Looking to see an acceleration as Governor Tax 'em all Deval Patrick wants to ruin 3 more cities with casinos.
Somebody should chart population loss/growth against total tax rates. I bet there would be a high correlation.
Many....and as the libs destroy those areas they move to others...like Virginia, Atlanta GA, etc...
like a plague of locusts...
A couple of things all these places have in common:
1. High Taxes
2. Democratic Leadership
3. Unions
4. Bad weather.
Buffalo? Didn’t Clinton run on promising jobs to upstate NYers?
“how may of these cities are run as socialist/liberal fiefdoms?” I suspect there’s a very strong correlation between high crime + poor economies and exclusive democrat control (consider, detroit, b’more, new orleans, pre-Rudy NYC).
Notice that all of the top 5 are big union cities.
Look at the statistics: Gen-X is fleeing those cities and the younger demographic is inflated by illegals (and muslims in Dearbornistan) leaving lots of boomers and some older folks.....
On a talk radio site, it said that a new real time radio listening measuring system was being planned for the top ten markets, and it was only Detroit's loss of population that netted Boston the tenth position.
Maybe San Francisco is declining because all the gays are moving up here.
Why is the author surprised that San Fransicko is on the list? Between astronomic housing prices, one of the largest gay populations in the US, and an oppressive local government why would anyone want to raise their family there? MEGA-Duh!
btt
Unlike the other 4 areas, Pittsburgh is a really nice place to live. I think it has bottomed out...with a resurgance of nuclear power, Pittsburgh based Westinghouse is have trouble hiring enough people.
There was a great, very long and extensive WSJ article recently about the decline (in everything) in Buffalo.
It went into the historical reasons behind, and the historical data of, Buffalo’s decline.
What one can take from the lessons of Buffalo, and see them at work in other cities are:
(1)some reasons for some cities decline were/are unavoidable - the world that created a city changes (business, economics, technology, culture and their positive and negative contributions are neither fixed, assured or possible to maintain in all cases);
(2)local governance can ruin the productive climate for a locale, but even good local governance cannot save a locale from some attributes noted in (1) above;
(3)almost all state and federal “aid to cities” for economic development and redevelopment for America’s worst declining cities has not stemmed either their population loss or their declining economic performance on an aggregate or per-capita basis.
The authors concluded that the best social, moral and economic approach to cities in great decline could be assistance to those who want to leave and get started somewhere else.
One telling evidence of why this may be a better approach is that in-migration to some of our cities in great decline (like Buffalo) has witnessed a greater % of new residents coming from lower income levels. This generates a viscous cycle in the cost of local governance - a declining local tax base and expanding local requirements for assistance to lower income people, generating either a higher local tax burden (with both in-migration of poor and higher taxes making it less attractive to business) on the remaining productive segments of the population, and whereby more of them determine to leave as well, or an increased ratio of state to local funds is needed just for the locale to operate without a hugely increasing local tax burden.
If those with some job skills, but in lower income levels, in our declining cities were encouraged and assisted to get into jobs and job markets in more productive locales, the shrinking local population would remain economically healthier and might even remain more viable or even recoverable, with a smaller but stabilizing locale population.
Some cities, like Camden New Jersey, can never, in my opinion recover from the cycle of decline and high local poverty - which can become self-reinforcing attributes, particularly when the old cause of their once healthy state no longer exists and no new natural dynamic has replaced it. I have used the term natural in this case to mean free-market forces (in ideas, economics, technology and culture), because it seems that government cannot contrive for these forces to come into existence, in a sustainable manner - those efforts fail, if not sooner then later.
4. San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City Metropolitan Division
Bogus MSA. This is equivalent to something like a “Manhattan MSA” - a built out core area of the metro, completely surrounded by other urbs and burbs, or natural barriers.