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The thing that made cities work was the concentration of employment opportunities. What killed cities was their tax structure that relied on sucking money from those who provided jobs. Due to advances in technology and the availability of workers in lower taxed venues those jobs have moved, permanently to other places. Nothing will bring back those jobs to cities. Nothing. So, cities in general are in decline. In particular, cities with Democratic majorities can never be rehabilitated because of cronyism and existing liabilities and debt.

As for California, they have actively courted illegals to move there. This means legitimate businesses and sources of income, the rich, are moving out. Reversing this would be somewhere between hard and impossible. So, goodbye New York and California. Of the two, only California will be missed.

If the NYC pols had been paying attention in the late 70’s and early 80’s they could have seen the reason for Wall Street banks and brokerages moving their back office and main computer operations to Brooklyn and NJ. Cost centers that didn't need to pay the already high sf costs. One bank HQ on Water Street had an entire floor totally devoted to temp storage of waste paper mostly computer printouts. Image an entire floor filled with the big canvas mail carts staged for after hours disposal. Saw that doing a physical survey prior to remodeling of several floors.Watching where the Morlocks slaved away.

This was just before IBM pcs arrived, Wang being a big player in stand alone word processing at the time.

Funny that with all of the systems and narket analyists they never saw that coming.