Is Now The Time To Move Away From Major U.S. Cities?

The American Dream ^ | 1-26-2012 | Michael Snyder

[little jeremiah]

In a SHTF situation many necessities and conveniences may be partial, sporadic, or unavailable. Things like water, sewage, fire departments, electricity, natural gas, propane, etc.

I’d much rather be “out in the middle of nowhere” than in the middle a hundreds of thousands or millions of people who cannot find water with which to drink, bathe or wash their clothes, fires that cannot be extinguished, stores that cannot function due to no electricity, or no products delivered, no gasoline, etc.

I can’t stand cities as they are now. I cannot imagine living in one once things really start to break down.

[dragnet2]

You need to read my post a bit closer.

[rdb3]

In Cleveland, over 50 percent of all children are living in poverty and abandoned houses are everywhere.

The city has already demolished about 1,000 homes, and there is a plan to demolish 20,000 more homes. The following comes from a recent CBS News report by Scott Pelley....

Perfectly good homes, worth 75, 100 thousand dollars or more a couple of years ago, are being ripped to splinters in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Here, the great recession left one fifth of all houses vacant. The owners walked away because they couldn't or wouldn't keep paying on a mortgage debt that can be twice the value of the home. Cleveland waited four years for home values to recover and now they've decided to face facts and bury the dead.

Sad, but true. I had to leave.

My 3 brothers and 3 sisters try our best to convince mom and pop to leave that hellhole, but they refuse.

25 years ago, we had Ronald Reagan, Johnny Cash, and Bob Hope.
Today we have Obama, no cash, and no hope!

If you can't appreciate the pure beauty of the violin after hearing this, something's wrong with your ears.

Or you can get raw with these strings.

How about this gamechanger from America's Got Talent (which they SHOULD have won).

And finally, this, dedicated to the one and only rdb2, whose eyes are growing dim.

Either way, the violin is sweet yet LETHAL.

Do it!

[Straight Vermonter]

How are these millions of "students" going to participate in any meaningful way in a modern economy?

Rate	District	Size rank	Rate	District	Size rank	Rate	District	Size rank
21.7	Detroit	11	53.7	New Orleans	48	68.4	Gwinnett County, Ga.	20
38.5	Baltimore City, Md.	30	53.8	Duval County, Fla.	19	68.6	Brevard County, Fla.	42
38.9	New York City	1	54.6	Clark County, Nev.	6	69.3	Fulton County, Ga.	45
43.1	Milwaukee	28	54.8	DeKalb County, Ga.	27	70.0	Hillsborough County, Fla.	10
43.8	Cleveland	44	55.1	Austin	37	70.2	Anne Arundel County, Md.	40
44.2	Los Angeles	2	55.2	Palm Beach County, Fla.	12	70.4	Cobb County, Ga.	26
45.3	Miami-Dade County, Fla.	4	55.5	Philadelphia	8	72.2	Granite, Utah	46
46.3	Dallas	13	56.0	Charlotte	23	75.3	Mesa, Ariz.	39
46.5	Pinellas County, Fla.	22	56.2	Orange County, Fla.	15	75.8	Northside, Tex.	49
46.8	Denver	43	60.1	Polk County, Fla.	34	77.0	Jefferson County, Colo.	33
48.5	Memphis	21	62.2	Jefferson County, Ky.	31	80.2	Jordan, Utah	41
48.7	Broward County, Fla.	5	63.0	San Diego	16	81.3	Cypress-Fairbanks, Tex.	47
48.9	Fort Worth	36	63.1	Fresno	35	81.5	Montgomery County, Md.	17
48.9	Houston	7	63.7	Hawaii (statewide)	9	81.9	Baltimore County, Md.	24
50.4	Nashville	50	66.5	Virginia Beach	38	82.2	Wake County, N.C.	25
52.0	Albuquerque	32	67.3	Prince George's County, Md.	18	82.5	Fairfax County, Va.	14
52.2	Chicago	3	68.1	Long Beach	29

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-06-20-dropout-rates_x.htm#grad

[vanilla swirl]

Been hearing this chestnut for awhile. I live in a city of about a million. I live in a neighborhood of maybe 200 houses. Let’s think about this logically, if bullets are flying out of a only handful of houses in the neighborhood where do you think the looters will go? There are plenty of easy pickin’s for a looter without having to dodge bullets!

And as far as roving bands of armed paramilitary zombies? Probably thinned out before they get here.

All that being said, I have hardened my basement so that my wife and I could survive a couple of months without popping our heads out. And I do have a bug-out location in another state.

With what is going on in Georgia court regarding Obama’s eligibility I seriously expect race riots this summer. Atlanta will be the first to go up in smoke!

[southern rock]

I understand what you are saying in your post # 30, but I'm not sure geography has as much to do with it as you think. Somewhat yes, but not everything.

