Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

A disappointing effort by Taibbi, usually does a lot better. Way too much exaggeration.

Its a dying city because its population dropped about 0.3% per year. Like saying my blood pressure has dropped about 1 point due to some (minimal) exercise in the last month, therefore I'm dead. And then later on the population is now booming because of white heroin addicts moving into the city, but its also dying anyway at the same time or some foolishness.

The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history. Like reading breathless reporting of the activities of Martin Luther (not MLKjr, I mean the original ML). My grandpa thought stories about "rust belts" are "news", and I'm not that young anymore.

"Not long ago" means a century ago, in a nation with a 24 hour news cycle. Uh huh. Just a few moments ago I was driving my covered wagon to work and ... oh wait.

There is some insight in the "future is already here, just unevenly distributed" aspect of the story. Also its got some "true crime" voyeurism.

He's a good writer, usually better than this. If joe average journalist wrote this I wouldn't be as... offended. For my local fishwrap of a newspaper this would be an average tolerable article, which might be why its going out of business slowly, the point is he usually does much better than this.

It is funny to see articles like this on a site with so many hard core followers of urban living. For 99% of the population, Camden is "real urban living" not SV/SFO and NYC. So you can see the disbelief bordering on laughter WRT urban revival. Yeah I can't wait until I can live in Camden and walk to work LOL, sounds like paradise. And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite. And that's what the real world is like.

> The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so

As someone living in a city gutted by de-industrialization and the drug trade (Wilmington, DE), I think it's news that 40 years later, these places are still in poor shape. The usual response to concerns about technology or globalization putting people out of work is that it just frees them up to work on something better and more useful. "New jobs will replace those that are lost." Well, the people here are still waiting for those new jobs to replace the ones that got automated or outsourced away.

> And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite.

I think this is quite exaggerated. Aside from Detroit and New Orleans, cities in the Delaware Valley like Camden and Wilmington have some of the worst crime in the country, because they face the challenges of other Rust-belt cities and are also on the major drug trade route up I-95.

Fully a quarter of the U.S. population lives in the metro areas of just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Jose/San Francisco, and Boston. These cities are all quite safe, and the idea that people might either move into the core cities or to satellite cities in those areas is hardly ridiculous. And there's a long list of cities that are perfectly safe that aren't one of those six: San Diego, Austin, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, etc. And there are even more cities that are perfectly safe in the areas middle class people would actually live. I lived for seven years in Atlanta, and it was very safe as long as you lived on the north side.

>> Fully a quarter of the U.S. population lives in the metro areas of just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Jose/San Francisco, and Boston.

Chicago and Los Angeles are safe if you live in a upper-middle class white neighborhood. Chicago is the most dangerous large city in the US.

First, no, Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the US. Per capita, it's not even in the top ten. People have a bad habit of looking at Chicago's totals while forgetting that the city is gigantic. The logic that says Chicago is the most dangerous city in the US also says that Camden is safer than Dallas.

Second, it is not true that Chicago is only safe if you live in rich white enclaves. What is instead true is that two large tracts on the south and west sides of the city (Englewood and Lawndale, respectively) are currently lost to gang violence. But Chicago also has huge swaths of lower-middle-class neighborhoods that are no more dangerous than those of any other big city. A huge portion of those neighborhoods are hispanic, and there are many majority-African American neighborhoods with low crime stats as well.

It is possible that your friends who live in Chicago don't realize this, because what is also true about Chicago is that the 20-something hipster demographic lives almost exclusively in just a few neighborhoods on the north and near northwest sides.

The problem with "fully a quarter" is WRT Chicago they're talking about a metro area, Skokie and Romeoville, maybe Lake Geneva, heck maybe Milwaukee... I'm talking about actually in the city, walk to work, urban renewal stuff, not suburb a long commute away. Like the north side of Milwaukee or south side of Chicago. Not say, Chenequa (which is a rather wealthy suburb of Milwaukee, more or less, but is technically part of the "metro area")

For example, and I speak from experience, there are no middle class people left anymore in the city of Milwaukee. School district stats show 90%+ poverty rates in the public schools, and a couple $25K/yr private schools for the wealthy leaders, and almost nobody in between, until you commute at least 5 to 10 miles away.

The idea of urban renewal is getting people to move back from the suburbs into core cities or satellite cities. Your contention was that this is ridiculous, because for "99% of the population" their urban living options are places like Camden, not NYC or SF. My point is that 25% of the population lives in metro areas where moving to the core city or a satellite city would not mean moving to a place anything like Camden. This is particularly true for places like New York or Chicago (combined, almost 10% of the whole U.S. population), where you can live in a little satellite town with a walkable, urban, downtown area, and commute to work in the core city on METRA/Metro North/LIRR/NJT.

Re: school statistics. Chicago also has 90% low-income in the school district, but there are tons of middle class people in the city. A lot of the gap is filled by parochial schools. For example, Chicago has ~400,000 school aged kids enrolled in CPS, 87% of which are low-income. But it has ~615,000 school-aged kids. There are 30,000 kids enrolled in Catholic schools alone.

There are plenty of middle class people left in the city of Milwaukee, on the East Side, and in Bay View, and the Third Ward, and Downtown, beyond.

