Okay, I want to try something a little different
to kick things off. I want you to close your
eyes. Yeah. No, seriously, humor me for a second.
Picture a prairie. A prairie. All right, I'm
with you. What do you see in your mind's eye?
Well, the classic image, right? You see, um...
Tall grass, it's swaying in the wind, big wide
open skies, maybe a bison if we're feeling particularly
romantic about it. But it's peaceful. Exactly.
It's peaceful. It's nature. It's wild. Now hold
that image, the grass, that sort of untamed feeling,
and I want you to mentally just drop it right
on top of the grid of a major city. Okay. And
I don't mean a park. This isn't Central Park.
I'm talking about city blocks. Pavement, sidewalks,
fire hydrants. But the buildings? They're just
gone, erased. All the noise, the traffic, the
people, it's all gone. And all that's left is
just silence and weeds coming up through the
cracks in the concrete. Right. So you're not
actually talking about nature. You're talking
about the aftermath of something. I am. I saw
this term in the source material, urban prairie.
And it just stopped me cold. It sounds so poetic.
But when you actually see pictures of it, like
in parts of Detroit or St. Louis, it's... It's
haunting. It is a haunting term. It looks like
the world ended, but only on that one block.
Well, and it's technically accurate. I mean,
when the population density of a city drops so
low that the land literally reverts to green
space, not because we planned a beautiful park,
but because there's no one left to live in the
house or mow the lawn that is the urban prairie.
And that's exactly what we're digging into today.
We're not just looking at abandoned buildings.
This is more like a forensic investigation into
the life and, well, the death of cities because
that's what we're talking about isn't it it's
a kind of death it is but i'd argue it's not
a natural one it's not a city dying of old age
when a bustling thriving metropolis becomes a
ghost town or a neighborhood becomes what planners
call grayfield land that isn't some random accident
it's not bad luck it's a process it's a sociological
process it's a series of decisions often made
decades apart that all lead to this one outcome
That's the core tension I really want to pull
apart today. Because, you know, you grow up thinking
cities are these permanent monolithic things.
Rome is the eternal city, right? New York is
the city that never sleeps. But the material
we've got today, it shows that cities can absolutely
fall asleep. They can go into a coma. Yeah. Or
they can even die. Exactly. And our whole mission
for this deep dive is to really understand the
mechanics of that. We call it urban decay or
urban rot or blight. But those are just labels.
We need to look under the hood at the gears that
actually turn to crush a city. And we're talking
about what? Economic gears? Political? All of
the above. Economic, political and social gears
all grinding together. And it's never just one
thing, is it? It's never as simple as, oh, the
big factory closed down so everybody packed up
and left. No, never. That's probably the biggest
misconception out there. It's never a single
gunshot. It's always a convergence. It's deindustrialization
colliding with a massive population shift, which
then collides with a policy decision that was
made 30 or 40 years earlier. It's a perfect storm.
It's a perfect storm, exactly. So we have a huge
map to cover today. Yeah. We start by looking
at the anatomy of blight. You know, what does
it actually look and feel like on the ground?
Then we're going to get into the American model,
which creates... It's this very specific kind
of weird donut shape of decay in the U .S. And
then we're going to flip that script completely.
Because if you think urban decay looks the same
everywhere, you are mistaken. We're going to
Europe. We'll look at France and the U .K., where
that whole map is basically inverted. And the
case studies. I mean, some of these are just,
they're mind -blowing. There's a story out of
South Africa in the notes that... Well, let's
just say I had to read it three times to believe
it was real. It completely redefines the word
stealing. Oh, the Johannesburg example is terrifying.
It's what happens when the rule of law just evaporates.
I cannot wait to get to that. But first things
first, section one, the anatomy of blight. When
I say urban decay, I think we all have a sort
of movie clip that plays in our head. You know,
broken windows, graffiti, trash playing down
the street. We do. But let's zoom in on that
image. The research mentions a really specific
aesthetic. It talks about modern ruins. You mentioned
the broken windows, but think about the texture
of it all. There's a reference to a building
in Poznań, Poland, and it describes these tiles
that are cracked and just covered in layers of
graffiti. It's not just empty. It's scarred.