To dig deeper into what you touched upon here, you really need to read a book called "Class" by Paul Fussell. I read it years ago and it was an eye opener. I finally understood why I had been annoyed by certian types of people. After reading it, you will realize that you are not bothered by small town people, or even less educated people (although this plays into it a little), but it is really "prole" behavior that you are adverse to. It will be worth your time.

[PapaBear3625]

Yet they still manage to muster manpower and gear to conduct East German style checkpoints and speed traps.

Arresting gang bangers does not produce revenue. Arresting middle-class drivers for speeding and DUI does. Increasingly, police care more about revenue than their official jobs. In what way does this make them different from old-style highwaymen?

[patton]

Of note, I can remember reading about each incident the author cites on FR.

[P8riot]

Locked and loaded.

[panaxanax]

“Nearly everybody I know has a pretty prestigious education: Harvard, Pepperdine, the Sorbonne in France, Oberlin, Amherst, Georgetown, Duke, Tel Aviv University, and King’s College in London - to name a few. I rarely ran into anybody educated when I lived the small town I was born in!”
_____________________________________________

BFD.

Your highly educated friends would be the first to implode during a crisis. Bobby Brooks bow-ties and PhD’s don’t mean shit when you’re hungry and have to actually hunt for food.

Their definition of being hungry is being late for dinner or missing breakfast.

Do all of us uneducated country-folk a favor and stay right where you are.

[Chode]

yup... that was my point

[bert]

With the fantastic change in communications and transport, cities have become obsolete. The necessity to gather people and resources into a tight area no longer exists. Decentralization provides benefits outweighing those of closeness of a city.

The occupation of cities by feral people has hastened the decline. Nothing can be done about those feral populations except starve them out. The Starvation will lead to despair and conflagration on a massive scale.

Do not be there at the time....... stay away

[cripplecreek]

The population in the UP is low but lots of people on public assistance. What happens up there if the SHTF?

Those are college students and they'll be too busy trying to get home to do much of anything else. They don't know how to feed themselves now and started leaving as soon as we cut some 30,000 of them off food stamps. Native Michiganders are generally life long hunters and fishermen.

[bert]

-——all we need to do is blow the Route 17 bridge-——

With what?

Of course the reverse is true. You are thinking defense when some offense might be prudent. The bridges on the interstate leading to the cities effectively cut off flow of goods into the city.

The state of Florida is especially vulnerable. the loss of I 95 and I 75 will severely impact the state’s ability to function. The same is true of Philadelphia but perhaps more work needs to be done

[cripplecreek]

I think small towns are ideal. I’m about 70 miles west of Detroit and better than 10 miles off the highway. There are other little towns every 4 or 5 miles in every direction.

Any urban barbarians who think they could simply roll out across the country side taking what they want would be in for a big surprise.

[patton]

Your post is misleading - those are graduation rates, not drop-out rates.

[angcat]

You must be very young. My daughter is in love with NYC, she is 16.. My whole family ran out of NYC. My parents were born and raised on the lower east side and I spent 28 years there and in Yonkers. After living in the country for the last 18 years I don’t miss paying all the taxes and hanging out with snobs from other states who have really changed NYC and not for the better.

[netmilsmom]

(you’re gonna let us in if the SHTF, right? I’ll show my FReeper ID, live in our camper and bring cookies)

[reformedliberal]

I was responding to “you can run, but you cannot hide” and agreeing with it.

If pressed to hazard a guess, I’d say that collection of taxes would be one reason. Beyond that, the ability to create what we used to call sociograms that reveal your social interactions must have a reason. With all the data-gathering technology available that can read your ID from a chip in a driver’s license, passport or credit card or the GPS tracking available via cell phone, _someone_ seems to want to be able to track us.

Perhaps there is another reason for all the data mining on the web besides just knowing what to sell us and where we would be most likely to purchase it, not to mention who we might be meeting up with, which can be determined from comparing the various tracking data common to any group of individuals? They know the products you buy and where you buy them. Social networks and emails reveal your personal associations.

If your various cards/phone pass within range of an RF reader, you are identified. Mobile scanners are being used to see if someone is carrying in public. In some large cities, you can also be tracked via the ubiquitous cameras and, in some places, via drone. Your IP identifies your location when you post or go online from any platform.

That is the data collection part. Data storage is becoming very cheap. Large centers exist and more are being built just to store that data. Many of these data storage centers are run by the government intelligence services. The government wants access to the private data storage.

Why go to all this effort if there wasn’t some purpose behind knowing where people are, where they are going, what they are doing and with whom they are doing it?

Perhaps they have no interest in any one individual at the moment, but they foresee a time when they would.

Read “Minority Report”. Dick was writing before all this tracking was so readily available. The book differs from the movie.

[patton]

Here is an interesting question, inspired by you post ...

What is an ideal bug-out location?

No man is an island - humans need sleep, and someone to watch their back.

Perhaps a town of 500 to 2000 people, more or less in farm country? A minimum of 100 miles from a city?

But then, even if you own a place in such a community, you may not be welcome, unless you bring needed skills - a DR., eg, would be welcome anywhere, a tax collector, maybe not.

Food for thought.