What's the cost of having a electric pole relocated

It really depends on how old your community is and how the people there feel about having their front yards torn up. Newer communities got buried utilities as part of the land development. Done as an afterthought can be quite destructive.

I used to laugh where I lived in CT. We were the last house with overhead wires. Below me was a development of about 24 homes with underground utilities. They would often go dark in a storm and we never flickered. It was still overhead from the power station to their underground drop.

Yes, I haven't done a survey, but I think even low-cost housing is built most of the time these days with underground wiring. But most poor people don't live in newly-built housing. They live in houses which were built decades ago for middle income or poor (and sometimes for very upper middle income) during the time when all wiring was done from poles**. It costs a fortune to redo that, just so people won't see wires (and you have to do t he phone lines at the same time or there will still be poles and wires) when they actually have working electric and phone service. So it's pretty low priority.

Also in many places, homeowners are expected to chip in a lot of the cost for improvements like this (Just play Monopoloy and you'll get an idea), and a minimum percentage of owners have to agree to it. 50, 80% I'm guessing Poor people have more important things to spend their money on than the view and the possibility of fewer outages. So do I.

I have underground wiring for about 170 yards from my house, and then it's onto poles. We have very few outages, and most are only a second or two. If the wires were showing now, I wouldn't pay $500 to bury them, and I have more money than poor people.