“First one family will either rent/lease/or buy a house and move in. Within a week or two, another will move in. After awhile, more and more will move in.”
Many landlords here in NJ prefer them to vacancies as Americans continue leaving NJ (a trend that started under our previous governor). This is also the main reason NYC is a “sanctuary city”; if these roaches didn’t move in it would be a ghost town. At least with live bodies there the city will receive all sorts of federal funds to keep its employees & politicians living large...
Until the Progressive Era and the rise of hygiene agitation, big cities were population sinks, with more people dying than being born there, and only rapid immigration accounting for growth.
I was just reading, apropos of another thread completely, that Stephen A. Douglas, "the Little Giant", lived in small-town Illinois. He moved his family to Chicagos to further his political career in 1847, and within five years his first wife died a young woman (leaving him two kids). He remarried three years later, in 1855 or so, and then he was dead of typhoid himself six years after that -- still a man of relatively young middle years.
Metropolises are a good deal for the people who own and run them. They suck for others.