CDZ How big of a problem are our hollow inner cities / suburbs?

[Toronado3800]

In St Louis and many cities to the east we have these big hollow devalued cores of obsolete city / suburb cores ranging in age from old brick home neighborhoods to the first of the post WWII neighborhoods.

Generally I consider this an economic and environmental problem. Economic because value is lost needlessly and we know what happens to the economy when home values drop. Environmental because of the problems with sprawl and the loss of efficiency with our longer commutes. It doesn't matter if I buy a car that gets 15 (FIFTEEN!) more miles per gallon if my commute is 15 miles longer, I still use a gallon of fuel not to mention the other wear items which make the country less competitive.

HOWEVER,
Ridiculously cheap $10,000 homes which really don't meet any safety standards but are functional do provide housing to very poor people. Not in areas with great schools or great crime rates but housing none the less. Nothing like disposable income also.

If you don't have kids you need to put in private school, don't mind seeing black folks at the grocery store, and can live with a handful of murders a year happening within a 5 mile circle of your home I know where you can get an acre of beautiful land w/o ridiculous subdivision ISIS like over site, within 15 miles of the arch and a reasonable home for $60,000.

So, in a way its beneficial but the pattern here is for the $60,000 home neighborhood to decay into the $10,000 home neighborhood and quickly. We just don't have any incentive to rebuild when it is cheaper to flee, go west to rezoned farm land and allow decay.

Is this really a problem though for anyone who isn't attached to their home or land?

 

[MarathonMike]

There is a large human cost involved. The deterioration of the inner cities is a symptom of the destruction of the Black nuclear family. The inner city war zones we see now did not exist 60 years ago. Families started breaking up, neighborhoods declined and those that could left those neighborhoods to live in the suburbs. I lived in the Washington D.C. suburbs in the 60s and witnessed it first hand. You can debate why it happened, but it happened.

 

[william the wie]

MO has not yet reached the stage of gentrification and spillover from IL is not helping. As the bad parts of the Blue Wall near MO collapse improvement should be rapid.

 

[Toronado3800]

MO has not yet reached the stage of gentrification and spillover from IL is not helping. As the bad parts of the Blue Wall near MO collapse improvement should be rapid.

Its not a blue vs red thing here and Missouri's two big cities and older suburbs are hollow on a legendary level (St Louis worse than KC) even if you can't see it from afar. I drive through the current situation and know the history.

The former red suburbs failed and went blue in desperation. Did the reds fail them or the blues not succeed in rebuilding them? This is going to border on a personal attack, I'm sorry, but I think it is a bigger issue than your team worship blindness allows you to see.

Red and Blue are both involved in this problem.

 

[william the wie]

You have reversed my view of causality. All states attempt to get economic rents from location, most cannot. NY, IL and MO lost their economic rents with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

LA and FL are a contrast in how this works. New Orleans LA is the most vital piece of real estate between the Alleghenies and the Rockies because it is the cheapest export port in the country and has been for the last 200 years and more. The Ds are better at skimming economic rents and run LA. FL is a tourist trap that competes with the entire Caribbean, Bermuda and the Bahamas and therefore does not get economic rents so the Rs run FL.

As it sinks in that the former economic rents are gone and the SALT deduction cap kicks in the Ds are losing their comparative advantage.