I had never even heard of Angkor until I listened to this episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast (I highly recommend it): https://youtu.be/ghmjIBD2Fd4
Resource management intertwined with poor leadership is a common thread in the demise of societies. Our ability to adapt to our environments is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as Mother Nature itself.
I'd love if we took the hint from these histories, because the scale of change in our global climate looks like it'll far exceed past catastrophes. Some days I'm hopeful, but others, quite wary. Hmm.
Our cities won't become "lost" like Angkor. Our cities have already collapsed. There's crime, corruption, decaying buildings. Detroit looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb.
There's not enough money for two reasons. The city overspends on everything due to contract corruption and misled ideals. The money doesn't go where it needs to go, and when it goes to the wrong place, it's like a black hole.
The second reason is because large cities offer many more benefits for the poor. People who cannot afford a car simply cannot live outside of city boundaries and bus lines. With increased crime, corruption, and decay, the taxpayers leave (NYC).
Cities cannot fix this. If there will be any solution, it must be a national one. The problem of taxpayers leaving and net-drains arriving can never be solved at the local level.
>With increased crime, corruption, and decay, the taxpayers leave (NYC).
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.
I believe these things come to a boiling point... covid has perhaps accelerated that boiling point in NYC's case.
NYC was also kind of a bad example for me to use because actually, it's a really clean city. When I visited in 2016 I couldn't believe how much cleaner and safer it felt than my hometown (Portland Oregon).
I went to all areas, manhattan, brooklyn, the bronx, harlem, queens, and I just didn't see the sad human decay (Giuliani kicked them all out I guess).
I agree with the other commenter that it's a boiling point issue. Things looked ok at the surface but...
- rising cost of living, propelled by foreign investment in housing, pricing out even upper middle class
- more taxes
- more crime, and less policing
- shitty schools
As soon as you don't need to be in the expensive city for work, it's like hmmm, why the hell am I putting up with this? People with kids may be slightly less flexible, but anybody young and single can basically move very easily. People forget that companies can move easily too.
In terms of amenities, city governments forget that the whole microbrewery/dispensary/expensive coffee shops/hot yoga/avocado toast ecosystem has basically been franchised out at this point and is trivial to stand up anywhere. Sure, it's not an opera house in Manaus, but lots of cheap places in the US have more culture than Bellevue or San Jose.
Expensive cities will argue people will return, and sure, some will, unless the city is too dangerous and completely broke from the tax base leaving. If you are young and single, and want to be around other young single people, and let's say a little midwest spot becomes hip and has the basics, and lots of people move there, you don't really need NYC (at least not everybody). And $500/month rent for a nice 1 bedroom (or a mortgage) is appealing.
If you think that a town of 200k can compete with NYC - you are deluded. People move to large cities for more than just the money* or the job.
You are aware that there are only two places in the world to have globally renowned theatre districts? NYC's Broadway and London's West End.
No periodic Osheaga can outdo music venues in Brooklyn.
There are things that stick. Things that would have to move. Things that seems "easily replicated", but are only possible in extremely densely populated areas.
PS: I just recently moved out of NYC to a town 1 hour north of NYC. And I hate NYC. And I still can see what is impossible without certain factors.
*Software Engineer in Bay area gets paid more, than in NYC.
Not everyone desires materialistic things, live performances included. I love live performances, but I think most people are not really capable of appreciating "top" live performances anyways - to them, a big mac is filet mignon.
Live performance is art, which is opposite of materialistic.
Smaller and more niche artists sell out medium sized venues in NYC, while failing to get half occupancy in fairly large cities. That is a major draw, because even idealistic artists need food.
I consider art another type of materialism, but perhaps my definition is wrong. I consider any kind of hedonistic pursuits materialistic (even if they are free). Consumerism in other words.
I'm not speaking of just money and property, but rather, anything which pleases our lizard brain - this includes things like tourism, sex-for-pleasure, video games, and novels.
Some counter-examples that I don't consider materialistic are: personal relationships (family and friends), pursuit of justice, philosophy, and also creating art.
