Why do some people continue to live in ghost towns and what do they actually do for work?

This is the answer at least for Colorado and Kansas. There are munitions/chemical disposal sites and Superfund projects that provide employment in addition to prisons and processing facilities. Those can be very good jobs. A fair amount of rural American is contaminated as hell. In Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, some towns are unsellable and unsafe because of radiation levels. There was nuclear testing which drifted radioactive particles over a lot of towns, resulting in high cancer rates. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. government also detonated nuclear devices in the groundwater and in the gas reserves underground. Not only did this not work to free up resources, but it also contaminated the drinking water and the sole natural resource that might have brought in income. So if your family lives there, you’re pretty much stuck watching everyone get cancer and die. And since the U.S. government refuses to compensate anyone outside of a few people in Nevada for the massive damage they did, these towns bear all those medical expenses themselves. They go bankrupt first and lose businesses while they’re trying to get chemo, and then they die. Anyone who’s left, has an unsellable house and no income sufficient to go move somewhere else. In one county in Colorado where there are only these types of near-ghost towns, the water was controlled by a voting bloc of farming families. In the 1970s, a private equity water purchasing company bribed 51% of the controlling votes to sell all the county’s water to Denver. Overnight, this county went from growing the country’s best watermelons to getting choked by dust and tumbleweeds. Land was unsellable because there isn’t even any water left over to run a restaurant. Then the company that owned the water sold some of it back to the state prisons so they could build a huge facility in the county. Jobs for everyone! they said. Then they just hired people from the next county over. A few people from the area do work at the prison, but mostly, natural resource acquisition has screwed over what used to be a thriving area. So what happens in a dying, contaminated town? Meeting your neighbors for dinner. Going out of town to go fishing and hunting. Quirky little talent shows where someone’s kid plays guitar and someone else does a handstand. Lots and lots of library books - and even if the town library is small, there’s a huge rural library network so you can get anything you want. County Extension does classes and seminars. There are little historical societies all over these towns, and the work they do is incredible. Of course there’s Internet and drugs, but the majority of people just get very good at entertaining themselves and each other. Traveling medical personnel will give you their perspective: everyone’s on drugs (because they see the sick people, not the ones who aren’t sick). Everyone excludes outsiders (because why would you put emotional energy into someone who’s only there for six weeks). It’s like working at a prison and thinking everyone is a criminal. When I moved to one of these places, folks made sure I wasn’t traveling healthcare before deciding to accept me. But wow, did they - I’m a leftist bisexual mixed-race woman, and while I’m definitely not saying there isn’t racism and bigotry, I never wanted for something to do and I never wanted for a friend.