On the Direction of Evolution for American Cities

I used to be a big advocate for so-called bedroom communities, but I'm not so sure anymore. There are some huge systemic problems with the way many towns and cities are built. I now believe this means many of them will inevitably become useless. 

In the US, towns were built or vastly expanded in the post 1940s around the concepts of automotive transport and suburban lifestyles. This creates "wide" city plans that build "out" and not "up," since it is assumed everyone can just drive a car to get where they need to go. Public transportation languishes in the same environment. Simultaneously, suburban aspirational living drives the workers and their money out to the fringes of the city, looking for new developments on large lots in convoluted street plans that abandon the grid street system literally in order to prevent their neighborhood being usefully navigable. This devalues whatever holdover main street "walking" district remained at the center of the city, moving the business money out to what I call "secondary main streets" - large avenues connecting the city on the limns of the new low-density housing areas, lined on all sides by strip malls and box store lots. This is encouraged because it looks "open" and "big," is cheap for the businesses to build, and is developed relatively quickly so long as the city planners agree to let the businesses develop this how they want. This works great for our civilization right up until the 2000s, when the following developments occur (or continue to pick up steam alongside the other developments):

• Gas prices go up
• Family sizes go down
• Agriculture and manufacturing become less important to our economy than services, knowledge sector, and logistics
• Wages stagnate while inflation continues, making car and house ownership more difficult while ultimately decreasing property tax income for the city
• The Amazon Effect guts malls and box store companies, further decreasing property tax income for the city
• Limited IT infrastructure rollout largely bypasses rural and suburban areas in favor of cities (as you already mentioned)
• "boom" infrastructure not designed to last begins to crumble, exacerbating the maintenance costs of low-density housing

In the end you are left with a city that is expensive to live in and maintain, without a population financially capable of enjoying it or having a real use for the size of the houses outside of pure aspiration, with a bunch of empty box stores that are difficult to repurpose - not only by their nature but because of their location and basic low-quality construction. People living there will realize they are living in a city imagined by corporations instead of city planners, and that nothing around them is beautifully architected - they will have no sense of ownership. The historical geographical reasons for the city's existence have dried up and now, unless it is a hospital or university town, or has heavily invested in IT or commuting infrastructure and can parasitize the incomes of a larger neighbor city, it has little path forward. Its costs will continue to compound while its sources of income will decrease, driving out citizens able to do so to more densely-packed megacities without these structural issues. The remaining population will be even less able to cope with the structural doom imposed on them, and the city will die a slow death over the course of the next century, making all those cornfields and forests they paved over to build it look like pretty great carbon sinks in comparison.

I don't see a way out of this. The only thing you can do to reverse it is compel people to literally act against their own interest and stay; to gain control of their local governments and get them to do drastic shit like build municipal IT infrastructure and buy out box store lots and pave them over to build high-density housing, open public spaces, and whatever kinds of commercial development make sense (probably logistics-related stuff and office buildings). That's scary because it requires you to put yourself even deeper in the financial hole in order to drag yourself out of it, so many places will not do it (politicians who increase city debt will be voted out by a population not educated enough to realize they're doing what needs to be done). You can try to attract businesses, but without a compelling workforce or geographical reason to exist, you are not going to get a lot of them without selling out completely (offering them utterly unfair tax incentives to invest in your community which ultimately destroy a lot of the immediate benefit their investment would provide!).

A lot of small and mid-sized cities in America, especially those which expanded quickly during the baby boom years, are now entering a death spiral that will see them contract or even snuff themselves out. Their populations will migrate to the bigger cities and continue to drive housing prices up there. I see this all as a fundamental and practically insurmountable change.

In the future, our landscape will be dotted with the hollow ghost town corpses of towns and cities - and as nature reclaims these spaces, and people burn less gas just to exist, we will actually realize this was a good thing.

SOURCE: am living in Rockford, IL