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Comment by yairhaimo | Hacker News Reader

Is there any scenario like this in any other developed country? (Im honestly looking for an answer)

The problem here is a lack of prudence. When the town was flush with cash from the manufacturing sector, they expanded the budget and became inefficient. When that money left, they still had all of these long-standing inefficient agreements and processes.

Detroit is a well known example of it because they are still trying to uphold these parasitic relationships despite being basically evacuated.

I'm not sure you even need profligate spending to suffer after 50% of the population leaves.

Probably not, but the combination is especially dire.

I would generally consider spending to be profligate if you could not sustain it for a proportional reduction in population (even of an important demographic) with an equal proportional reduction in number of people served.

Or I guess the important matter would be making it so that you only have maybe a few quarters of loss before you can legally adjust services to fit within the budget.

It's really unusual for cities to shrink, let alone drastically, so rapping people on the knuckles for not planning what happens when half your population leaves is a bit disingenuous.

I don't think it's disingenuous to be thinking of how quickly you could terminate non-essential services and staff, and in what order they are cut. You can spend your size, you'd just better be able to downsize quick, whether the economic downturn is global or local, artificial or natural.

City councils seem to think they're in the business of employing people permanently, but they really shouldn't need to be concerned about that, given that the citizens are left to foot the bill, and the majority of them do not work for the local government.

You missed the racial fearmongering fueled by various things and the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation.

> the public and private sector policy that enabled that evacuation

What do you mean by "enabled"? Are you suggesting the law should force a manufacturing plant to stay in a city, or a person to stay in their apartment? How would that possibly work?

To understand why Detroit and the surrounding region look the way they do today you cannot just chalk everything up to factories closing and the mismanagement of local government. Not to say those aren't important, but the systematically racist policies on the Federal and state level (combined with private sector trends that pushed those policies), especially with regards to housing (e.g. redlining) and transportation (e.g. the freeway system and its destruction of Black neighborhoods), played a huge role in creating the problems the city and region now face.

Here's an article about my city.

http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining...

The area in red is where African Americans and poor Irish lived. No bank would write a mortgage there.

A quote from an article referenced in the link: “As federal official and leading real estate economist Homer Hoyt explained in 1939: "Usually existing residential structures deteriorate and become obsolete with the passage of time. They are occupied by successive groups of people of lower incomes and lower social standards with the result that the quality of the neighborhood declines with that of the buildings." In the eyes of Hoyt and nearly all other real estate professionals, the presence of non-white residents was prima facie evidence of neighborhood decay and the destruction of property values.”

These ideas were codified in Federal policy and residential lending standards. The legacy of those maps remains today in many places.

It's not necessarily imprudent or inefficient. It's just a consequence of what happens when you build stuff that needs maintenance. Now, I'm not saying that some of the projects weren't unwisely extravagant, nor that the budget wasn't spent inefficiently and recklessly - but even if it was spent by angels instead of humans, this would still happen.

We can't know the future. So when you need a 5-lane road now, or a major shopping center now, and the history says you'll almost certainly need a 7-lane road and big parking garage in a few years, the prudent thing to do is to build a little more capacity than you need, with the hopes that by the time you maintain it for 20 years and it needs to be replaced or improved again, it's served its purpose well.

Detroit was a seriously happening place half a century ago. There was nothing wrong with creating the buildings, infrastructure, and signing up for the maintenance contracts that those buildings needed at the time. But there was no plan in place for "What happens if all the money disappears and most of the city flees."

Many of the roads and buildings are in surprisingly good shape. Even if they can't do a good, frequent job of plowing the snow off that 7-lane-road in the winter, they're keeping up with it well enough. Pipes, drains, and wires designed to last 20 years are holding together pretty well after 40 years. But they're going to fail eventually, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Should there be a plan, maybe an insurance contract, for demolition if the city can no longer afford a thing? Could there be?

Like Detroit it comes down to poor leadership. I remember when Chrysler left. The city needed to go on an extreme diet because the revenue was gone. But instead leaders kept spending, borrowing and postponing the day of reckoning. When it arrived the hole was large.

There are parallels in the decline of boomtowns of the Industrial Revolution between the Rust Belt and the Rhine-Ruhr and Northern England, although declining European cities generally saw a lot more investment from their central governments.

More importantly, the European cities didn't experience the same degree of racialized shunning, as described by the Detroit-native urban planner Pete Saunders: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petesaunders1/2017/07/28/detroi... Most Rust Belt metro areas have seen little population decline from their peak (metro Detroit has lost perhaps 200,000 people even as the city has lost over 1M), and could easily be intact-but-rough-edged cities with cheap housing if there weren't the same dynamic of white flight from the core.

A lot of UK cities suffered 70s/80s economic decline, to the extent that the government was discussing "managed decline" for Liverpool: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-16355281 . Even London suffered a decline in population from ~8m to ~6m.

But somehow I don't think it ever got quite as bad as Detroit. It seems that somehow American politics can just abandon cities, and declare their failure not a problem for the nation or the state.

(Last time I ran the numbers, 80s Detroit was more dangerous than troops-in-the-streets Troubles Belfast, but I don't have it to hand)

Difference between the UK and the USA is white flight and racial/ethnic tensions.

Berlin in the 90s, and to some degree today, may be similar.

Given that the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country, I'd wager not.

Parts of China have some cool stuff. The arts community in Yunnan is a good example. Many sculpture parks, weird spaces, reinvigorated industrial, etc. But gentrifying quickly now, so creativity is waning.

source?

The United States is not a particularly wealth-unequal country by world measures.

The US is very wealth-unequal, especially if you compare it to developed countries:

https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

Compared to itself, 30 years ago.

That page doesn't compare wealth but disposable income.

https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/dp2008-03.pdf

Picture's still the same.

Actually, that isn't shown by your link. Your link's Table 1 shows Wealth Shares by percentiles in 10% intervals. This shows a gap of 39% for the US and 53% for Denmark, between the lowest 90% and the top 10% by wealth. Comparing the top 10% to the bottom 10% shows an 82% difference for Denmark and a 70% delta for the US.

The OP wrote, "the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country," which is not supported by your link.

The US is the third worst in that list. If you're content to say "but X is worse", as long as there is at least one X, so be it...

EDIT: And if you want more recent data: https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research...

The question was specifically about developed countries. If you look up the Wikipedia entry on wealth inequality [1] and sort the first column, looking down the list the USA appears to be the highest ranked country for inequality (ratio of earnings between richest and poorest 10%). Notably China is there, and Mexico and South Africa too, among myriad developing African and Central/South American countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

America is a lot more like African and South American countries in terms of income inequality than compared to other G20 countries.

It's also one of the few countries with a multitude of multi-billionaires and yet an astoundingly high rate of child poverty.

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