"They are the ones with a very dominant urban core, where the urban fabric overwhelms the horizontal, auto-oriented stuff. I'm not saying these places won't struggle for the same reasons Lafayette will, but I suspect their decline/contraction will be less pronounced, less a defining characteristic.
NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Vancouver, maybe Chicago.... I'm not an expert on this scale of a place by any means so I could be very wrong but they don't seem to have the same underlying forces as a Lafayette (or even a Detroit or Memphis) where 80%+ of their infrastructure serves unproductive land use patterns. Might be 20-40% in these places."
Also, the weather sucks.
Source: Moved out and now want to go back.
But a blanket statement like that about Chicago is very surprising given all of the negative things about its situation (unbelievable gun violence, for one).
Also I can never get over the hilariously bad 75-year lease of its parking meters where they got $1B up front in exchange for eschewing massive amounts of ongoing revenue (the lessees have made $650M+ in revenue in 6 years while sapping the populace dry). Now Chicago actually has to lose money and pay Abu Dhabi any time they want to shut down a street for maintenance or public festivals. Fantastic!
Also, I really like Chicago. It's a great place to live downtown (and unlike other NYC, Boston or SF, living downtown is not out of reach for people making under $100k).
Gun violence does NOT happen in the "good" parts of the city to "good" people. I mean yes I am sure it happens. But the good parts of Chicago have being shot by a gun odds as lower or lower as any other major American city. (Look at say the Violent crime rate in Lincoln Park or Oldtown).
Deal with drugs or live in a bad area? Yes, not that safe. But I am lucky to avoid both of those.
Parking meter was total robbery. But Chicago has good income. The small town I moved to is like the city in this story. Too many roads that cannot be paid to maintain. My city literally has 0 debt. Not low debt, but like literally 0 debt. But he average salary is 35k, and each year the city crumbles a little bit more. Chicago with the average salary double that, even with debt, is a more attractive place to live.
Road resurfacing is pretty good where I am, but oddly is largely a function of how effective the alderman for your ward is, since a lot of the cost typically comes out of their budget.
The real problems with the city IMHO are massive unfunded pension liabilities and a huge segregation problem between the north/south sides.
It doesn't really matter where you are, politics state that money is going mostly to people and not into the ground.
San Francisco, where I live, has loads of revenue and a citizenry which approves every single bond measure on the ballot. And we certainly shouldn't be on his list. Infrastructure issues here are never addressed until they hit a crisis level.
Just the other day there was news about how our seawall which contains our entire financial district is in horrible condition[1], and there's "no funding" and the usual blarble about the Feds bailing us out. Is any other city program going to be cut a dime to fix the seawall? No. From a political standpoint it makes more sense to let the city flood than it does to cut off any short-term political gain.
[1]https://www.hoodline.com/2017/01/as-earthquake-threat-to-sea...
The city pursued an agenda of low taxes by leaning heavily on subsidies paid by large-scale developers directly to the city. This was something very much embodied by the city's long-time mayor McCallion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_McCallion) who was something of a titan in her time and governed over the city from 1978 to 2014 with little political opposition.
The idea was that they'd build infrastructure to last 30-40 years and then figure out what to do later. Not surprisingly "later" came around all too soon and they were left scrambling.
The mayor pivoted from producing more sprawl, which just doubles down on the problem, to inviting developers to densify portions of the city, building codos and office towers. Through development fees they'd try and work their way out of a jam without having to massively increase taxes for everyone.
It looks like this strategy has so far worked, but it's not without risk. It's dependent on passing the buck to the typically younger crowd that's buying condos. They're paying for sewer replacements in those older neighborhoods that apparently never paid their fair share in taxes. Who will bail them out when their time comes? Hopefully the increased density makes it more cost-effective to do that.
There's a number of things working in favor of the city, like they're close to Toronto, so the're an ideal commuter hub, plus the regional airport is there, so there's a large buisness hub built out around it. Without that tax base and proximity to another city they'd likely be doomed. Nobody would ever want condos there.
If you're looking for those cities, look for suburbs built near major US cities that can leverage their location. Any that are on their own are ultimately doomed unless they dramatically re-work how they plan their urban layout. Low-density housing will strangle a lot of small cities to death.
Honestly it should be illegal for municipalities to collect less in taxes than they need to maintain their infrastructure in the long haul. They should be factoring in 60-year replacement costs and collecting money towards that in the decades leading up to a major overhaul. A change in the accounting rules to include this sort of depreciation as an expense that must be balanced out with revneue could go one step towards that, factoring in replacement costs and so on.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2017/01/09/How-Strong-Are-Your...