Awhile back another user posited in a discussion of "Why is Berlin so cool" and "Why was Portland cool" that if the cost of living is low enough that you can tend bar 2 nights a week and cover your living expenses, all sorts of awesome people will congregate- all the kind of people that are fun to hang out with, and throw good parties, and do cool shit- music, software, performances, etc. New York used to be affordable for artsy types per a former dance instructor of mine in the 2000s, but I suspect that is no longer the case.
I suspect that an extremely awesome scene can be replicated anywhere there is suitable mass of interesting people who can live cheaply. Sure, it's not going to be top billing, but for 99% of us, we simply don't care. Having a hundred different live shows to go to any weekend is more than enough for us, with lots of great local artists.
New York is still way more affordable, than many other places(a busy bar bartender can get over $100K in tips). You also have to realize that outside of NYC you need to have 1 or 2 cars per household and you need way less space for stuff in your apartment in NYC(product and service availability make it easier to depend on things "being there")
Portland is an outdoorsy city, barely a cultural hub - it's cool in its own way. Its appeal is way narrower, than NYC.
Berlin is literally massive city with political power and financial prowess. It could become another global center, but like London - it's its own thing. Very different to NYC.
That's a problem with suburbia. You need a lot of road per house. The tax money you receive doesn't cover maintenance. Even the worst city blocks bring in enough tax revenue to maintain their roads.
Theres also the snarky meme that Hiroshima is in better shape now 70 years after having a nuclear bomb dropped on it than Detroit is after 70 years of bad governance.
Have been to Hiroshima. It is a pretty city by Japanese standards. Green paths along the river unlike Tokyo’s concrete. Much more laid back than Tokyo.
Growing up in Mississippi I often heard of the phrase "bombed out building" to describe old buildings and infrastructure that had decayed so much it looked like it had been bombed.
Crime, corruption and decaying buildings were much more prominent in NYC of the 1970s than NYC of today. Or Chicago in the 1960s than Chicago of today. Or Boston in the 1920s vs. Boston today.
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.
Chances are they’ll move to another city, and NY will regain that population sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile rural areas have been constantly and consistently depopulating for decades. My grandmother is buried in a graveyard in the middle of a soy field; the town that originally made that graveyard is just gone, and it happened within my lifetime.
The issue isn't that NYC will not regain, but in what state it will be.
Lower income families cannot leave an urban center easily. Drop of median income is bad because the loss of a group of people that contribute a lot more tax money and provide demand for services. That means that an "exodus" of 400k (some are) middle class people will only marginally reduce the demands for infrastructure. That will inevitably lead to strain on infrastructure of NYC.
NYC infrastructure is the most expensive in the world. Construction of one mile of subway runs at $1bn. That is not even TBM bored deep tunnels.
All fair points. But I’ll point out that NYC infrastructure costs are largely a matter of political policy. There’s no particular reason why NYC couldn’t construct for the same cost as say, Tokyo or Paris if they wanted to.
> 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.
This sounds like a perspective of someone who's lived their entire life in the US. Meanwhile, here in Poland, you can have relatively large metro areas (Warsaw + suburbs is probably over 2 million people at this point) with barely any discernible crime - certainly not enough that it's anyone's radar as a social problem. When I was younger I was always puzzled why the american comic books focus so much on fighting crime (Batman, Punisher etc.) - now I understand that it IS actually a real problem in the US.
I wonder why crime never took on in Poland, even though we have clearly way fewer economic opportunities and the state-provided social support is worse than in the US (with the exception of free health care). One argument that comes to my mind is the almost complete lack of drugs over here. In Poland, if someone is keen on destroying their life via a substance dependence, they always go for alcohol, which I guess is much cheaper than drugs, so it creates way less criminals. That can't be the whole explanation though.
I should probably say "large groups of disparate people". Ethnic homogeneity makes everything easier. American gun laws probably don't help either, but there are non-American cities - Sarajevo, South Africa, much of Europe after the Syrian migration crisis - that struggle with crime too, and there seems to be a correlation there.
Crime in Europe is generally lower, than many American cities.
