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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
by ndiscussion 6y ago
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.
- marcinzm 6y ago>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.
- ndiscussion 6y agoI 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).
- JAlexoid 6y agoThere's plenty of sad human decay - it's just very compartmentalized.
- medium_burrito 6y agoI 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.
- JAlexoid 6y agoIf 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.
- ndiscussion 6y agoNot 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.
- waynesonfire 6y agoKinda like when cities build roads but fail to budget for their maintenance costs? .. but keep building new roads.
- imtringued 6y agoThat'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. https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0 https://youtu.be/VVUeqxXwCA0
- JAlexoid 6y agoTBH - NYC is really bad with road maintenance. NYC should have had congestion zones and tolls on Manhattan long ago. Not to mention a lot less street parking.
- tyleo 6y agoWhen you say, “Detroit looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb.” What are you referring to? I’d love if you could share a link. Out of curiosity I searched images of Detroit after reading your comment but couldn’t find anything like what you describe.
- u678u 6y agoI think they mean like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/7h0770/view_of_a_detroit_suburb_from_google_maps/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/7h077... At 70k, the median house price is still very cheap. https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-market https://www.redfin.com/city/5665/MI/Detroit/housing-market
- ndiscussion 6y agoYes, like that... but that's only after the "blight removal". 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 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/sunday/exposures-detroit-by-air-alex-maclean.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda...
- redis_mlc 6y agoI'm from there. It's worse than Hiroshima. 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.
- benjohnson 6y agoTheres 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. https://www.reddit.com/r/libertarianmeme/comments/3qv79l/hiroshima_vs_detroit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/libertarianmeme/comments/3qv79l/hir...
- nostrademons 6y agoCrime, 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.
- ashtonkem 6y agoAlso, American cities on average continue to gain population, not lose them. Even cities that are derided as “decaying”, like NYC.
- JAlexoid 6y agoNYC is set to loose people and/or have a drop in median household income(the second bit is where it really hurts)
- ashtonkem 6y agoChances 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.
- gspr 6y ago> Our cities have already collapsed. 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.
- ndiscussion 6y agoCheck out the map here. "Serious" crime may be down, but quality of life has gone down the toilet, even in our richest cities. https://allthatsinteresting.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol 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.
- Simulacra 6y agoIs 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.
- ndiscussion 6y agoPortland, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Columbus, LA... I guess you're right, it's all in one-party cities. But, that's like, almost all of the biggest cities? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population 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.
- finiteseries 6y agoThe 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.