America is now in a Post-Urban Age, and we have been for almost 40 years. The final nail in the urban coffin was the internet. Yes, we still have cities, but they are on life support, and Chicago shows us, that life support is now failing.
Cities were once the hubs America’s wheels turned on. Now, there are not enough jobs in the cities to support their population, and more jobs leave every day. Cities have become centers of poverty, hopelessness and crime.
Before WWII cities were the manufacturing, distribution, and commercial hubs of America. The majority of manufacturing was done in or very near cities. Sea ports and rail yards were the source of most raw materials, and the primary transport for finished products. Without rail service and sea ports, manufacturing could not exist. While sea and rail were the primary mode of bulk transportation, cities made sense. Most of America’s jobs were in the cities. Why are there are no jobs now? The jobs all left the cities when transportation technology exploded after WWII. Please note… this is about the time the cities started the downhill slide into poverty.
With better, more economical trucks, manufacturing and distribution were no longer tied to the urban hives they created. Manufacturing and distribution started decentralizing. As these industries left the cities, they took their jobs with them. With a more broadly dispersed manufacturing/distribution system, better highways were needed to support them. As better highways became available, transportation became easier and cheaper, and even more industries left the cities, taking even more jobs with them. With better roads, more people bought cars, and employees no longer had to live within five miles of their work location. Now places that used to base their economy around cotton, corn, soy beans and wheat are building cars, computers, refrigerators, and every other manufactured good you can name. By the mid 1960’s, cities were already in decline. Then, in the 1990’s, came the Internet, decentralizing banking and commerce in much the same way as the highways did for industry. Now, With the information age in full swing, it is no longer necessary to congregate offices and call centers in cities. Tele-commuting is changing the face of business. More jobs left the cities, and still do so daily.
As cities slid into poverty, the US welfare system grew along with it, and started providing a subsistence level stipend to prevent those in the worst need from starving. As things got worse, no one invested in repair of the housing where the most poverty stricken lived. The housing decayed, and due to a lack of return, no one re-invested in new housing. As with the subsistence stipend, the government came to the rescue and built new housing. As new, government subsidized housing became available, more people moved in to occupy it; more people, moving into an already depressed environment, that is not going to get better. In order to keep up with the influx, more government subsidized housing was built. And still, no jobs can come back. Industry cannot come back to the cities because the infrastructure cannot support the immense amount of truck traffic required, and if it could, the automobile traffic would make it impossible. This is institutionalized hopelessness.
The best way to solve the problems in our cities, is for the people who live there to move to some place with jobs, without crime, and with hope. There may always be a need for cities as cultural repositories, and centers for the upper echelons of commerce, industry, and government, but our cities can no longer support their present population densities. Seventy years ago, industry began leaving the cities, and twenty-five years ago the banking and commerce exodus began… isn’t it about time for the people to follow? Yes, the people need help, but keeping them in a hopeless environment, and feeding them crumbs is not help. If the government wants to build housing, identify places where there is opportunity, train people to take advantage of those opportunities, build housing there, and help these people move there, toward hope.
In the long run, everyone will win. It will directly benefit those who relocate, and as the population pressures decrease in the cities, the “hopelessness quotient”, along with crime, will fall. People deserve opportunity, not institutionalized hopelessness.
11 replies on “Why America is Now Post-Urban”
The guy that invented freight containers designed transfer stations that moved the containers quickly from ship to train and truck to train. These were never built because in the 1960’s most railways were nationalised or nearly bankrupted with red tape. Cities increased the use of commuter trains on the same tracks. Slow freight and ‘fast’ commuter do not mix. Older freight bogies are noisy and so rail freight curfews were added. A gain quieter bogies were available, they are on the passenger trains, but government owned the bogies and saw no need or had no money to buy new ones. This added to and drove the shift to trucks. The inventor of the freight container now considers it a failed technology because it was never properly implemented.
