Americans Don’t Know What Urban Collapse Looks Like

NYC in the late 1960's and 1970's underwent a kind of urban collapse.

Detroit underwent urban collapse and never came back.

I think this is maybe what the author meant by 'we don't know what this means'.

If companies, middle class and power flee a city, there is a 100% chance of urban collapse due to the lost tax base.

A thriving city like NYC or SF that are a dysfunctional mishmash of 'barely effective' - well that's another kind of problem but it's not quite urban collapse.

Poor leadership is unfortunate, personally think it's just too hard for humans to plan hundreds of years out, so the rise/fall cycles are inevitable.

Urban ghost towns require billions of dollars every single year: https://detroitmi.gov/sites/detroitmi.localhost/files/2018-1...

Cities are full of people who lived through part of those declines and left, or grew up in those places after and left. Part of what "decline" means in this context is "your young and ambitious people all left for the nearest very large city or NYC."

I RTFA and it absolutely does not do this or even imply it. "Urban collapse" is right there in the title, so it'd be odd if the article talked about rural collapse.

You and/or your family were clearly hurt by rural collapse, and I'm sorry for your pain. Having grown up in rural Iowa, I know that seeing rural communities and towns wither away sucks in its own way.

So sad growing up here. I imagined I would live life as an artist in a cheap flat. It was safe, beautiful, fun, and cheap.

Then Portlandia aired and the worst of the worst came to the city flooding out the local residents.

Growing up, I never understood why being poor was considered a problem. People in our city were poor, but we were decent people. I was one of them.

At some point, I realized that the new poor coming to our city on a dream fucking sucked. They shared none of my ideals and seemed to want everything for nothing.

edit: not to mention the gentrification.. holy smokes, it was a mix of these terrible people with no impulse control, and extremely rich playboys that would overpay for everything. Caused rents, restaurants, and everything else to glamorize. Even after a tech employer gave me a chance, I struggled to afford much here. I'm now happily living away.

But how can anyone help? There’s no avenue for intervention in a city where constituents (and the homeless voting bloc) keep voting for increasingly fringe party and politics. The hostility and outright violence towards anyone who is even center-left means people are more likely to leave than spend years fighting a battle to save the city.

And once the city falls apart economically, the political grifters will simply move to the next big successful city and damage it in the same way.

Your tears for small towns are utterly pointless. It is a trend "as old as Rome herself".

Do you have numbers to back that up? Pre-COVID. Personal income tax numbers have increased until 2018 (last year I can find) which indicates that taxpayers were coming in rather than leaving.

Out of curiosity I searched images of Detroit after reading your comment but couldn’t find anything like what you describe.

The problem with this explanation - even though it sounds reasonable - is that it lacks predictive power. There's always crime, corruption, and decay, because whenever large groups of people come together there's crime, corruption, and decay, and cities are defined by large groups of people coming together. But for this to be the cause of collapse, you need to explain how cities can have high levels of crime, corruption, and decaying buildings and then recover back to lower levels of crime, corrupion, and decaying buildings.

I'll posit a simpler explanation that sounds a lot less sexy. Cities rise when the industry they specialize in becomes a regional or global powerhouse. (Here, I use "industry" broadly - it can also refer to power & governance, like with Rome or Washington DC, or to culture, like LA.) They fall when that industry becomes relatively less important.

So Detroit fell because the American auto industry is no longer competitive vs. the Japanese & Koreans. New Orleans fell because the Mississippi river trade lost its importance when steamships & containerization happened. Boston fell when the textile industry moved south, and then renewed when it was replaced by the education, minicomputer, and biotech industries. There is very little cities can do about this other than refocus on another industry, like Boston did.

Obviously the parallel is not perfect—no real-estate companies bought up land in Angkor for redevelopment—but we see the same pattern of locals repurposing older parts of the landscape. Detroit could continue thriving for centuries, revising its 20th-century land-use patterns to suit new populations.

“Our cities” is also the wrong word to use considering I can’t purchase a home in or around my city without 70 competing bids tens of thousands of dollars over asking price at the moment. And we’ve got hefty property taxes.