A lot! Post-industrialism is a huge problem. Most of Upstate NY is one ghost town after another punctuated by art studios and phoney-baloney tourist towns wit

A lot! Post-industrialism is a huge problem. Most of Upstate NY is one ghost town after another punctuated by art studios and phoney-baloney tourist towns with a "pedestrian mall" which is just a bricked over main street with some landscaping added. All for the benefit of the massive state workforce, I guess. Anyone who can escape has escaped. Imagine my surprise on going back to visit my elderly parents after an 8 year hiatus only to find that absolutely nothing had changed! Nothing. That's not to say all of NY is like that, but I'm astounded at how very little economy there really is in that whole region. The mega-city has killed the rest of that political boundary, killed it dead. It's sad what the US has become overall. We imagine sprawling futuristic cities and there's not a single one anywhere. Everywhere that isn't what I just described in some variation of bedroom community with endless strip malls and suburban blight and as you get closer to whatever city, then the urban blight takes over--mostly to do with trucking, warehouses, and so forth. There's little industry anywhere, just armies of people sitting behind computers while sipping coffee in climate-controlled offices. The 21st century is truly strange. What's also truly strange is that it is nearly impossible to get "off the beaten path" anywhere on the east coast. The Eastern US is unending sprawl beginning somewhere near the Maine border all the way to Miami. You can still get away in the Northwest, Montana, and the Dakotas and maybe also down the center of "Flyover Country" but that's about it. Okay, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is sufficiently remote, too.