The emptiest city in America

What's left? I would also hesitate to put LA in the category of Southwest.

 

Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Las Cruces, all seem like they would be decent places to live.

It's sad to see so much housing stock decaying in the NE cities, as shown in that photo feature. Some of the housing bailout money would be much better spent on rehabbing some of those that are still salvagable and selling them at a reasonable price than bailing out those who tried to flip houses and got caught short or who bought a house they knew they could never afford.

(Yes, I know this has been tried in some places. But perhaps never with enough of a commitment to make it work. How about a Homestead Act for urban areas?)

The house in the photo looks as if at one time it was a nice place to live.

 

Any of the Arizona folks know what's up with Arcosanti these days? Just curious.

 

Meh. I wouldn't read too much into those pictures, it's not a recent phenomenon. Most of the neighborhoods with houses like that have been like that since the 1970s, hence the term "urban prairie" where swaths of abandonment occur. I can remember driving through Milwaukee neighorhoods as a kid and seeing things like that, especially along a corridor where they planned, but never built, a freeway.

Besides the decline of industry, the interstate system has a lot to do with some of this. Whole neighborhoods were isolated by the freeways in many instances, or, cut off from their traditional commercial sources. I believe East St. Louis is completely surrounded by interstates and it's felt that they choked the city off and accelerated the process of decline there.

 

Bubbler is right. Back in the 60's and 70's, in some cities, urban planning consisted of "Let the engineers figure it out".

Being engineers, they were great at solving problems such as, "How do we get x 1,000 cars an hour from point A to point B? The fact that there were people in the way was entirely irrelevant.

 

Read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

 

Excellent Book. And for all he did and tried to do, Moses was never able to get a highwy across Manhattan (he tried like heck). It was also believed at the time that highways would lead to more development downtown. Instead it had the opposite effect, where people who could afford to moved to the suburbs and left the cities entirely. There are a number of other reasons why too: redlining, Title ! and Title II housing acts. We got the whole Landscape Architecture movement out of this in the 70s.

 

Milwaukee actually returned a pretty major highway to grade to revitalize an area. Believe it worked well, too. The Mississippi DOT thinks the solution to all traffic problems is flyover highways. All they see is a a purty bridge; they never see the neighborhood that goes to seed underneath and beside them.

 

Sounds like a great idea for the Scajaquada Expressway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Route_198

 

Do you mean CityCenter? That project is really feeling the pinch.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/us/11vegas.html?ref=us

I'm guessing Boyd Gaming is regretting imploding Stardust right now. That Echelon development (four high-end hotels) has got to be in trouble right now.

 

Any jobs in any of those cities?

 

Sorry, you'll have to settle for Roswell or Farmington.