I can also assure you, that it's not hard to come by drugs in Poland (I have procured marijuana in Warsaw, without issues). Drug laws create more criminals, but then a cohesive society creates invisible "exceptions" to the rules. You're more likely to be sent to a rehab facility in Europe, than to be sent to prison for drug use.
Let's also remember that US has a massive problem with mental health.
Who wouldn't want to enjoy the fine scenery while stepping around HIV-infected needles and fresh poop? Ah, this hamburger tastes so much better when I get to interact with the local people while eating it - they are so quirky, they always ask me for a dollar with a threatening gaze.
Is San Francisco a special case, though? It's a one party government that tends to tilt towards the extreme in its decision making, with an extraordinarily wealthy class of citizens, and a very difficult homeless and drug population, all compounded in a small area. I'm old. I remember San Francisco of the 80s, prosperous, wild, open armed, and beautiful. Today it's a concrete jungle with terrible management.
I'm sure there's some cities on that list that occasionally vote for the other party, but I think cities inherently become democrat-leaning because the people inside cities tend to be poor.
NYC seems to be doing alright because they had extreme hardass policies in the 90s (kicking out homeless, literally) but that probably won't last much longer.
Seattle is pretty much the same. It retained its old Seattle credentials until the mid 2000s and then it started a rapid change politically, maybe due to a tipping point in terms of California transplants or some other such trend. Now it is a one party city with extreme (far left) politics being normalized. The effects of that are apparent daily - despite ever increasing city and state budgets, urban blight is everywhere in all the same forms as SF. The homelessness and drug abuse issues have been induced by a soft on crime local government that takes no responsibility for anything but instead uses these permanent “crises” as political leverage. The spiral of echo chamber politics dooms the city to this direction.
It is truly mindbogglingly fascinating to see Americans talk about "the extreme far left", and also very cute how you guys somehow think that left-wing politics cause homelessness and drug abuse.
These people just need a stern order to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, then all the poop will be gone from the streets, am I right?
Over a trash can, bury it in a hole in a park, carry a small bag with me to throw away, in a bucket, at a library or other public building, in a park toilet, at a Target..
Literally anywhere other than the public thoroughfare or someone’s stoop.
Except that the local "progressive" NIMBYs have prevented "a restroom being built in that new waterfront park". Then complained enough to bar you from going to that Target. Etc...
It's considerably harder in US to get to a publicly accessible toilet, than in many countries that I've lived in.
When hiking in the woods, we dig a small hole and cover up. I don’t recommend doing that in a city park, but certainly better than pooping where kids walk to school.
I think you're a bit confused about how this works. You can't mix and match different bad things from different cities, take the union of all of them, come up with some dystopian fictional place that suffers from all, and use that as a basis for your claim that real-world cities have collapsed.
The entire point of the article is that there is no solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist, Angkor was rocked by certain changes but ultimately “collapsed” to time and repurpose over a span of centuries.
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.
>Instead, what kills cities is a long period in which their leaders fail to reckon honestly with ongoing, everyday problems—how workers are treated, whether infrastructure is repaired. Unsustainable, unresponsive governance in the face of long-term challenges may not look like a world-historical problem, but it’s the real threat that cities face.
The feels correct to me.
I lived in New York City for 15 years. Until last year. I've thought about this theme all year. Decades of policy supporting foreign investment and developer speculation gutted the chance for even affluent upper middle class New Yorkers to afford housing and setup a home base, and so many left. The situation has been incomparably more challenging for low income residents.
I agree the urban collapse meme is much easier to spread than a thoughtful discussion about policy and priorities and how to balance the economic strength of a city's major players with the daily priorities of everyday citizens. I hope the New York remainders shift priorities and initiate a different kind of prosperous era than the one I got to enjoy.
Massive investment and ever increasing market value of abodes is generally the opposite problem of 'urban collapse' - I mean, unless the bridges are falling down, which I doubt.
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.
We are agreeing that NYC is not at a moment of urban collapse. The processes that drives away the tax base includes policies and social and market forces that erode the city's effectiveness as a sustaining economic and social hub.
The 1960s and 1970s crisis had a lot to do with the end of NYC's industrial epoch. Suburban development and globalization eliminated manufacturing and pulled workers and residents out of the city. The recovery of NYC was bringing high-value services, retail, and tourism back along with arts and culture.