My opinion is that cities aren’t the problem, public sector welfare is. Telecommuting also isn’t entirely a rural thing just yet. It often requires more bandwidth than is currently available in many small towns.
Dallas is sustaining jobs, Chicago isn’t.
Cities are not the problem, the inability of cities to provide jobs for their residents is the problem. I guess Dallas has not yet exceeded saturation. Unfortunately, cities like Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, and St.Louis, have.
Bandwidth is not an issue. I am in rural South Carolina, and have fiber to the door. My next door neighbor is a Commercial Network Engineer, for a national service provider. At one point, his area of responsibility was in California. He walks across the hall to his office, in his pajamas, most days. I have another neighbor who is a reservation clerk for a cruise line, working from home, and yet another who was a records manager for a major health insurer before retiring, working from her home office..
I am not saying every city needs to be completely evacuated. There will always be business positions, and service positions to support them, along with those who do infrastructure maintenance. Even if offered, not all will be willing to leave. However, anyone already on public assistance should have an opportunity to leave their hopeless situation. As it stands now, most major cities are unsustainable.
You do want a certain population density in area so you have a ready choice of plumbers, electricians, doctors, furniture stores, etc. etc. But giant cities like LA, Chicago, NY, etc. are increasingly decrepit relics of a dead past. I strongly suspect that privacy is necessary for people to live in such large unrelated groups and the destruction of privacy by the internet will slowly kill off the cities.
“The best way to solve the problems in our cities, is for the people who live there to move to some place with jobs, without crime, and with hope.”
The problem with that is if you could get them to do that the result would be that there would be no place with jobs, no place without crime, and no place with hope. And that would happen quickly.
You put your finger on an important problem, but I’m not sure I concur with your solution. I live in a small town in a nearly empty county, and life here would go absolutely to hell if everyone from cities started moving here. Areas with hope are very fragile environments.
We need to find a way to revitalize our cities so that they can support themselves. We can start with outlawing Democratic Party management and demanding the institution of true educational systems.
I live in a small town also, and in the south. In my area, the population is better than 30% black, and, mostly we live in harmony with an astonishingly low crime rate. You have that old “Not In My Backyard” syndrome, and evidently buy into all of the old stereotypes. No, it will not be easy, and there may be problems early on, but no pain; no gain. Not everyone gulled onto the reservations where Democrats put those they didn’t want in their backyards is irredeemable.
I didn’t say anything about race. It’s purely about population density. The country needs to be non-homogenous. Humans do not all have the same ideas about how and where to live. I do not buy into stereotypes at all.
I simply disagree about giving up on cities. The main problem with them is mismanagement.
Sometimes you have to defend your backyard. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s why we need a wall on the southern border, and why we are free to think our own thoughts.
You would not be happy with your town if it starting looking like a city. Which it would, quickly enough, with mass migration. And then I suppose we could move back into the now-empty cities and rebuild them, so we can have some peace and quiet.
Yes, mismanagement, by allowing, no, engineering them, to become unsustainable. The problem now is, no jobs. This country is so large, that dispersing 30 million or so across the country would have a very low impact. Ideally the dispersement would not increase the population of a county by more than 10%. And you cannot ignore that the greatest majority of those to be dispersed from cities would be black. The simple fact of the matter is, there is no other solution besides maintaining the status quo.
We are going to have to disagree. Migrations from cities are already negatively affecting several states, changing them politically and culturally in ways the native populations dislike.
There are other solutions. There are never “no other solutions”. You should never walk away from a problem, like a nomad fouling his living area and going off to find somewhere else to use up. Cities were first invented by people who stopped doing this. We have allowed poor leadership to destroy their value, and the solution is not to walk away, but rather to repair that leadership.
And this is not about color, so stop bringing that up please. Most out-migration from cities so far is not from the black inner core. If, as it sounds, you are proposing to force them to move against their will, that is a very poor solution indeed.
And it is many more than 30 million.
Yes, I am afraid we will have to disagree.
No worries.