Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- By studying population trends and forecasting models, researchers have come to believe that nearly 15,000 U.S. cities will face noticeable depopulation by 2100.
- Populated areas of the cities in question could experience a decline of up to 44 percent.
- Projections call for the biggest drops in city populations to occur in the Northeast and Midwest.
Total lack of social/ecoomic context as I’d expect from PM.
But sociology and economics are soft sciences, so obviously it’s pointless to use and never reflects reality. Unlike physics and engineering, where if it works on paper it will always work for real /s
Just ask mechanics! They love engineers!
Yeah, I really wonder about the mentality of people that would read that article and not wonder “what’s actually going on.” Like shit just kinda happens and we measure it when it does?
yeah, since as we all know, the world is actually hollow. there is nothing going on inside.
For people who don’t know this most cities are built upon the concept that they are constantly growing and receiving more taxes than the year before. It’s basically a Ponsi scheme. This works perfectly fine if there is always money coming in. When people and businesses leave the money stops coming in, then everything starts to fall apart quickly. Have you ever wondered why formerly prosperous places like Detroit and Gary went to absolute hell. It’s because they started to lose people and business. When the city cost more to operate than what is coming in from taxes, you become the murder capital of America.
www.strongtowns.org Strong Towns helped me understand this pattern, and more importantly, how to fix it
Sounds like the USA needs more immigration.
That’s a bandaid fix. Everyone is depopulating except like 5 African countries which are going to enter their own negative birth rates in 15 years if they continue developing.
Im Canadian, and India crossed into negative birth rates a few years ago. The median age in India is almost 30 now
With a population of 1.45B people, India has a median age of 29.5 years which makes it the 108/196 oldest country. 24.6% of the demographic are children 0-14 years old, 68.2% are working-age people aged 15-64, and 7.15% are older population aged 65+ years
What this means is
A) average age is going to go up roughly 1 year every 2 years
B) the average age in India will be roughly 38 or so in 20 years
C) their 65+ cohort increases by a huge margin
Eventually even they are too old and you’re importing a demographic they desperately want to retain domestically. Same with the Phillipines and other emigrant nations.
At what point are we just colonizing other nations through immigration? When their best and brightest all leave the country to earn more in a foreign country, start a family there, and the only thing they give back is a remittance. Any kids they would have had are citizens of their new home nation and they’re probably not going back (statistically the supermajority) while their home country dips into negative birth rates and having never developed industrially to support a massive cohort of elderly people.
Hilariously I could see a point where an immigrant takes any net benefit they provide in a foreign nation and use it to support their own elderly parents and grand parents in their home country. The entire planet one giant retirement home…
Two men were standing under a tree when it began to rain. One said to the other, “good thing this tree will keep us dry.”
“But what happens when the treek is soaked, and it can no longer keep us dry?” Asked the second.
“Don’t worry,” said the first, “we’re in a forest. We’ll just run to another tree.”
The USA has plenty of immigration, they just choose to not live where all these towns are depopulating. No one can figure out why.
/S
Because it’s full of maga idiots?
Correct. Our government however, thinks they need to die.
If it’s a shift from a labour-intensive agrarian economy, that’s to be expected. A similar thing happened in Iceland, and due to the small scale of the country, it is very noticeable. Some 2/3 of the population live in the greater capital area, and beyond that, the countryside is dotted with abandoned farmsteads slowly falling apart.
This has nothing to do with the agrarian transition. These depopulating cities were created by the agrarian transition. They were where people went after they left the rural areas.
Yup, this is likely because large cities have become too expensive, and rural areas have been getting fiber rollouts. With WFH being a viable option for many people, they can live in the boonies where you can get a 1200sqft house for under $200k.
It’s more about regional populations movements. There is no vast movement of people from the cities to the countryside. Rural areas continue to drop in population just as they have for the last century. The rural areas have a higher cost of living when you include job prospects. People can only afford to bid up the housing costs in cities because the jobs pay better than in the sticks.
I live in a city that 10 years ago was losing population and nowadays it’s growing in population.
I honestly preferred ot better when it was losing pops.
