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Friday, May 5, 2023

The Death of Cities - Vox Popoli

And dancing around the obvious. Sarah Hoyt has an interesting piece on the decline of the major US cities that somehow manages to avoid a single reference to the causal factor:

Despite the fact that in the late 20th century we were all taught — or imbibed through entertainment — that the future was the megalopolis, and that in the future everyone lived in cities, the future has taken a sharp u-turn, and what we’re looking at is quite different.

We are standing, staring in awed horror, as cities take themselves apart. It seems Detroit was the foretelling of destiny for the American cities, the inescapable future. But in the end it’s not even Detroit. It’s the way of those enigmatic ruins found in the middle of nowhere, where you look at them and say “Who were they? Why did they build this? And why did they leave it?”

Why did they leave it in the first half of the 21st century is readily answerable: crime, malfeasance, bureaucrat hatred of those they govern, making the cities unlivable. Who will stay to be abused when they could live anywhere?

And that’s the second part, the sting in the tail of what’s happening: the seekers of knowledge, the setters of culture, those who make and break things do not need to live in the city anymore.

While Hoyt has finally come to terms, more or less, with the fact that she is not an American despite her acceptance of many American ideals, apparently it is still too emotionally painful to point out that the reason for the death of the cities is that white people, particularly white Americans, do not wish to live around black people or under immigrant rule.

And these days, living in a major city requires both.

She correctly notes that the major cities are now unliveable, but the reasons that she provides are merely consequences of the real reasons. Detroit was 91 percent white in 1940, with a population of 1,623,452. In 2020, the city was 11 percent white, with a population of 639,111. This demographic change is not the result of “crime, malfeasance, and bureaucratic hatred”, but rather the cause of it.

That same process is already taking place in the suburbs and smaller cities. The problem is that in the USA, Europe, and Australia, there is nowhere else to go. And once there is nowhere further for whites to retreat, the empire will collapse in violence, if it has not already for other reasons.

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 https://voxday.net/2023/05/04/the-death-of-cities/