Yesterday, in an article titled "Looks like interesting times ahead for city business districts", I highlighted the crisis in commercial real estate, and warned that it was going to get worse. In the comments to that article, reader pyotr forecast:
"I wonder what it will be like to be in a downtown full of abandoned high rise buildings."
Bad. Squatters camping in them, fires. Eventually one will collapse, not neatly, and 'there goes the neighborhood'. Clearing the streets will cost too much. Later rinse repeat.
Possibly, before that starts happening, there will be a resettlement - cities are where they are for reasons - and the old structures will be minded for resources.
He's right. We can already see that happening in some inner-city areas in the USA, and it's common enough in collapsing Third World states. As an example, here's a city where I lived for eight years, Johannesburg in South Africa. Well over a hundred buildings in its central business district are now derelict, overrun by squatters, ruled by urban gangs who extort payment from anyone wanting to live there - and able to do so because there's nowhere else to live. They're very dangerous places, not least because nobody has any sense of what's safe or acceptable. Last year a fire killed 77 people in one such building. Police have just arrested a self-confessed suspect in that case.
As for Johannesburg as a whole . . . I spent eight years of my life there. It used to be a First World city. In less than two generations, it's cratered to Third World standards, and fairly low Third World standards at that. According to friends who are still there, parts of it now resemble the worst slums in Haiti. I can examine satellite images of the area where I used to live, and see the quite incredible urban decay around my former home. It's sickening to see.
Here's a longer documentary about life in Johannesburg these days. I don't like its style or narration, but it does convey the reality of day-to-day existence there. I'm glad I no longer live there, and I grieve to see places I lived and worked brought so low.
As for those who think that can't happen here in the USA, it already is. Back in 2019 I highlighted a three-part documentary series from station KOMO in Seattle, Washington. The final report was titled simply, "Seattle Is Dying". In case you missed it then, here it is again. Click through to the earlier report to see the first two parts in the series.
Seattle's not alone in that. Just last month I noted a TV documentary from Minneapolis titled "The Fall of Minneapolis". Click through there to watch that video, if you can stomach it.
Friends, you may not want to believe it, but that is quite literally what's coming to many major US cities within the next decade. The influx of millions of Third World immigrants under the Biden administration guarantees it. They aren't going to be magically converted to First World citizens by crossing the Rio Grande. No, they're bringing their Third World attitudes, habits and behaviors with them - and we're already seeing them in action, to the detriment of the places they're being settled. That's going to continue, and increase.
Get out of big Democrat-controlled cities now. Don't delay to squeeze the last penny in value out of selling your home; don't be tied down by family connections; don't wait until it's too late. Leave now, and take your loved ones with you. If any of them won't leave, that's on them, not you. Your primary responsibility is to your immediate family, your spouse and children. If you and they decide to stay in our big cities, you've just seen what's coming your way. On your own head be the consequences of that decision.
Peter
One possibility for those high rise buildings is being renovated for low rent apartments on lower floors, and low rent retail outlets on upper floors (light floor loads only).
ReplyDeleteThe apartments would require a lot of new plumbing but I think electrical needs would already be present. The low floors because easy building exit and limited fire truck ladder height limitations.
A vertical mall above that. The apartment occupants below might enjoy shopping without having to leave the building, especially the people with no vehicles and no parking anyway. Thi would be nice in the snow bound north - to hell with dealing with snow.
Mega City One style housing.
DeleteOr we could just send them home.
It's the New Dark Ages. I've been saying this for a couple of decades now.
ReplyDeleteGetting out of the city doesn't make it better. It just means the buildings or highway overpasses don't fall on us in the boonies. The rot spreads. Cancer always does.
I started going to South Africa on an annual basis in 1996 - since there was a year in between visits, I could very clearly see the downward trajectory of J'burg. The first trip, I saw impeccably clean streets and green spaces in the city - it was quite lovely in many ways. By the time of my last trip to S.A., the guy that met me at the airport handed me a handgun when we got to the car and told me to keep it under my leg and not to hesitate to use it if we were attacked driving through the city.
ReplyDeleteI have also gone on many mission trips to Haiti over the years and can confirm that the images in the first video are very much like what you would find in Haiti.
The Washington State Supreme Court ruled some years ago that you can't tow a derelict camper if it is someone's home. They did not, of course, also rule that I could just build a house wherever I wanted but that's a different subjecct.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, in my small town (6,000 people) I noticed a large RV with a trailer behind it, a tarp draped over one side, an old car parked in front of it, and some propane canisters and trash piled next to it, right next to the skateboard park. Where our kids go to play. Just behind that is the library, where our kids (presumably) go to read. Right. Down. Town. A block from the police station. And we can do nothing about it. We can't force them to move. We can't tow them away. They are destroying the cities because a majority of city voters apparently want that, and they are now destroying our towns because the city voters far outnumber the small town and rural voters.