In the time since, NYC has become increasingly a luxury experience, which is indeed part of its strength but also its weakness, since it accelerates decline when people can up and leave without having roots.
NYC isn't going to collapse, but I believe it is going to degrade. But it's going to degrade primarily for the middle and lower income families.
Median household income in NYC is actually below median across US, making the existing tax base small. The flight of the middle class, that was only accelerated by COVID, was already happening.
We left NYC just a few months ago. And we are one of many, who left.
maybe it's not collapse yet, but it certainly isn't making the city an easy place to live, and seems to fit the precursors mentioned in the article. the paper valuation of real estate and landlords don't make a city. referencing their efficiency of extraction as a metric for city health works right up until the moment the burden becomes too great.
The point of the article is to normalize that "americans" is synonymous with "urban new yorkers" and the rest of the population doesn't count.
Clearly, rural mining ghost towns are familiar with the concept of slowly shutting down a boomtown. See also the rust belt cities which were de-industrialized about three generations ago, and continue a slow decline, or at least slower growth than the rest of the country, since then. Some like Detroit are going to something like ghost town status, others like Janesville are doing OK ish, it all seems to depend on demographics. Compare Flint MI and Janesville WI pre and post their respective GM plant shutdowns.
Quick question where do you think the huge population growth in large cities over the last few decades came from?
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."
> The point of the article is to normalize that "americans" is synonymous with "urban new yorkers" and the rest of the population doesn't count.
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.
This article sounds like it's written by someone who read everything in a book, and painfully smacks of elitism. Big industrial cities like Detroit have fallen, and urban decay is abound, but it's not always a "major" industrial center. Take any moderately sized down in rural America and you will find a place that was once a boom-town. Employment, prosperity, and great strides in the live of its citizens, slowly evaporated as rail lines were cut, highways were built around, manufacturing jobs exported, and you will find not only urban collapse, but abandonment.
I know what it looks like; I live in Portland, Oregon.
In 4 years, we went from 3rd most desirable city, to 66th. They're facing a 17% budget shortfall and are getting rid of people in the permitting department which means it will take longer to get permits for new construction. We are in desperate need of high density, cheap apartments. We have a housing crisis.
Gun violence has risen 166% in a single year. Back in July, at the height of the riots, the Mayor and City Council got rid of the Gun Violence Reduction Team and "defunded" the police department by $15M.
Many businesses are facing increased insurance costs, and some facing not being renewed, after the violence and destruction of property in the city. They also found out most of the damage was not covered by insurance due to "not covering civil unrest."
The violence is still going on. Last night, as with the last several nights, they attacked the Federal ICE facility. The week previous, they attacked the Democrat Headquarters.
The district attorney chose not to prosecute many of the people arrested during the "peaceful" protests. Many have been arrested multiple times at multiple events now. 90% of those arrested by the police had their charges dropped.
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.
I have several good friends living in Portland, who grew up there, who work in a variety of non-software areas doing artsy cool shit, all in their 30s. They are all planning on leaving this year as their leases expired.
I lived in Portland from 2001 to 2007. In the early 2000s I occasionally saw poop on the sidewalks and it felt to me the homeliness was confined to certain areas. I went back last June and was shocked about how the homeliness problem had grown. The city also had become very dirty. But to me the largest change was how vacant the streets felt. I am sure COVID was part of this as was flawed memory but it was a pretty summer day and no one was out.
Portland had amazing potential with its art and food culture. It’s really sad to see it fall apart for very predictable reasons. I imagine that all the violence in the name of politics and the homelessness/drug abuse issue will crater tourism. Once the Pearl District loses its draw, other parts of the city will feel the domino effects as well.
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.
Then there is Saint Louis, Missouri, that lost its claim to be the capital of the Midwest to Chicago because they neglected their infrastructure, just as Bruges went from major economic center to quaint historic town because they let their canal to Zeebrugge silt down, impairing their access to the sea.
