Posted on 09/01/2010 9:31:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A city does not die when its last resident moves away. Death happens when municipalities lose the industries and vital populations that made them important cities.
The economy has evolved so much since the middle of the 20th Century that many cities that were among the largest and most vibrant in America have collapsed. Some have lost more than half of their residents. Others have lost the businesses that made them important centers of finance, manufacturing, and commerce.
Most of America’s Ten Dead Cities were once major manufacturing hubs and others were important ports or financial services centers. The downfall of one city, New Orleans, began in the 1970s, but was accelerated by Hurricane Katrina.
Notably, the rise of inexpensive manufacturing in Japan destroyed the ability of the industrial cities on this list to effectively compete in the global marketplace. Foreign business activity and US government policy were two of the three major blows that caused the downfall of these cities. The third was the labor movement and its demands for higher compensation which ballooned the costs of manufacturing in many of these cities as well.
24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of sources in order to select the list. One was the US Census Bureau’s list of largest cities by population by decade from 1950 to 2000 with estimates for 2007. Detroit, for example, had 1.9 million people in 1950 and was the fifth largest city in the nation. By 2000, the figure was 951,000. The city was not even on the top ten list in 2007.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The understanding is that a trade deficit is dollars leaving the country because Americans buy more imports than they sell exports. Lots of people think that this is what happens but they're wrong. It's not all that hard to disprove, let me know if you're interested.
“Yeah, these are the future leaders...and they’re going to run the government?”
They already are running the government. In all 57 states.
If we’re going to turn this around, it will take a long time. We already have a genuine political aristocratic class that makes no pretense of being subject to the same rules and laws as the rest of us. The left is in control of every bureaucracy and they just keep getting more entrenched and arrogant.
“R&D does follow manufacturing.”
I’ve heard Bill Gates on some Sunday radio broadcast express concern that the next “Microsoft” might well materialize in China or India.
“If we’re going to turn this around, it will take a long time.”
Well, the War of Northern Aggression lasted 4 years, I suspect if there's a part 2 it would be shorter...
Adapt or die.
"Yankees lose....th-a-a-a-a Yankees lose."
Who loses? They are all moving your way.
He He he
Never mind a wall on our southern border, we need one at Texas’ northern border. ;)
Which “War of Northern Aggression” are you talking about? The War Against Slavery, or the War Against Secession? In any case, the analogy doesn’t work. In Part 1 the slave owners and the secessionists were on the same side.
“Who the hell built up the Japanese after WW11”
Dang! I wasn’t alive yet for 1 and 2.
Then I go and miss 3 through 11! I must have been sleeping or on vacation or something.
“With all due respect to northern Freepers,”
Sometimes, when I read something that starts off with “with all due respect” it means that some ignorant flaming asshole is about to speak. Sometimes.
“Well, Eastman Kodak and Bausch and Lomb are still there”
EK at one time employed over 20,000 people in Rochester. B&L was once a major employer with many product lines being manufactured there, as well as R&D and offices. Now EK has what, maybe 8,000 employees left, and B&L has some office workers.
Rochester may not be dead, but it is code blue. The ER docs just haven’t quit pumping on its chest quite yet.
Too bad. The surrounding area is wonderful country, great scenery, recreation, friendly folks, lakes, hills, valleys, and unfortunately all still in the state of NY so there is little economic activity left.
I love it here. (in the sticks outside of Rochester) I hate that it is in NY.
By trying to force people together that wanted nothing to do with each other, these dim-witted liberal judges only worsened the situation. The inner-cities are like war zones and the schools are even worse. Little wonder many cities are dying.
Thanks for the 4-1-1.
“Who the hell built up the Japanese after WW11”
Dang! I wasn’t alive yet for 1 and 2.
Then I go and miss 3 through 11! I must have been sleeping or on vacation or something.”
Sorry Ace You lose for being the grammar queen!
Or countries.
The office towers going up on the Jersey side of the Hudson should be a huge clue-by-four to the City leadership wrangling and wangling and letting Moslems interfere in redevelopment of the World Trade Center, that they'd better get off their butts and do something about their situation.
Nobody wanted to rebuild the WTC towers because they supposedly had so many occupancy problems in the first place, but the people saying that stuff, can't explain why New York firms are building high-rise office space over in Jersey.
Well, about 1/4 of their citizenry died in the space of six hours one Saturday afternoon in 1900. That didn't help.
It's still an anomaly on this list because a) it wasn't really an industrial city or "big" city in 1950 -- third tier city among the country's big towns. And b) Houston had already basically replaced it as a port city before 1950.
The 1900 hurricane and Houston's building the Ship Channel in the 1920's pretty much bypassed Galveston, which was Texas's dominant dockland and entrepot before the 1900 storm. If Galveston's city fathers had built the seawall they'd been talking about since the 1874 Indianola storm, they'd have been okay in 1900, and then who knows where the development would have gone in the 1920's.
The 1900 storm was so bad, that in the 1960's the city's historians were guessing they might have lost as many as 6000 people, as opposed to the first-pass number of 3500 or so worked up by city fathers polling people who'd been involved with body recovery and disposal. By 1999, researchers had upped the toll to over 9,000 with work still continuing but finally winding down. So many people died in the storm, it took 100 years' careful work to figure out just a good, solid guesstimate.
Boston is going to take a hit as education diversifies.
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