What the hell happened to cities?

[DiscoRodeo]

In my experience cities have a sweet spot where they are actively taking care of shit to get people to live there and then too many or too many of the wrong people move in.

I've lived in the sweet spot twice and it was good, dare say great and then the masses move in within the decade and it's all fucking overcrowded, underfunded trash.

This is exactly it imo.

The OP opened with "I was there in 2020 and it seemed normal" and I was just a bit bemused by this.

Most of the cities Ive known became gentrified to hell in the 2010s. Normal enough, livable for the rich, but honestly ultra sanitized, boring, and full of hipsters or yuppies. A lot of people here like to talk about "reject the bugman narrative", reject panera bread and food trucks, high rents, a tech startup out of every freshman's apartment, etc, and that does hold its own cultural capital.

I think that people are right to notice a literal decline in cities post-covid, in that even this gentrification has taken a hit, and as many people are saying- with remote work cities became less appealing (even the yuppies started to move out), druggies started to take over, the local businesses that had survived up till now finally were forced to die out, and now cities are shells of their former selves.

The gentrification era may be over in a lot of regards, but even prior to covid, cities have been ultra boring this past decade. From perhaps 2008 and onwards, the majority of the interesting and genuinely unique things happening in cities have been dying out, only to be replaced by regurgitation and imitation.

What makes cities good is that sweet spot, between being safe, and affordable- before the bubble pops in either direction. There are still some interesting cities out there, that are currently hitting that sweet spot, but they certainly aren't in places like SF, LA, NY, etc. Id look more to Florida or Texas for interesting cities that are at an intersection to live in.

Cities are victims of their own cultural success, in some sense. If a city becomes too hip, too popular within the social narrative, it becomes more competitive to live there, more local businesses are forced to move out, designer stores and chains come in, etc. You accelerate that process by a few years, and many of those disenfranchised people don't leave, they just turn to drugs or crime, and that's the result of gentrification where you don't care for the natives, the people who grew up and lived in that spot for years and can't move on when their business was bought out by Amazon.

You wind up getting more crime, more druggies, that gets out of hand, and these cities become less appealing until things calm down for a bit, or someone either cracks down on crime or helps the poor.

I think covid definitely accelerated that process in many cities, but city decline does seem to go through cycles as far as I can tell.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

You accelerate that process by a few years, and many of those disenfranchised people don't leave

It is very difficult to leave. I really want out of where I live, but the whole city is surrounded by immense suburbs where middle class families live in housing unaffordable to me. And outside that there's nothing. Dying rural areas that would be nice to live in with my current salary but too far away from my current job and with zero jobs available on their own.

Cities act like a resources/economic black hole where everything around is usually dead.

 

[General Disarray]

Cities. CITIES. What are cities? Vibrant, bustling, energetic, CULTURED. (please read that in internet historian's voice)

Milwaukee just spent 56 MILLION dollars (15 or so from the City, the rest from daddy Gubmint) for ONE electric bus. Which won't be ready to roll until 2023. That only serves one route from Downtown to the Med Center in Tosa. The figure includes charging stations for it, which I assume would be along that route only.

This is on top of the debacle of a light rail "system" that traverses a whole mile, and is still FREE (it's a moving homeless shelter, let's be real). It is very proudly and openly sponsored by Potawatomi Casino, but the damn thing doesn't even go that far and the cab to get the rest of the way (which you WILL have to call if there's inclement weather, a bit of a hike) the driver will upcharge you ($20 for two people foh mang!)

And THAT was on top of the Thurgood Marshall Homes, a 24-unit full service Housing First multi-million dollar project. I inquired as to their success rate in permanently removing people from the streets and they just routed me to their website.

Cash sinks. That's all every. single. one. of these loony liberal projects in The Cities (tm) are. All the while they're begging on the TV to please give coats to dem poor kids (as they do when school starts, only then it's begging for school supplies). We just got a brand new arena for the Bucks, though; which also meant renaming the downtown stretch of 3rd Street to MLK Drive because reasons. PROGRESS!!!

I, for one, cannot wait to retire to rural Arkansas, if not fucking Costa Rica at this rate.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

Cities were always bughive shitholes. Even the heckin' based ones like Tokyo, Nippon

 

[DiscoRodeo]

Cities were always bughive shitholes. Even the heckin' based ones like Tokyo, Nippon

Cities used to be cool when this was the dominant cultural force

As opposed to this

And now we have this I guess.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

When asking about what cities are, one has to ask what a city is. A city is the ultimate accumulation of an areas skilled workers, professionals, tradesmen and assorted laborers all bound together in the common interest of gaining capital and access to resources. They are where our universities are centered, where our governmental agencies are staffed, where our markets enter first and where our culture is shaped and exported.
These combined factors turn the city into the ultimate representation of whatever nation it resides and the region thereabout and the simple fact is that everyone with any say in things in our country is a dishonest grifter. Worse yet, they're stupid because they forgot why everyone gets together to make cities which can be the same for why anyone puts up with anyone's bullshit and everyone who acknowledges it is either broke, gutless or in on it somehow.

 

[tehpope]

My new job is in Austin. I took another way home the other day. There was this pedestrian overpass across some road. The stairs on one side of it was a homeless tent city. Kind of near downtown. Cities are fucked.