It is the future if you are LA or Cleveland or Akron or Indianapolis or Buffalo or Hartford or Providence or Philadelphia or Flint or Toledo or any number of cities that are simply obsolete and financial disasters.
There is no longer a reason for them to be. It is better to start new in say South Carolina or Alabama or perhaps Tennessee than screw with all the crap in these old places.
The problem is, that if you build a nice city in those areas, inevitably scum will want to move there and end up turning the nice apartments into Section Eight housing and fill them with druggies and single mothers who are on their ninth kid. Urban blight isn’t some ecological issue, which could be addressed, but it’s the people who see the gleaming new city and want a piece of it, without working for it. The underclass is spreading and moves into a new shiny place, takes it over, consumes, and then moves onto a newly built place. If I built a new small city and it ended up attracting the wealthy and hardwoking, inevitably there would be some welfare mooch who wants to live there without paying full rent and if I refuse, I would get sued into bankruptcy. Building a new place is a great idea, if not for the ones who want to come in and colonize it and then turn it into another slum, the only type of place they would be comfortable living at. Detroit and LA were great places to live, but got taken over by the worst sort of people and the problem comes from the fact that the majority of the people living there are not working or law abiding. You have to either change or keep the welfare types OUT.