Last year I was working in Midtown, Manhattan. It was a normal day just like any other, except when I arrived at my desk there were tens of shocked colleagues looking down to the street below. It transpired that a piece of the facade on the old, brick walled building opposite had somehow dislodged, fell, and ended someone's life who was walking by. Her body remained there during the day because it was too dangerous to remove it. For obvious reasons, this was traumatic.
My instinct tells me NYC will not suffer from the mass abandonment that the article refers to, but it needs a tremendous investment to avoid further rot. Modern skyscrapers are a bandaid over the scores of ill fated and fragile buildings and infrastructure NYC is home to.
I think this pandemic will transform American cities because of economics. I live in the suburbs of my city, but pay income tax to my city because that’s where I work. Well, where I used to work prior to the pandemic. My company is about to announce that we’re going to be working from home from now on so my income tax will switch to my suburb. The city stands to lose a lot of tax revenue. We’re not the only major employer in the city making this decision. I figure this can’t be unique to my city so these huge income losses are going to be hitting cities across America and will lead to rapid decline.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadResource management intertwined with poor leadership is a common thread in the demise of societies. Our ability to adapt to our environments is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as Mother Nature itself.
I'd love if we took the hint from these histories, because the scale of change in our global climate looks like it'll far exceed past catastrophes. Some days I'm hopeful, but others, quite wary. Hmm.
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.
There's not enough money for two reasons. The city overspends on everything due to contract corruption and misled ideals. The money doesn't go where it needs to go, and when it goes to the wrong place, it's like a black hole.
The second reason is because large cities offer many more benefits for the poor. People who cannot afford a car simply cannot live outside of city boundaries and bus lines. With increased crime, corruption, and decay, the taxpayers leave (NYC).
Cities cannot fix this. If there will be any solution, it must be a national one. The problem of taxpayers leaving and net-drains arriving can never be solved at the local level.
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.
NYC was also kind of a bad example for me to use because actually, it's a really clean city. When I visited in 2016 I couldn't believe how much cleaner and safer it felt than my hometown (Portland Oregon).
I went to all areas, manhattan, brooklyn, the bronx, harlem, queens, and I just didn't see the sad human decay (Giuliani kicked them all out I guess).
- rising cost of living, propelled by foreign investment in housing, pricing out even upper middle class
- more taxes
- more crime, and less policing
- shitty schools
As soon as you don't need to be in the expensive city for work, it's like hmmm, why the hell am I putting up with this? People with kids may be slightly less flexible, but anybody young and single can basically move very easily. People forget that companies can move easily too.
In terms of amenities, city governments forget that the whole microbrewery/dispensary/expensive coffee shops/hot yoga/avocado toast ecosystem has basically been franchised out at this point and is trivial to stand up anywhere. Sure, it's not an opera house in Manaus, but lots of cheap places in the US have more culture than Bellevue or San Jose.
Expensive cities will argue people will return, and sure, some will, unless the city is too dangerous and completely broke from the tax base leaving. If you are young and single, and want to be around other young single people, and let's say a little midwest spot becomes hip and has the basics, and lots of people move there, you don't really need NYC (at least not everybody). And $500/month rent for a nice 1 bedroom (or a mortgage) is appealing.
You are aware that there are only two places in the world to have globally renowned theatre districts? NYC's Broadway and London's West End.
No periodic Osheaga can outdo music venues in Brooklyn.
There are things that stick. Things that would have to move. Things that seems "easily replicated", but are only possible in extremely densely populated areas.
PS: I just recently moved out of NYC to a town 1 hour north of NYC. And I hate NYC. And I still can see what is impossible without certain factors.
*Software Engineer in Bay area gets paid more, than in NYC.
Live performance is art, which is opposite of materialistic.
Smaller and more niche artists sell out medium sized venues in NYC, while failing to get half occupancy in fairly large cities. That is a major draw, because even idealistic artists need food.
I'm not speaking of just money and property, but rather, anything which pleases our lizard brain - this includes things like tourism, sex-for-pleasure, video games, and novels.
Some counter-examples that I don't consider materialistic are: personal relationships (family and friends), pursuit of justice, philosophy, and also creating art.