It's scarred. It's the visual language of neglect.
It's like the building itself is screaming, nobody
cares about me anymore. And that's the critical
link, right? The material points out that blight
isn't just a physical thing. It is. I mean, just
imagine for a second you live next door to one
of these condemned houses. I've seen this. I've
literally seen it. You have one house with a
perfectly manicured lawn, and the house right
next to it has a blue tarp on the roof, and the
windows are boarded up. Right. So what does that
do to you day in and day out? It has a visual
effect, sure, but the source says it has a physical
and psychological effect. It creates this pervasive
sense of abandonment. If your environment is
literally degrading around you, you start to
feel like maybe you are, too. It's a signal.
It's a signal that the social contract is broken.
It feels like being the last guest at a party
that ended three hours ago. Like you missed the
memo and you're not supposed to be there anymore.
That's a great way to put it. If we look at the
causes, and believe me, it is a laundry list,
we kind of have to group them to make any sense
of it. The first big bucket is, of course, economic.
This is the bedrock of it all. This is the no
jobs part of the story. It's even deeper than
just no jobs. It's deindustrialization. So think
about a town that was built entirely around a
steel mill or a car factory. The mill closes.
It's not just the steel workers who are out of
a job. No, it's the whole ecosystem. The whole
ecosystem. The diner across the street loses
all its customers. The truck drivers who hauled
the steel lose their contracts. The local government
loses its biggest taxpayer. So they can't afford
to fix the potholes or keep the streetlights
on. Exactly. Then private divestment kicks in.
The banks see the writing on the wall and they
just stop lending money in that area. It becomes
a death spiral. High local unemployment isn't
just a statistic. It's the trigger for absolutely
everything else that follows. OK, so the money
leaves first. Then do the people follow the money?
That's the second bucket. And this is fascinating
because it can actually go two different ways.
On the one hand, you can have population decline
depopulation. That leaves you with a city that
was built for, say, a million people, but now
only 500 ,000 live there. So you've got all these
schools and fire stations and bus lines. Right.
But you don't have enough taxpayers to keep the
lights on in any of them. Correct. It becomes
incredibly inefficient to even run the city.
But paradoxically, you can also have overpopulation
in certain pockets. If everyone who's left crowds
into the few remaining affordable areas, you
screen the infrastructure there until it snaps.
So the sewers back up, the power grid fails.
Precisely. You get a situation where it's a ghost
town and a pressure cooker at the same time.
Wow. So it's either empty or it's breaking. And
that leads directly into the third layer, which
is social. You see family fragmentation. You
see the brain drain. I mean, anyone with a college
degree or transferable skills, they're the first
ones to leave. Of course. You lose what sociologists
call social capital. Those are the networks of
trust, the neighborhood watch, the people who
know each other and keep the community functioning
and safe. And into that vacuum. Crime rushes
in. Yeah. Gangs, drugs. That's the classic pattern.
There was one detail in this list of causes that
I actually, I circled it in my notes because
it genuinely freaked me out a little. It wasn't
about economics or crime. It was about urban
wildlife. Yes. This is a very specific indicator
of advanced decay. And we're not talking about
like a cute raccoon tipping over a garbage can,
are we? No, no, not at all. The notes specify
large, unregulated populations of animals. Think
abandoned pets. Feral dogs. Feral dogs forming
packs. Now stop and think about what that signals.
We spend thousands of years as a species building
cities specifically to insulate ourselves from
the wild. We build walls. We have animal control.
We have streetlights. When you have packs of
feral dogs roaming the streets of a major industrialized
city. The city has failed at its most basic function.
It has completely failed. It's not just sad or
neglected at that point. It's genuinely hostile.
You could be walking to the bus stop and have
to worry about a pack of dogs. It's like something
out of a post -apocalyptic movie. But it's real
life in some of these blighted zones. It just
signals that all the structures of civilization,
you know, safety, sanitation, our basic dominance
over the immediate environment, have just dissolved.