Eternal growth is unsustainable
What I don’t understand is that the most desirable areas (home price, population growth) in the US are also very prone to natural disasters: floods in Carolinas, fires in S California, hurricanes in Florida, extreme heat in Texas and the southwest. Meanwhile, Great Lakes / rust belt area does not get many disasters, still has seasons, has access to fresh water, and yet, cities/areas populations are slowly decreasing or staying flat.
As someone who loved living in the Midwest, the severity of the winters are usually enough to scare people off. And it got kinda muggy in the summer.
I’d love to end up there, as I didn’t mind the weather, but I also worked from home and didn’t have to go outside more than when I wanted to.
This is probably a good thing, it’s more efficient if people live within larger municipal areas closer to amenities. It’s very inefficient if we have small towns everywhere that need their own supplies. I’m not saying we should all live in one massive city, just that at scale, things become more accessible to people.
Lot of pro car idiots in this thread.
I long to join them by moving to Canada.
The less Americans there are the better.
Frewer
Canadian says dumb shit, more at 11
I mean, with 54% ‘barely literate’, there’s a pot-kettle issue coming.
Brother literacy rates in Canada aren’t doing so hot either.
I don’t think you understand what the article is talking about.
This isn’t a population reduction, it’s a population relocation.
are you calling us fat
And they’ll still have more representation due to our antiquated electoral college
kinda strange giving wfh should theoretically disperse the populace more. I mean not me I like public transit.
Quick q, where is the research? I had a hard time finding the actual study they were talking about.
The only external data they link to is:
“We extended the line of best fit really far!”
This is just as valuable as someone from the 1950s saying this.
Thank you!
It was unsustainable without a lot of forethought and planning.
they must all be coming to Seattle. The city council here worships the gods of Density, and bends over backwards to give density developers anything they want. Den-sit-tee! Den-sit-tee! No escaping that for me!
silence landlord
me? I’m no landlord I just get to live with moar density. Most of my favorite restaurants are gone because their rents doubled, and donuts at one of the new places are $5. Yay, density!
If they do the density right, then rents should come down not go up. More places built to live and have shops means (assuming there is demand fill them, which there certainly seems to be) we should have cheaper rents for each space AND more total revenue for all the landlords AND more variety in nearby shops for all the people living there.
The problem in Seattle is exactly that they are fucking NOT increasing the density of housing and especially of street-level commercial, not nearly fast enough to keep up with all the people moving there.
Lots of talk, more action needed.
eh, the price curve looks a bit more U-shaped. it goes down first as you go from 1 to 3 stories (because less area usage) but then it can go up again (higher construction cost per floor because higher material strains). i’m not entirely sure where the optimum is.
also btw this was not your question but just to add … i think that it’s important to reserve enough space to streets. not to build lanes, but to build cafes and seating banks and trees there. it’s a typical problem of cities that they figure out that there’s not enough space to build trees, bike lanes, etc. after the houses are built. better reserve space first.
“If thing is done right, everything works fine!”
The problem is, no one can agree what “right” is, so it never works.
If you do less dense “right” it should work, too.
There’s certainly wrong ways to do anything, but I don’t think there’s a right way to make “less dense” handle “more people want to live here.” Those are just opposites.
Wouldn’t more population within walking distance cause business rents to go up because of the promise of more business? That seems to be what’s happening, and I can’t see how it could be changed by “doing it right” unless they imposed rent controls. Talking about West Seattle in particular, more apartments have been built in the last 10 years than since I moved here 38 years ago.
I would expect more nearby residents makes the business rents go up, (more demand) and more nearby commercial space makes the business rents go down, (more supply) so ideally there would be some kind of reasonable balance between these things.
What we’re actually seeing is skyrocketing demand and skyrocketing rents for just every kind of real estate so clearly this is not happening.
Please don’t mistake me for somebody with deep knowledge of the subject; I’m just a loudmouth on the internet.
What I’m arguing against is the idea that densification makes business unaffordable and we’d all have more interesting restaurants nearby if we just made everyone keep buying their own single family home with a yard. Even I can tell that that’s an asinine position.
Well, whatever happened to make business rents skyrocket here, it happened at exactly the same time as the big density push. Could have been some other factor since this apparently defies the physics of density, but it happened.
People move to Seattle -> rents go up -> density push to fit all these people
