THE WAY CITIES END

It's interesting to read about how 300,000 New York denizens have left New York City since the start of the year. That's a lot of people, a lot of empty apartments and offices and a huge hole in the city's tax revenues that only get worse as the lockouts kill the restaurant industry and mean that almost no money will enter the city's coffers from the ridiculous hotel tax, entertainment tax, dead broadway non-shows, and the whole litany of disasters that is befalling Gotham. Coudn't happen to a nicer city.

I've lived in he former great cities of America. I lived, for a time at 20 mile road North Detroit back when it was rapidly decivilizing and turning into a wasteland. I live now in environs of what was once America's fifth largest city, now a bright spot amidst the flyover staters because it still retains its orchestra, opera, ballet, vast library and library network and is still, in many respects great even though the population is less than half of what it was at its height. It's probably safe to say that the old population has been entirely displaced. What used to be neighborhoods stuffed with Europeans, eastern Europeans, Jews, etc, isn't anymore. It has the usual vast metropark population makeup one finds in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinatti, etc.

I'm curious to see how NYC turns out as it seems to have slammed the door on its citizens and industry and now even the NYSE is talking about relocating to some other place and I don't really see the office workers returning again to Manhattan particularly as Blasio seems to believe it is his job to reign over nothing but scum and villainy and kowtows to them at every opportunity.

I like to read history and I always used to wonder how so many of the great cities in the past were abandoned by their inhabitants. You can look to the Mayan collapse or the collapse of Ur and other great cities in the Tigris Euphrates region and of course there are the ruins of great places in Greece and Egypt that took centuries to reappear.

It won't be the rising waters that diminish and degrade the great coastal cities, it will be the realization that they are traps where only the soulless live surrounded by deep unending poverty and where society has defaulted to the lowest common denominator and it will not ever get better. It will be interesting to see what the mayhem of major muslim population gains in western Europe do to their great cities. They already have schools now mostly filled with young/new muslims and the old population, much like the old population of former metroparkcentralis is quickly changing to a new form that is disinclined to treat the past as anything but a shabby robe and treat it just like they treated their own cities like Beirut, Damascus, Bagdhad, Tikrit, Mosul and all the rest of the ruins.