Okay, before we move on to the history of how
this happens, I need you to explain one thing
to me. The notes bring up this counterpoint from
some libertarian economists, guys like Milton
Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. And they blame
something that I think most people assume is
a good thing. They blame rent control. This is
a really important and very controversial piece
of the puzzle. The logic for rent control seems
straightforward, right? Housing is expensive.
People are poor. So let's put a legal cap on
the rent. It sounds compassionate. Yeah, of course.
Keep it affordable so people don't get pushed
out. But Friedman and Hayek would ask you to
look at it from the landlord's point of view.
Let's say you own an apartment building. The
roof is old. It needs to be completely replaced.
The estimate is $50 ,000. Okay. But the government
has a law that says you can only charge, say,
$500 a month for each apartment because of rent
control. Right. You do the math. You will never,
ever make that $50 ,000 back. It's just not possible.
So the question is, do you fix the roof? I mean,
no, I guess not. I'd go bankrupt if I did. Exactly.
You don't fix the roof. Then the boiler breaks.
You patch it, but you don't replace it. The plumbing
starts to leak. The building just deteriorates.
Eventually, it becomes unlivable. And the tenants
leave. The tenants leave or they stop paying
rent and become squatters. You, the owner, just
abandon the property because now it's a financial
liability, not an asset. So their argument is
that by trying to keep the price artificially
low, you actually end up destroying the supply
of housing itself. Yes. They argue that it completely
freezes the market. New developers won't build
there either because why would you? There's no
profit to be made. So the existing housing stock
rots from the inside out and no new housing gets
built to replace it. So a well -intentioned policy
can basically become a machine for creating blight.
That's the argument. And it highlights how complex
these forces really are. That is. Yeah, that's
some depressing math. But it makes a certain
kind of cold, hard sense. Okay, let's pivot.
We've got the ingredients of decay laid out.
Now let's look at the recipe. And it seems there's
no chef quite like the United States of America
when it comes to this. The American model, as
it's known. We call it the donut effect. Right.
And you should picture a literal donut. The doughy,
tasty part is on the outside. That's the wealthy,
growing suburbs. The hole is in the middle. That's
the empty, decayed city center. But it wasn't
always that way. That's what's so strange. No,
absolutely not. Before World War II, the city
was the place to be. I mean, the whole Industrial
Revolution was about packing people in. You wanted
to live close to the factory, close to the trolley
line, close to the action. So what happened?
Did we all just collectively decide we liked
having lawns and barbecue grills better? It wasn't
just a preference. It was engineered. After 1945,
two absolutely massive things happened. The first,
and maybe the most obvious, was the car. The
private automobile. We shifted from a society
built on public transportation, walking, trams,
subways, to a society built around the private
car. And the car just obliterates the traditional
geometry of a city. Suddenly, you didn't need
to be close to anything anymore. You could live
10, 20 miles out, have a big yard, a two -car
garage, and just drive into the city for work.
But wait, cars are expensive. New houses in the
suburbs are expensive. How did everyone afford
this all at once? And that is the second crucial
factor, the government. We have this myth of
the suburbs as... this this natural expression
of the american dream right rugged individualism
yeah i pulled myself up by my bootstraps and
bought my house with my own hard -earned money
but the reality is that the federal government
heavily heavily subsidized that dream the fha
the federal housing administration and the va
mortgage aid for veterans they completely revolutionized
home lending before this you might have had to
put 50 down to buy a house 50 who has that kind
of money almost nobody But the FHA came in and
introduced the low down payment, 30 year fixed
rate mortgage. All of a sudden it became cheaper
to buy a brand new house in a suburb like Levde
town than it was to rent a cranked apartment
in the city. So the government basically built
a giant slide leading out of the city. Yes. And
then greased it with cheap money. For some people.
And that's a key point we'll get to in a minute.
But yes, they pulled the white middle class out
of the city like a giant vacuum cleaner. And
to make sure they could get to and from their
new suburban homes, they built the interstate
highway system. Infrastructure. Infrastructure
as a weapon. This is so important. We think of
highways as things that connect us. But in the
context of urban decay, they were escape routes.
And more than that, they were often built by
literally demolishing the city neighborhoods
they passed through. There's that specific brutal
example in the notes about the Gowanus Parkway
in New York. Oh, it's a tragic story. And Robert
Caro documents it beautifully in The Power Broker.
