Thread: Why are American inner cities failing and European cities improving?

This is a bit of a rant wondering why the Rust Belt cities are crumbling away, it is about our environment although not in the way that some may think of it. Where we live is our human environment. The problems associated with urban sprawl also affect the natural environment, the further you have to travel to reach your work place, the greater your impact on the environment. Urban sprawl at this time of economic crisis is causing more to look at the societal environment we have created over the past 100 years.

AHISTORICAL

Cities like Cleveland and Detroit appear to have entered the terminal stage of their decline, a self-reinforcing cycle of population loss, crime, blight, and white flight that sends cities into a torpor from which they do not recover. Detroit is resorting to turning off the streetlights in an attempt to auto-amputate the most thinly populated parts of the city – a not-so-subtle way of doing what eminent domain and rampant decay cannot, namely to force the few remaining residents out of neighborhoods that are 75% vacant or more. Detroit gets the most attention but certainly it is not alone. This is a problem everywhere, particularly in the large, older cities of the Midwest and Northeast but also in the logging and mining towns of the West, the depopulated rural South, and points in between. Yet we find it most compelling to watch the big, once-magnificent cities crumble.

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Maybe if our cities had more history or a more prominent place in our cultural fabric we would fight for them rather than treating them like a soiled disposable diaper. Or maybe we don't care about them for the usual reasons that we use to identify who the government and our society should and should not fight to protect. When we redefine the city as places for the Negroes, the unwashed poor, the immigrants with their barbarian tongues, "union thugs", and meddling liberals, it does not take a very thorough understanding of American politics and society to recognize why we are letting them rot, and in some cases fighting to accelerate the process, rather than fighting to save them.

European cities have much more developed, extensive, and clean mass transportation systems than in the US.

...and were developed largely in the era of foot transportation and the horse and buggy, with much more dense centers than most U.S. cities. It's difficult to compare U.S. cities and European (or any other nation) cities for this reason.

I agree with the blog author of the OP that U.S. style corporate laissez faire is at least partially responsible for the decline of U.S. inner cities. However, people would have stayed if they felt it was a good place to raise kids. If I was faced with living in a high density living area with crime and bad influences for my children or moving to a suburb 30 minutes outside of town that had a good school and a nice playground for the kids, I would move too.

Too, the U.S. mode of using interstate highways as commuting routes was born of an age of post WWII prosperity and lack of awareness of the environmental penalties of all that oil usage, not to mention the soul draining commutes that would eventually get much longer than 30 minutes.

It is much more profitable to take a former piece of farmland and create a high value housing tract than to redevelop crumbling innercity infrastructure. Hopefully city planners are learning the lesson of such short sighted thinking and are willing to give tax breaks and other incentives to builders to redevelop inner city properties.

Originally Posted by Somerville

This is a bit of a rant wondering why the Rust Belt cities are crumbling away, it is about our environment although not in the way that some may think of it. Where we live is our human environment. The problems associated with urban sprawl also affect the natural environment, the further you have to travel to reach your work place, the greater your impact on the environment. Urban sprawl at this time of economic crisis is causing more to look at the societal environment we have created over the past 100 years.

well - not every city in the US is in some sort of decline or suffering a blight of inhumanity. . . and different cities suffer different issues. I think it's unnecessary to compare our worst-off cities to cities in other nations whne you could just compare them to other successful areas in the US itself.

May I recommend the film "The end of Suburbia".

Originally Posted by Canell

May I recommend the film "The end of Suburbia".

A most excellent doc.

European countries are managed by a single government. The people at the top answer directly to the population and their population has much higher standards than we do.

America has a Federal Government, State Governments, County Governments and City Governments and sometimes even further sub-divisions. Not only does this create multiple layers of corruption and theft, blame is easily reassigned. Potholes in the road? Obama did it.

Originally Posted by Somerville

This is a bit of a rant wondering why the Rust Belt cities are crumbling away, it is about our environment although not in the way that some may think of it.

The problem is multi-cultural in nature. Different people place different values on the characteristics of the houses and communities in which they live, and they will prioritize, based on their own preferences.

As far as the U.S. is concerned it is industry going once, going twice, gone. We've sold our industries down the river so the rest of the world could prosper. How do we employ the masses now when everybody else in the world is making our stuff? So I am thinking that the same thing hasn't happened on the same scale in a lot of Europe and in some cases Europe now has a lot of our jobs.

Originally Posted by specklebang

European countries are managed by a single government. The people at the top answer directly to the population and their population has much higher standards than we do.

America has a Federal Government, State Governments, County Governments and City Governments and sometimes even further sub-divisions. Not only does this create multiple layers of corruption and theft, blame is easily reassigned. Potholes in the road? Obama did it.

Books are good for you. Libraries have then. Travel too, it can help.