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Jackson is in a death spiral. It’s been shrinking for decades and the people who leave first are the people with income, money, and opportunity. The people le
by nostromo 4y ago
Jackson is in a death spiral. It’s been shrinking for decades and the people who leave first are the people with income, money, and opportunity.
The people left are increasingly poor, on public assistance, and simply don’t pay enough in taxes to maintain their city’s infrastructure.
When this happens, cities need to restructure. Shrink the city boundaries and end service to people outside of it. Give them plenty of warning of course - years of warning - but a city that is shrinking in population and wealth also needs to physically shrink and reduce the amount of infrastructure being maintained to be solvent.
- Bud 4y agoI get your general argument, and in a lot of circumstances, it has validity, but I don't think it does in this case. Jackson has indeed experienced white flight and a population decline. But it still has basically the same population it had 10 years ago (153k now, 173k as of the 2010 census). And the water treatment infrastructure issues there have been ongoing for many years. There have been repeated appeals to the state for funding. The state has denied anything close to the requested funding. In this particular case, it's not about failing to wisely "physically shrink" the "amount of infrastructure" to something 10% smaller. It's about failure to address chronically broken fundamental infrastructure.