You had the street, 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. It
was a bustling, working -class market street.
It was vibrant, noisy, full of shops and people.
Full of life. And then... Then Robert Moses,
the so -called master builder of New York, decided
he needed an expressway to get people from the
suburbs into Manhattan. And he didn't build it
around the neighborhood. He didn't tunnel under
it. He built it directly on top of it. He put
a roof over a living street. A massive six -lane
concrete slab. The source material describes
it so vividly. It says he cast the avenue forever
into darkness and gloom. Wow. The noise from
the traffic above was deafening. The sun was
completely blocked out. The businesses on the
street below just withered and died. The street
life vanished. He literally shadowed a neighborhood
to death just so that suburbanites could drive
over it more quickly. That is such a powerful
image. You're actively killing the city to serve
the people who have just Abandon the city. It's
the perfect metaphor for the whole process. But
now we have to talk about the people who couldn't
leave because this wasn't just about cars and
highways. It was about race. We have to talk
about the great migration. This is the massive
internal migration of African -Americans we're
talking about, right? Yes. From the rural south
to the industrial cities of the north. It happened
in two major waves. The first was early from
about 1910 to 1930. But it was the second great
migration from 1940 to 1970 that was truly seismic.
Five million people. Five million people on the
move. They were moving for factory jobs. They
were fleeing the oppression of Jim Crow. They
were looking for a better life. By the end of
this period, something like 80 percent of black
Americans lived in cities. But when they arrived
in Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland, they ran
straight into a wall. Institutional discrimination.
Remember those FHA loans we talked about? The
ones that made the suburbs possible? Yeah, the
cheap mortgages. Well, they weren't for everyone.
The FHA had an explicit policy called redlining.
And this is absolutely essential to understanding
the American city. This wasn't just a couple
of racist bankers. This was official federal
policy written down in government manuals. Can
you explain exactly how it worked? The government,
through an agency, literally drew maps of every
major city. They color coded the neighborhoods
based on perceived risk for mortgage lending.
Green was good. These were new white affluent
areas. And red was bad. Hazardous. And what made
a neighborhood hazardous? I have the quote right
here from the 1938 FHA underwriting manual. It's
shocking to read out loud. It says they need
to protect against the infiltration of inharmonious
racial groups. Inharmonious racial groups. That's
the federal government of the United States.
That's their language. If a single black family
moved into a white neighborhood, the FHA could
declare that entire neighborhood red and refuse
to insure any mortgages there. Banks followed
their lead. No loans. So let's just play this
out. I am a white WWII veteran. I get a cheap
government -backed loan and I move to a new house
in the suburbs. I buy it for, I don't know, $5
,000. Over the next 40 years, that house's value
explodes. I build equity. I can borrow against
it to send my kids to college or I leave it to
them as an inheritance. Correct. That is the
primary engine of white middle -class wealth
creation in the entire 20th century. Okay. Now,
I'm a black WWII veteran. I fought in the same
war. But... I can't get that loan. I'm forced
to stay in the city. I probably have to rent.
Or maybe I managed to buy a house in one of those
redlined areas. But because no banks will lend
there, the property value never goes up. In fact,
it probably goes down. That's right. You gain
zero equity. You might even lose money. You can't
get a loan to fix the roof when it starts leaking
because the bank looks at the map and says, sorry,
you're in a red zone. So the house decays. So
you fast forward to today. The White family has
inherited a $500 ,000 asset. The black family
has inherited nothing or maybe even a liability.
That is the brutal, simple math of structural
inequality. It's the power of compound interest,
but for discrimination. Redlining didn't just
segregate where people lived. It segregated their
financial futures for generations. It systematically
stripped the inner city of all its capital. And
when you strip the capital and the industrial
jobs leave and the white population flees to
their subsidized homes. You get the American
model. Poor, decaying, predominantly minority
inner cities surrounded by rings of wealthy,
predominantly white suburbs. It was a machine
designed, intentionally or not, to create slums.
Wow. OK, so that is the donut. Yeah. And it feels
so ingrained, so permanent, like that's just
how American cities are supposed to look. But
the research says no. Not at all. Look at Europe.
