US Cities Could Verge on Becoming Ghost Towns by 2100, Study Finds
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
It's a complex issue and many people are sure they know the solution, but the reality is that the only way we know how to govern ourselves anymore is scraping the bottom of the barrel with knee-jerk responses to acute events.
Edit: I can tell by both responses that I wasn't clear enough in my main comment. Civically, America's representative governments have collectively established a policy of maintaining function just slightly above total catastrophe, while robbing taxpayers blind through nearly every single initiative they fund.
Big piece right there. If cities can finally stop subsidizing suburbs, they can probably shore themselves up just fine.
If state governments took over more of the functions of local governments, or if local governments were merged – such as a single local government for an entire metro area – that might solve many of these problems.
When the state government takes over, the suburbs contribute to the state-wide tax base. Similarly, when the suburbs are merged into a single metro-wide local government, their local taxes now start contributing to services in other parts of the metro area which they commute to or rely on.
Seattle and King County were spending a cumulative $100,000/year per homeless person. That's higher than the per capita income of the county. No way to sustain that in the long term. If you aren't prepared to tell high-school dropouts, drug addicts, and the lazy, that they shouldn't aim for more than an ultra-high density apodment and generic brand everything and no kids, then you can't have a high standard of living city for anyone.
Oh, I thought that by non-contributing you meant tax dodging millionaires that incentivise vast array of useless luxury services and extract undue rent from the populace through their various schemes.
American cities aren't really growing their infrastructure that much (that's one of the problems), they are just maintaining what they already have. But ya, we will spend billions on a link from Ballard to West Seattle here, and it won't be ready until sometime after 2040.
> Whenever I see comments like this, I always note there doesn't seem to be any broader solution than 'ship them somewhere else and make them someone else's problem'
That's because while the problem is national, the resources expected to solve it are local. Since the problem is also mobile (as anyone taking a greyhound bus to Seattle could see), at least not being a preferred destination for the problem is a valid strategy. Shipping it off is also valid, but mostly the chronic homeless will go places where they can survive (looking for better weather, generous social services, and police that aren't going to throw them in jail for doing fent on the bus).
Is a valid local strategy. Not a national one. The cities are just responding as best they can to the brokenness of the national (lack of) response.
Let them explain, ever year, why your child is less deserving of the public investment.
You are ignoring the 9 people they did help that way, but they didn't stay homeless for very long and aren't counted as chronically homeless. The one person that did burn down their hotel room is chronically homeless and very difficult to help...well, they are chronically homeless after all.
Not really exaggerated at all, I'm guessing you live in a nice suburb or somewhere without a chronic homelessness problem? Or you are just trying to gaslight us into thinking our property crime/drug problems aren't as extreme as we see them to be?
It's a grim situation that doesn't even require decline, just the end of growth:
I am genuinely curious to know what number of cities and towns in the US have lost at least 12 to 23 percent of their resident population, or have become ghost towns, in the past 100 years.
Ghost towns are rarer, and it doesn't usually happen to major cities that have national recognition. There's a good list [1] on Wikipedia. tl;dr: they number in the hundreds, easily, but are largely small towns that you wouldn't have heard of unless you lived locally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Un...
Some cities have increased population by expanding their city limits and annexing adjacent unincorporated areas or merging with other cities. And some cities had existing undeveloped areas. But for many cities, they were already completely built up and haven't increased their city limits. In that case, the main way a city can grow population is to replace single family detached houses with multi-family housing, or to replace smaller multi-family housing with multi-family housing with more units.
In metro areas that are constrained by geographical or regulatory constraints on the growth of suburbs, this was done. But in metro areas that don't have those constraints (most cities in the midwest) suburban land is cheap and that type of housing replacement doesn't make sense. When land is cheap, single family detached housing in the suburbs is cheaper to build per unit than multi-family housing, so that is primarily what gets built. In that case, even if there is no flight from the inner city or housing that is abandoned, the central city becomes less dense as household size declines.
Another reason that cities are abandoned historically is that they become too hard to defend. In such cases, the people often relocate to a more defensible location. Similarly, in the US, many cities were abandoned by those who could afford it because of increasing crime, and they retreated to suburbs that were less hospitable to crime.
Edit: I never said the great lakes region would be immune to climate change, just one of the best places to migrate to in the continental us
>Increased heat wave intensity and frequency, increased humidity, degraded air quality, and reduced water quality will increase public health risks.
>More than 20 million people in the Midwest already breathe air that fails to meet national ambient air quality standards.
>Air quality is expected to get worse with higher temperatures, due to both human-induced emissions and longer pollen seasons.
>The frequency of major heat waves in the Midwest has increased over the last six decades. Between 1980 and 2010, the rate of warming in the Midwest increased three times as quickly as it did from 1900 to 2010.
>Extreme rainfall events and flooding have increased during the last century, and these trends are expected tocontinue across the entire region. In the Midwest, when it rains, it will – more and more frequently – pour.
What about that "plentiful fresh water supply"?
>These lake surface temperatures are projected to rise by as much as 7°F by 2050 and 12.1°F by 2100.
