| | |  Americas & Beyond | April 2009 
Cities Collapsing Throughout the USA
 The Coming Depression Blog
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With enough abandoned lots to fill the city of San Francisco, Motown is 138 square miles divided between expanses of decay and emptiness and tracts of still-functioning communities and commercial areas. Close to six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 500 "mini- farms," demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive.
The city, like the automakers, has to shrink to match what's left, said June Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"The issue is how," she said. "There's no vision."
"People are moving out of the city, trying to find work," said David Martin of Wayne State University's Urban Safety Program. Those who stay "can't afford to move out."
"Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable - shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service.
[Mayor] Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city's tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine "shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn't) provide services."
He did not define what that could mean - bulldozing abandoned areas, simply leaving the vacant homes to rot or some other idea entirely."
"Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes."
"In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again).
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them." |
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