This is where it gets really, really interesting.
We call it the European inversion. The inversion.
If you go to Paris or Vienna or Rome or many
of the great European capitals, the map is completely
flipped on its head. So where do the rich people
live there? They live right in the center. Historic
core, the first surrounding small of Paris, right
by the Louvre. That's where the money is. That's
where the power is. The apartments there are
astronomically expensive. Where is the decay?
Where is the blight? It's on the edge. It's in
the suburbs. In France, they call them the banlieues.
I always thought banlieue was just the French
word for suburb. Linguistically, yes, it is.
But culturally, it carries an incredibly heavy
weight. It's become synonymous with poverty,
with immigrants, with crime, and with social
exclusion. How did that happen? Why didn't they
get the nice, leafy, single -family home suburbs
that we got? It's just a completely different
history. In the post -war era, the 50s and 60s,
France had a massive housing crisis. They needed
to build housing and they needed to do it fast.
So they built these enormous projects called
Grand Ensembles. What were they? Huge, modernist,
concrete, high -rise towers. And they built them
way out on the periphery of the cities where
the land was cheap. And at first... People liked
them. Oh, yeah. At first, they were seen as a
huge step up. They had indoor plumbing, heating,
electricity. It was much better than the shanty
towns and slums many people were living in before.
But there's always a but. But by the 1980s, the
industrial jobs in those areas started to dry
up. The white -collar, middle -class French stayed
in the beautiful city centers. And these high
-rises became essentially warehouses for the
unemployed and increasingly for immigrants from
France's former colonies in North Africa, Algeria,
Morocco, Tunisia. So instead of a white picket
fence in a backyard, the suburb in the French
imagination means a giant concrete tower block
and a sense of isolation. Yes, exactly. And the
notes talk about a deep, profound social stigma
attached to these places. There's this feeling
that these areas are outside the law or even,
quote, outside the republic. That phrase gives
me chills. Outside the republic. It's like saying
you're not really French if you live here. That
is precisely the feeling it conveys. And it creates
a pressure cooker. The notes, of course, mention
the 2005 riots that spread across France. I remember
seeing that on the news. All the cars on fire.
It was shocking. And it started when two teenagers
who were running from the police hid in an electrical
substation and were accidentally electrocuted.
They died. And that tragedy was the spark. But
the fuel was decades of frustration, unemployment,
and feeling trapped in these concrete islands
on the far edge of the city. So the U .S. burns
from the center out. France burns from the edges
in. It's the perfect inversion. Now let's hop
across the English Channel to the U .K. Is it
the same story there? Well, London feels a lot
like the Paris model. Super, super expensive
center and the poverty is pushed further out.
London is its own unique beast. But for the U
.K. as a whole, there's a different kind of divide.
It's not just center versus suburb. It's north
versus south. The regional divide. The urban
decay in the United Kingdom is heavily concentrated
in the old industrial heartland. of the north,
cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle.
These were the engines of the British Empire.
Coal, shipbuilding, textiles. And I'm guessing
when the empire stopped needing as many ships
and as much coal. The economic floor just fell
out from under those cities. The notes mentioned
the big slum clearances of the post -war era.
They tore down a lot of the old Victorian terraced
housing and built high rises, a bit like the
French model, but the economic collapse was just
too severe. There's a pop culture connection
here in the notes that I absolutely love. The
idea of a soundtrack to this decay. You really
can't understand British urban decay in that
era without listening to a band like The Specials.
Their song Ghost Town. Oh, it's the ultimate
anthem for this. This town is coming like a ghost
town. It's so bleak. It is. It's haunting. Or
The Jam with a song like Down in the Tube Station
at Midnight. These songs from the late 70s and
early 80s, they perfectly captured that mood.
Gray concrete, the constant threat of violence,
mass unemployment. It was a very specific flavor
of despair. There's a really interesting data
point here in the material comparing Manchester
and Newcastle. Yes, this is crucial because it
helps us check our assumptions. In the U .S.,
we talk so much about race and redlining and
for very good reason. But look at the U .K. during
this period. Manchester had a growing non -white
immigrant population. Newcastle, on the other
hand, was overwhelmingly white. And yet. And
yet both cities suffered catastrophic urban decay.
