Detroit is an interesting example of a North American disposable city. Conditions changed and everyone left. Could this even happen somewhere like Europe where land is more scarce?
I talked with a friend who lives 1/2 time in Detroit and 1/2 time in the bay area last week and they were not very hopeful about the future of that once great city. They said it was not uncommon that once a property didn't have anyone around for a couple of weeks people would come in during the night and strip it. It sounded sad and dystopian.
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.
All I can say is "Wow". I knew Detroit was in decline but 25% in 10 years (excluding the greater area)? That's just staggering.
For almost all of human history we've only had to deal with issues of growth. There are of course exceptions to this. Some cities that were massive are either small now or have ceased to exist. Some (like London) went through centuries of virtual depopulation before being reborn (between the Roman departure and the 10th-11th century).
But modern city depopulation seems to create some fairly big problems. Cities with significant depopulation (eg Detroit, Baltimore) are known for crime. Some say this causes the depopulation, which may well be true, but it also exacerbates it, as drug addicts and the like move into decaying and abandoned areas.
Going forward, this is going to be a significant problem we'll have to deal with, I believe. The reason I believe that is that it is my opinion that there are simply too many people on this planet. Ultimately it's unsustainable. Either we'll solve this by breeding less or nature will do it for us.
Either way, if this comes to pass, we'll need to figure out how to shrink urban centers effectively. That's going to be painful.
As for Detroit, it's certainly well off its peak in the 50s and 60s. It may be cheap (and thus, arguably, attractive to investors) but it's cheap for a reason. I'm sure Chechnya is cheap too.
Honestly, Detroit had nowhere to go but up. The city was so poor that even a decade ago downtown was a hot mess where there was virtually nobody there after 6 PM.
But on the flip side, I can't imagine that people living in Detroit were thrilled by the decades of urban decay there.
I think I'd rather live in a city that's so popular that infrastructure can't keep up than to live in a city where entire neighborhoods are empty and are razed due to neglect and criminal activities.
The interesting part about Detroit, amongst others, is that Detroit's "ruins" are due to an exodus of industry and followed by population. That's to say, it's not exactly due to gov't mismanagement or some kind of systemic failure. The failure is more individual --for example, company goes bankrupt --leaves building. But no one comes in to rent the building out. In other cases, it's due to buildings reaching their useful life --and not getting torn down properly (in this case, too costly for the gov't since no one is willing to build, as they would in other cities). All this is aggravated by the flight form the city to the suburbs and elsewhere. To put it succinctly, this is more organic, than artificial.
So, for example, you could be in a nice building and look across the street and look at a dilapidated building in disrepair. It's a weird juxtaposition but one shaped by economics and demographics.
Cities have risen and fallen before. Part of the creative destruction of the last few decades involved wealth and power disappearing from Detroit and growing in Silicon Valley. I understand for Detroiters the sentimental value of Detroit, but there's no need for economic activity to happen in Detroit or in any other particular place so long as it happens and happens productively. In fact, it may be against this country's interests for otherwise useful and productive resources to be misdirected towards trying to rebuild failed cities like Detroit when they could be more productively invested elsewhere.
People see a city like Detroit turn to ruins and think this is terrible, this needs to be a thriving city again. No, really as long as we have more prosperity elsewhere, Detroit can stay in ruins.
This sort of decline has hit nearly every major city, Detroit is just the worse off. Have you been to Philadelphia or Baltimore recently? Husks of their former glory.
If it weren't for the immobility of building capital, Detroit would probably no longer exist. As is, it exists only because of the low level of demand for its buildings makes it the kind of place that the poor and desperate can afford to live, which further lowers the level of demand for its buildings.
No, I think you get the wrong impression here. This is not a city that has grown to 120k over 1000 years and which disappeared in a blink, this is a village that was overgrown because of the coal mine activity in the past 100 years, and just like in all modern countries which made the switch from coal to something else, the economic activity went somewhere else and people with it.
So no, it's actually very similar to cities in northen France, West Germany and South Belgium which lived from coal as well and quickly dropped in population as well. And the same thing is happening in Detroit as the auto industry dissappeared as well. It's all the same thing at work.
Another way to look at it is that there is absurd amounts of empty land throughout the country. Places were undesirable and cheap, and people of moderate means bought them, improved the area, and over decades it became a desirable area.
Young people need to go to shitty places that are cheap and then make the place better. Many young people want to live in SF or NYC. Go to Detroit instead.
I’ve always wondering if farming could be a solution for Detroit? It seems to have plenty of land and with growing shortages of basic commodities such as Wheat on the global market surely there’s an opportunity to return large parts of the land back to farming use.
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