MPS has an 81% student poverty rate, not 90+%[0]. Good students in MPS can access the magnet schools, where, to use my sister as an example, one can complete sufficient IB classes to get a BS and MS within 4 years, leading up to a PhD from MIT. Marquette University HS, the high-end Jesuit school, has tuition of $11,000. And the cost of private school is reflected in the lower home prices and property taxes in the city of Milwaukee.

Milwaukee isn't a shining city on a hill, but there's plenty of good living to be had there, and at a very low price compared to many cities. It has more than its share of problems due to un- and underemployment since its industrial fall, but it's nothing like Camden.

[0]http://www.milwaukeenns.org/2013/08/09/poverty-crime-contrib...

The violent crime rate 5 miles outside of Detroit (Livonia, others) is lower than Manhattan or the Bronx.

What does it mean to compare Livonia to the Bronx? I've lived near both and don't see any similarity between the places you mentioned.

The point is roughly that the metro area of New York isn't whole lot safer than the metro area of Detroit.

Parts of each are safer than parts of both and so on, and the comparison of the consolidated units probably doesn't tell us much.

Edit: A different way of putting it would be to say that Wayne County is a better thing to compare to Chicago.

Lets not forget Chester and Coatesville I don't know if every area has these sink holes or its just the NE's reliance on those lost jobs and the population density that make these places occur.

As someone living in a city gutted by de-industrialization and the drug trade (Wilmington, DE), I think it's news that 40 years later, these places are still in poor shape.

Yet some places hit by these trends (Boston and Seattle come to mind) were reinvented, and others didn't; the question of why some did and others didn't is a fascinating one, and I've seen many of the arguments from urban / geographical economists like Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida.

My GF and I were actually thinking about moving to Wilmington for a job, and we can't figure out why it isn't semi-desirable even for its proximity by train to NYC and DC. There are now some new mid-rises near the train stations, but those are weirdly expensive (we got quotes of close to $2K for one bedrooms; for that kind of money, where's the competition with Brooklyn or downtown Seattle?)

The separation of the U of Delaware from Wilmington by 15 or so miles is certainly unfortunate and may help explain why Boston (innumerable universities) and Seattle (University of Washington, Seattle University) succeeded while Wilmington did not. It also started from a MUCH smaller base; the 2010 Census says that Wilmington is 70K, which is TINY and probably too small to achieve clustering effects in most industries.

If I were a civic booster type in Wilmington, I'd probably try to focus on proximity by train to DC, but the university problem means that I think the city is a lost cause.

"The separation of the U of Delaware from Wilmington by 15 or so miles is certainly unfortunate and may help explain why Boston (innumerable universities) and Seattle (University of Washington, Seattle University) succeeded while Wilmington did not."

One of the reasons (in addition to what you have mentioned) is that the areas that were closest to the south and had good welfare and benefits attracted many poor people looking to escape poverty tended to go to the places that were closer to the south. Boston is farther than NYC, Philly, Delaware etc.

The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history.

Not for the people who are still living there, it isn't.

This type of thinking is part of the problem we have in America -- "eh, too bad that your town got eaten alive, sucks to be you I guess." But the blight doesn't stop, it just keeps spreading. It's not hard to imagine a near future where the United States is a few islands of fantastic, unbelievable wealth -- NYC, the Bay Area, DC -- in a vast sea of potholed highways, shuttered businesses and backyard meth labs.

I guess if you think you'll be fortunate enough to be one of the few people living on those islands, you don't care. But life has no guarantees, and as wealth concentrates more and more people will find themselves effectively voted off the island they thought would save them.

"The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history."

I understand why you view this as "old news". From that point of view, it probably is a bit disappointing.

My take on the article, as someone who doesn't live in the US, was sadness that such things are still happening. That large groups of people can be effectively abandoned by civil society, that elected politicians connive to do this for their own gain, that so many lives are ruined by neglect and poverty. That this is still happneing is the whole point.

"as someone who doesn't live in the US"

Ah I understand and thanks for the perspective. Locally its very well understood thanks to "if it bleeds, it leads" and infotainment in general. There's a checkbox that every single night there must be a report about violent crime in the inner city. Often a murder or shooting, but always something... Its extremely heavily propagandized.

Numerically you're far more likely to die in a car accident than get shot walking down alleys in the inner city at 2am, BUT, I checked the math and you are about 5000 times more likely to get shot in the inner city than where I live about 20 miles away. No kidding, about 5000 times.

The other part which probably isn't understood outside the country is even in the north, we segregate extremely heavily. Its extremely unusual other than maybe student dorms to ever see a mixed ethnicity neighborhood. Note I'm making a correct factual observation not a value judgment. The value judgement comes up when you can take a wild guess about what the TV news editors decide to report about neighborhoods of certain ethnic groups. As you can probably guess the "national sacrifice zones" are absolutely not populated by members of the dominate ethnic group, if you know what I mean, and the people in charge pretty much like it that way (again, an observation of their behavior, NOT an agreement with their behavior)

I agree in the assessment of disappointing, because I think there could be a good story here. I think it's hurt not only by the exaggeration and breathlessness, but also Taibbi's need to force everything into his chosen political narrative with mixed results. Subtlety is lost on him and he seems incapable pursuasive writing -- guiding the reader to reach conclusions rather than explicitly setting them out.

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