I suspect that an extremely awesome scene can be replicated anywhere there is suitable mass of interesting people who can live cheaply. Sure, it's not going to be top billing, but for 99% of us, we simply don't care. Having a hundred different live shows to go to any weekend is more than enough for us, with lots of great local artists.
New York is still way more affordable, than many other places(a busy bar bartender can get over $100K in tips). You also have to realize that outside of NYC you need to have 1 or 2 cars per household and you need way less space for stuff in your apartment in NYC(product and service availability make it easier to depend on things "being there")
Portland is an outdoorsy city, barely a cultural hub - it's cool in its own way. Its appeal is way narrower, than NYC.
Berlin is literally massive city with political power and financial prowess. It could become another global center, but like London - it's its own thing. Very different to NYC.
(speaking from personal experience here)
https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0
NYC should have had congestion zones and tolls on Manhattan long ago. Not to mention a lot less street parking.
Out of curiosity I searched images of Detroit after reading your comment but couldn’t find anything like what you describe.
At 70k, the median house price is still very cheap. https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-market
Imagine those green spaces looking a bit more like this (pardon the crass title, it's the first one I could find): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEdjiEJg0U
edit: this article also has some really nice aerial shots https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda...
Look for flat areas that are 1 sq. mile in size near the Detroit River.
One of the largest truck parking lots in the world combined the lots of thousands of homes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/libertarianmeme/comments/3qv79l/hir...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTKEx0N0DCY
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.
Meanwhile rural areas have been constantly and consistently depopulating for decades. My grandmother is buried in a graveyard in the middle of a soy field; the town that originally made that graveyard is just gone, and it happened within my lifetime.
Lower income families cannot leave an urban center easily. Drop of median income is bad because the loss of a group of people that contribute a lot more tax money and provide demand for services. That means that an "exodus" of 400k (some are) middle class people will only marginally reduce the demands for infrastructure. That will inevitably lead to strain on infrastructure of NYC.
NYC infrastructure is the most expensive in the world. Construction of one mile of subway runs at $1bn. That is not even TBM bored deep tunnels.
This sounds like a perspective of someone who's lived their entire life in the US. Meanwhile, here in Poland, you can have relatively large metro areas (Warsaw + suburbs is probably over 2 million people at this point) with barely any discernible crime - certainly not enough that it's anyone's radar as a social problem. When I was younger I was always puzzled why the american comic books focus so much on fighting crime (Batman, Punisher etc.) - now I understand that it IS actually a real problem in the US.
I wonder why crime never took on in Poland, even though we have clearly way fewer economic opportunities and the state-provided social support is worse than in the US (with the exception of free health care). One argument that comes to my mind is the almost complete lack of drugs over here. In Poland, if someone is keen on destroying their life via a substance dependence, they always go for alcohol, which I guess is much cheaper than drugs, so it creates way less criminals. That can't be the whole explanation though.
I can also assure you, that it's not hard to come by drugs in Poland (I have procured marijuana in Warsaw, without issues). Drug laws create more criminals, but then a cohesive society creates invisible "exceptions" to the rules. You're more likely to be sent to a rehab facility in Europe, than to be sent to prison for drug use.
Let's also remember that US has a massive problem with mental health.
Pardon me, but that's the dumbest thing I've read so far in 2021.
> There's crime
Broadly speaking, there's less serious crime than in a long time.
> corruption
Do cities have more corruption than society in general?
> decaying buildings
Are city buildings in a particularly bad state?
> Detroit looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb.
Detroit has become famous for precisely that, but it's hardly representative.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol
Who wouldn't want to enjoy the fine scenery while stepping around HIV-infected needles and fresh poop? Ah, this hamburger tastes so much better when I get to interact with the local people while eating it - they are so quirky, they always ask me for a dollar with a threatening gaze.
But, that's like, almost all of the biggest cities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
I'm sure there's some cities on that list that occasionally vote for the other party, but I think cities inherently become democrat-leaning because the people inside cities tend to be poor.
NYC seems to be doing alright because they had extreme hardass policies in the 90s (kicking out homeless, literally) but that probably won't last much longer.
Sadly, whichever side is in power, nothing seems to help reduce the homeless problem...