>Higher temperatures, increased precipitation, and lengthened growing seasons are likely to result in increased production of blue-green and toxic algae in the lakes. Blooms of these algae can harm fish, water quality, habitats, and aesthetics—and could worsen the impact of invasive species.[1]
[0]https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/content/regional_rel...
Yes... but compared to where?
> What about that "plentiful fresh water supply"?
Even at higher temperatures and increases in algae the Great Lakes are still there and can still provide fresh water.
This take, combined with the ever prevalent "Housing is so much cheaper in the Midwest" has been said so much that at this point I regard it as nothing more than pro-Midwest propaganda.
While I lived in SE Michigan, the main city that was targeted by remote workers wasn't Detroit, it was Ann Arbor. Housing prices there were already elevated due to U of M, but they spiked up more than surrounding areas did during the abnormally low interest rate era. People weren't moving to Livonia or Taylor despite the fact that they had lower housing prices than Ann Arbor because they wanted Ann Arbors amenities. Now, you won't have a bad life, but living like a king may be a bit too far unless you move outside of the well known areas.
I should say that, ironically, the reason I grew up here is that my Dad was a Federal employee at a time when there was no cost-of-living adjustment for Federal jobs (meaning his salary would be the same no matter which office he was assigned to, regardless of whether that was NYC or Peoria). He found this city doing research about low cost-of-living cities before putting in for a transfer. Now my daughter is growing up here for essentially the same reason. It's the circle of Midwestern life.
The second reason for people leaving cities was because of a sharp increase in crime, especially violent crime. The political leaning of the 1960's and 1970's were to be very soft on crime and that era is marked by a stark rise in crime. People that can afford it will not live in a high crime area - go figure! They move to an area that is nicer and the politics of those areas tend to be protective in that they don't want the same political policy that allowed crime to soar.
This of course starts a chain reaction where there are better living conditions and lower crime outside the city and the city begins to rapidly lose its tax base. The entrenched politicians are more concerned with having power than managing a city and the city rots. So they scapegoat people for being "racist: because they didn't want to live in a crime infested, cramped, hellhole when there were viable alternatives. The market speaks.
The main reason people left cities was because of better living conditions in suburbs and the rising tide of high crime in cities. That's it.
Racism played a part too of course but class is often completely ignored in the USA.
See also block busting.
Many properties in areas that were claimed to be "block busted" by revisionists were of low build quality to begin with were aging out and were unlikely to be revitalized by whoever lived there in the future. As I mentioned, because of the depression and WW2 there were not many new things being built and the existing stock in many of these areas was already low quality to begin with and had gone decades without much investment. Therefore the demand was low for these properties and lower class people were the market for them. So the neighborhood began to change and more crime was brought into these places which only accelerated the plummeting of values.
People act like an area of affluent people living in high quality homes all ran for the hills as soon as a black family moved in and the prices plummeted. No, it was places like the south side of Chicago which were always working class and full of small, cramped living places. Building huge housing project towers in these areas didn't help either, nor did the highway systems that cut through these areas. But people got out because the living conditions sucked compared to what was available in the new suburbs being built. Not to mentioned, jobs were moving out of cities because business could expand to new locations that were safer and not cramped.
Did race play role? Sure. As did class to a greater extent. But the narrative you hear and accepted as fact just doesn't reflect the total reality.
The first person to integrate that neighborhood was a banking magnate. They bombed his house. Five times. They bombed banks and real estate agents who sold or lent to blacks.
Racial covenants were popularized as the more progressive way to keep neighborhoods segregated because racial violence was so bad.
regardless, your suburb vs city dichotomy ignores the great migration from the south. rural folks in the south moved to urban areas in the north. it's not suburb vs city. it's rural vs urban. my criticism of this study is about that, it used an example of a city where there's been growth and urban sprawl in the metro area as a whole, but ignored that and only focused on the city of jackson itself. jackson has lost a lot of population for various reasons, but seeing that example in this article about the study set off a critical flag in my brain. it seems like a simplistic look at jackson without examining the metro area as a whole. it might do that and i just didn't read the study.
I feel like Americans should be more used to this.
This is a fallacy similar to hoping for interest rates to drop; these things don't happen in a vacuum, they are the result of other factors.
Rents might drop, but that's because the area is getting less appealing (much like interest rates might drop, because the economy is faltering). Is that net good? I don't know. Having more people living cheaply in an area with crumbling infrastructure doesn't sound great.
We only think that unusual because we've grown up in an era of perpetually-rising population. A lot of our economic rules of thumb don't hold once population growth reverses.
It is true that de-growth generates all sorts of other problems, though. One is labor: you may have houses, but they'll be shittily maintained, and you won't be able to find people to do the maintenance. Another is peace: when growth is happening, everyone has an incentive for peaceful trade so that they can capture the long-term profits of growth, but when growth reverses, the incentive reverses to conquering and pillaging as much of the pie now, before it shrinks, so you don't get left without a slice when it's gone.
Building more housing drops rent, but means the area is growing. People leaving because they are no jobs also drops rent, but good luck living in a place with no jobs.