Forgot to ask, what was it that happened approximately two generations ago in Jo'burg that might have had some effect on the quality of life in the city? I'm sure there was something but it's slipped my mind and I can't be bothered to go look it up.
ReplyDeleteAnd at least one of those cities is backpedaling just a bit:
ReplyDeletehttps://apnews.com/article/oregon-drug-decriminalization-law-3f851183d45e9c29609360b09e996d04
The esteemed blog host clearly sees urban decay and many of its causes, yet steadfastly insists the problem is not race, but culture. Culture does not arise from magic dirt and float around the atmosphere; it is the product of millions of choices and preferences and predilections of a group of genetically-related people over time.
ReplyDeleteCulture can be changed - just as the Ellis Island immigrants changed America and turned it from a nation of 'settlers' to a nation of 'immigrants." But despite hundreds of years, billions of dollars, and the earnest efforts by well-meaning Mrs. Jellybys (male and female), black behavior and culture has not changed. No matter the century or the nation. Massive criminality and destruction and social chaos wherever they go.
Yet Mr. Grant, despite his urgent warnings, still seems to believe a distinct genetic group of people (blacks, mestizos, subcontinentals, etc.) can somehow be changed. Commenter pjk notes he's made 'many mission trips to Haiti." Has he noticed any significant improvements in the lives of said Haitians over the years? What about all the Haitians who've 'migrated' (in many cases illegally) to the US? Can he tell us their rates of criminality, fraud, rape, etc.?
Doing the same thing - over and over and over again - yet expecting a different result - is considered by many to be the definition of insanity.
Yet this thinking somehow persists.
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
A reminder: in Paris of the 18th and 19th century, the rich would live at the ground floors, and the poor, starving aspiring artists would live in garrets at the top, five or six flights of stairs up.
ReplyDeleteOnly in a world with electricity, high pressure water pumps and elevators do rich people want to live in a comfortable world above the fourth floor.
Turn off the electricity, and squatters will only live in a high-rise up to maybe the tenth floor, and anything higher will just be stripped for salvage. They'll use the elevator shafts as outhouses and/or chimneys.
Oh, and I had to step around a pool of blood to get to work in the business district of Seattle, week before last. Someone got stabbed on 4th Ave, and they made it uphill to 5th Ave before collapsing. The stabber got shot by someone else. Both taken to nearby hospital.
@ heresolong
ReplyDeletey' gotta be kiddin' me. dere comin' in from Californiyea, dere comin' down from da great state of western Wash. Orygun's been taken over by legislators who just know that if somethin's not workin', it's only 'cause they haven't done enuf, haven't done it harder, haven't done further left enough, haven't taxed the worker bees high enough. I've left for good n' ain't ne'er goin' back unless the lines to the airplane bathrooms are too long and I really have to relieve myself - in that once beautiful city, now a cesspool - downtown Portland.
Am I being too harsh?
@ Anonymous
wherever you go, y' gonna take the same head with y'
Didn’t realize when I moved to a small city in PA that it was a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants. A former mayor who had opposed it had moved on to being a congressman, and said on the radio the damage it had done was to increase city population and the required city services by 50% while not increasing the tax base at all. Most downtown businesses were boarded up and extinct. Only major employer left was a near monopoly in the nation known for hiring illegals. Every public school was in failing status, and had been in “emergency” status for over a decade which let them drastically ramp up the property taxes. The home inspector I had hired explained in casual conversation that she had to be careful for her health on the properties with illegals because at night, rather than get up to use the bathroom, they would instead fill water bottles with urine and chuck them out the window. Think about how many diseases are spread through human sewage. My neighbor was a boomer who had lived there his entire life and warned us about which streets in town were no longer safe for my wife or children to venture down, and which ones weren’t even safe for me to venture down, even in daylight. The county government was in the national news for mind boggling levels of corruption and I still see them pop up in national news for continued reports of corruption. I was far enough outside the city center to not have to worry much, so it didn’t feel like 3rd world in the day to day living. But all the signs of radical civil decay were there and it was rapidly heading downhill. Was very glad to leave that place after a few years.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous at 9:39AM: Sorry, but you're wrong. It really isn't race. As the simplest yet most convincing evidence, I offer slums in Asia, the Indo-Pacific region, India, South America . . . none of which are black. They're all the races you can think of, and they all exhibit the same problems as Johannesburg, South Africa, or inner-city ghettoes in the USA. It's anything but restricted to black people.
ReplyDeleteFor another blogger's take, see the first couple of paragraphs at:
https://comeandmakeit.blogspot.com/2024/01/project-fitness-prepping-security-stuffs.html
That's in the Philippines. Same same as here and elsewhere - but no black people, just locals. It's culture, not race.
