As the title says.
I know Chicago had similar issues with white flight/suburbanisation/white no-go areas, but St Louis has failed even more than that...
It's surprisingly hard to find articles explaining exactly what the fuck happened. Is it just a combination of white flight/de-industrialisation and really fucking poor governance/forward planning..? I honestly don't understand how at least the majority white parts have still continued to decline as they have...
We don't have cities like this, in this part of the world. Frankly, I don't think many cities like this exist (where population has declined more than 60%, since 1950!!), outside North America, so it's an interesting test case.
It reads like a failed state. I guess, in a sense, it is. But how the fuck has it done worse than Detroit..?
Interesting about the railroads…
I didn’t really consider that effect!
But yeah, I could see that being a thing…
We have that here, too, to an extent. It’s just that the small towns are pretty much all ghost towns, and the cities pivoted to other things.
But yeah, same principle.
Sucks about that for your family though.
I remember when they gutted the railways in my home city. The impacts were pretty massive, and it had already been in decline for decades before that, so… I can only imagine.
Though in this case it wasn’t so much automation as really bad government decision-making, and deliberately shifting those jobs, and that industry, elsewhere, even within state…
Which kind of holds, too, I guess…
They all aged out of the business really. So while I guess it's not the "family business" anymore. Although it really was for a while, almost every man my grandparents generation had a railroad job. My parents generation didn't do that great really, but myself, my brother, and most of my cousins are generally doing well in something even the ones I don't like or talk to that much. So I guess it all worked out.
Is there such a thing as "good" government decision-making? Generally they should be completely uninvolved in everything.
At best, government's make the least worst decision. We are no where near the best.
Assuming they're not outright creating problems to "solve".
Hence the 'at best'.