These people just need a stern order to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, then all the poop will be gone from the streets, am I right?
Far left is literally against conservatism, that is the driving force behind NIMBYs.
Literally anywhere other than the public thoroughfare or someone’s stoop.
It's considerably harder in US to get to a publicly accessible toilet, than in many countries that I've lived in.
Personally, I never decided that we should put up with this. I don't recall a vote.
Also, dude, did a city hurt you or something?
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.
The feels correct to me.
I lived in New York City for 15 years. Until last year. I've thought about this theme all year. Decades of policy supporting foreign investment and developer speculation gutted the chance for even affluent upper middle class New Yorkers to afford housing and setup a home base, and so many left. The situation has been incomparably more challenging for low income residents.
I agree the urban collapse meme is much easier to spread than a thoughtful discussion about policy and priorities and how to balance the economic strength of a city's major players with the daily priorities of everyday citizens. I hope the New York remainders shift priorities and initiate a different kind of prosperous era than the one I got to enjoy.
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.
The 1960s and 1970s crisis had a lot to do with the end of NYC's industrial epoch. Suburban development and globalization eliminated manufacturing and pulled workers and residents out of the city. The recovery of NYC was bringing high-value services, retail, and tourism back along with arts and culture.
In the time since, NYC has become increasingly a luxury experience, which is indeed part of its strength but also its weakness, since it accelerates decline when people can up and leave without having roots.
So one declined, the other thrived.
Median household income in NYC is actually below median across US, making the existing tax base small. The flight of the middle class, that was only accelerated by COVID, was already happening.
We left NYC just a few months ago. And we are one of many, who left.
Clearly, rural mining ghost towns are familiar with the concept of slowly shutting down a boomtown. See also the rust belt cities which were de-industrialized about three generations ago, and continue a slow decline, or at least slower growth than the rest of the country, since then. Some like Detroit are going to something like ghost town status, others like Janesville are doing OK ish, it all seems to depend on demographics. Compare Flint MI and Janesville WI pre and post their respective GM plant shutdowns.
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."
San Francisco was exponential growth until 1940, then flatlined since 1950.
Detroit and Baltimore were those destination cities until 1970 or so.
Huge population growth in large cities is a pre-WWII effect and its an outside the US effect.
Last time NYC had Shenzhen-like population growth was over a century ago.
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.
Your tears for small towns are utterly pointless. It is a trend "as old as Rome herself".
In 4 years, we went from 3rd most desirable city, to 66th. They're facing a 17% budget shortfall and are getting rid of people in the permitting department which means it will take longer to get permits for new construction. We are in desperate need of high density, cheap apartments. We have a housing crisis.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/01/20/a-key-indicator-of-rea...
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/18/why-portlands-homeles...
We had over 150 days of protests, most of which turned violent at some point. Here's an article going over the first 100 days.
https://apnews.com/article/b57315d97dd2146c4a89b4636faa7b70
Gun violence has risen 166% in a single year. Back in July, at the height of the riots, the Mayor and City Council got rid of the Gun Violence Reduction Team and "defunded" the police department by $15M.
https://www.kptv.com/news/gun-violence-in-portland-continues...
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/defunding-po...
Pedestrians visiting downtown drop 80%.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2021/01/oregon-insight-p...
Many businesses are facing increased insurance costs, and some facing not being renewed, after the violence and destruction of property in the city. They also found out most of the damage was not covered by insurance due to "not covering civil unrest."
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/downtown-portland-bus...
The violence is still going on. Last night, as with the last several nights, they attacked the Federal ICE facility. The week previous, they attacked the Democrat Headquarters.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/portland-rioters-attack-ic...
The district attorney chose not to prosecute many of the people arrested during the "peaceful" protests. Many have been arrested multiple times at multiple events now. 90% of those arrested by the police had their charges dropped.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/multnomah-county...
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.
My instinct tells me NYC will not suffer from the mass abandonment that the article refers to, but it needs a tremendous investment to avoid further rot. Modern skyscrapers are a bandaid over the scores of ill fated and fragile buildings and infrastructure NYC is home to.