Arrrghh - of all the times to have a comment make the front page - it is the one with the miss spellings.
ReplyDeleteOh well, it helps keep me humble.
Peter Grant: While I appreciate your courteous response, I believe you misconstrued my comment. While I focused primarily on blacks, I did also mention mestizos and subcons. I've lived in Asia, and the Caribbean, and in Europe (both west and east). The cultures of Africa, or the Philippines, or Bolivia are all different (due to the different races of the inhabitants) and they are all failures - socially, culturally, and economically. The only functional nations on earth are (or used to be) the White ones. Now it's all crashing down, as the Tower of Babel was always meant to.
ReplyDeleteSame result with blacks/mestizos/asians adopted by Whites. The child's personality and inclinations and life success/failure hews closely to said child's genetic heritage, not the 'culture' of the adoptive parents.
Culture is downstream from genetics - always and everywhere.
@ Peter
ReplyDeleteare you saying that's the reason why these problems didn't show up (or did they and we didn't read about them) in the Jewish ghettos in Poland and Romania in the latter '30s?
@ Anonmous
"they would instead fill water bottles with urine and chuck them out the window. Think about how many diseases are spread through human sewage."
Black savages? I still remember the picture from East Germany post-WWII of the Russian peasant woman washing and scaling a fish in hte toilet.
To anonymous 9:39:
ReplyDeleteI no longer go to Haiti as the security there has been degraded to such an extent that you can't go there safely anymore. I also note that conditions there have gotten progressively worse as time goes by even with all of the private and public donations directed towards Haiti as a result of both political disasters and natural disasters.
It used to be that I could leave a couple thousand dollars with my brother in the event that I was kidnapped by one of the local gangs so that he could negotiate my release when he received the ransom call - that used to be "workable" - I never had to use that option, thankfully. The last time I was in Haiti I spoke to a former embassy employee who explained that the gangs now will generally kill the hostage even before they make the ransom call. I decided that the minor difference that I was able to make was not worth the risks involved, so my mission work has become focused on other parts of the world in recent years.
A bit ago on Chicagoboyz, I wrote a post about the Roman cities and extensive villas in Britain, which just crumbled away after the departure of the legions in the 6th century. One commenter pointed out that some of those cities - those which still had a purpose and a meaningful/useful location did not fade away. They were build up and remained serving that purpose. A naturally good position at a river ford or bridged crossing, a sheltered anchorage along the sea, an excellent strategic position, a natural place to trade resources among various communities ... that handful of cities remained - because their purpose and usefulness endured.
ReplyDeleteThe cities and establishments without those situations faded away and eventually were abandoned as anything but a useful quarry for ready-cut stone. Perhaps that will be the fate of some of our modern cities. Some will adapt and be retained, the rest will become quarries.
As we move to the Era of the Wizard Wars and Bio warfare I can see somebody in a darkened room surrounded by his friends agreeing 'oderint dum metuant and mutatis mutandis' and letting loose the bugs of genocide. I think it's just a matter of time now and it will make MAD look like a picnic in Hyde Park, London, England. It's not the governments one needs to fear who will set the world on fire, it's the billionaires and the people that go to the WEF every year in Davos.
ReplyDeleteModern office towers have limited common space and relatively small vertical utility chases for conduit, air handling ductwork, plumbing and elevator shafts. Rudimentary emergency staircases. Each component of construction was supplied at a price point, and the cheaper you initially build it, the more the remodel costs. The buildings of the past often had "good bones" allowing for easy adaptation. Some municipalities will attempt to remodel using and wasting much taxpayer money. The Saudi government tried to house the Bedouin in a newly manufactured city, Escan I think, and after they drank the pools they moved back to the desert. The recipients of "charity " often interpret it differently than the charitable. Nobody told them to be grateful. That said, some of the comments about the homeless I've read are awful. They're not all slackers and if you or I had to live under those conditions drugs might make sense. "There , but for the grace of God, go I". I doubt that they would all accept their circumstances given an informed choice. And informing choices of the young is the responsibility of the parents. To the extent that parenting fails, all else collapses to a default government band-aid, kind of the "empty calories" version of parenting. Our society is increasingly seeking nutrition from Cheetos, nobody is making us finish our Brussels sprouts. No wonder there's so many fat, affluent people pissed off at the world. The responsibility of the citizen to his city-state is an antique concept, but great civilizations are not built by disinterested parasites. Or by oligarchs and elites in their bunkers.
ReplyDeleteI strongly recommend the fiction series "World Made by Hand" by James Kunstler. It deals with this very topic: a societal collapse, and people struggling to navigate a future in a crumbling world.
ReplyDeleteIt is extremely well-written.