The Recipe for Urban Decline

Now you have the recipe for full decline. As the second life cycle of the Suburban Experiment kicks in, more growth and a little debt is used to make ends meet. Declining neighborhoods are gradually written off as being places where "those people" live, and "they" just don't have the same ethics and values as the rest of us. (By the way, identifying "those people" transcends race as I see the same labeling of the disadvantaged here in my 99.5% Caucasian community.) This all makes it easier to divert precious resources to growing (read: affluent) neighborhoods and neglect the others.

As those declining neighborhoods continue to grow as a percentage of the community, we try heroic interventions. Perhaps we build a stadium or label something an entertainment district. Maybe we simply tear down buildings and pay someone a subsidy to come in and rebuild something less offensive. Either way, the decline continues because the vitality and natural mechanisms for maturing have been sucked out of the neighborhoods and what has replaced them on the periphery is not financially viable. The clock is ticking.

Eventually the affluent coalesce in a handful of neighborhoods. Where they are outside of the city limits, the collapse of the place may accelerate, but even when these wealthy neighborhoods are within, one type of corruption (mob or gang style) is simply replaced with another (crony). Police and fire cutbacks. Reductions in park budgets. Public buildings in decline. Streets that are in such disrepair they are essentially abandoned.

Look around. Don't you see it?

Eventually, we reach the condition of Detroit. As LeDuff describes it, it feels a lot like some of the third world. Call the police, they don't show up. If they do, it takes thirty minutes or more. Same with the fire department. People who can afford it hire their own security. The rest carry weapons and travel in groups. Money is allocated for fixing things like the cracked floor at the fire hall, but nobody knows where it went. The floor is never fixed. City hall is distant and clearly corrupt, but who among decent people would step up and try to fix it? Decent people need to survive, or they are already having their needs met and, in that case, there is little to be gained for the enormous trouble.

For most of the city and most of the people, things just stop working. A lot of resourceful people find work-arounds. A lot of others don't. LeDuff's book is full of both. It will break your heart.

The Future of Failure

At the same time I was reading LeDuff’s book, I visited Mansfield, Texas, a growing and prosperous distant suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. Mansfield and the book were an odd juxtaposition. The people I spoke with felt that Mansfield was a great place, that it was doing most things right. Just look at the new mall or the movie theater or the collection of chain restaurants. The idea that the place could ever fail—that it would ever reach the depths of decline of Detroit, let alone follow the trajectory of the suburb up the highway (you know...the one that had been the new place a few decades ago)—was unimaginable to the people there.