So it proves that while racism can absolutely
pour gasoline on the fire, the root cause, the
fundamental economic collapse, is colorblind.
Exactly. When the factory closes its gates for
the last time, the city dies. It doesn't matter
what the people who live there look like. The
economics of it are just brutal and universal.
Speaking of brutal, I think it's time we get
into the case studies. Section four, failed utopias.
These are the stories that show how weird and
extreme this whole process can get. Which one
do you want to start with? Let's start in Italy,
in Naples. The Ville di Scampia. The Sails of
Scampia. Sounds so beautiful, doesn't it? The
Sails. And it was meant to be beautiful. This
is a classic tragedy of modernist architecture.
It was built in the 60s and 70s. The architect,
a guy named Franz de Salvo, had this grand utopian
vision. He wanted to create a self -sufficient
small city right there in Naples. Can you describe
what it looks like? Imagine these huge triangular
slab buildings. They genuinely look like giant
concrete sails billowing in the wind. They were
supposed to have these shared walkways connecting
them, parks, their own train station. The whole
idea was to use architecture to force community
interaction. We will build a perfect community
with concrete, a classic modernist dream. The
ultimate dream. Yeah. But then reality crushed
the party. First, in 1980, there was a massive
earthquake. The Urpinia earthquake. It left thousands
and thousands of people homeless. So desperate
families just started moving into the Vala. They
became squatters. The perfectly planned community
became a massive refugee camp almost overnight.
And what did the government do? The police? The
government largely abandoned it. It was too big
of a problem. And in Naples, when the state retreats,
who fills the vacuum? The Camorra. The local
mafia. The Camorra took over the entire complex.
And ironically, that utopian community architecture,
the complex maze like passageways, the lack of
clear roads. It made the buildings the perfect
fortress for the drug trade. So police couldn't
get their cars. Exactly. Police couldn't get
in. Lookouts could be posted everywhere. The
architect designed a walkway for neighbors to
stop and chat. And the mafia used it as the perfect
spot to sell heroin and watch for cops. That
is the ultimate failure of what they call. architectural
determinism. Yeah. You can't design your way
out of a social collapse. Not a chance. OK, from
the heat and chaos of Naples, let's go to the
cold, quiet emptiness of eastern Germany, the
shrinking east. This is a completely different
kind of decay. This isn't about crime and overcrowding.
It's about silence and absence. The case study
here is a town called Heuerswerda. Heuerswerda.
Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, its
population has dropped by 40 percent. Nearly
half the town is just gone. And specifically,
it's the young people. Especially the young women.
They left for jobs and opportunities in the West.
The birth rate just collapsed. It's a textbook
case of what demographers call urban shrinkage.
And what's left behind? What does it look like?
Well, you have the Plattenbau. These are those
prefab concrete slab apartment blocks that the
East German socialist government loved to build.
They were fast. They were cheap. But the notes
mention something really eerie about the East
German approach to history and architecture.
Yeah, this part was strange. It says that in
some places they just left the rubble from World
War II where it fell. It's bizarre, isn't it?
In West Germany, they were obsessed with rebuilding
everything, the economic miracle. In the East,
if a building was bombed out in 1945, sometimes
they just left it. Or they cleared the lot and
just left it empty for 50 years. If a building
didn't fit the new socialist ideal, they just
let it rot. So you could be walking through this
town today and see a mix of ugly concrete blocks
from the 70s, empty lots, and a pile of bricks
that's been there since the war ended. It's a
landscape of overlapping traumas, and now it's
emptying out completely. It's a ghost town happening
in slow motion. Okay, those are both incredibly
heavy. But the South Africa story, Hillbrow.
in johannesburg this is the one that felt like
it was ripped from the script of an action movie
hillbrow is something else entirely to understand
it you have to understand the transition out
of apartheid under apartheid hillbrow was a whites
-only high -rise very affluent neighborhood it
was kind of the manhattan of johannesburg so
cool cafes bookshops beautiful high -rise apartments
exactly then 1994. Apartheid falls. A Democratic
government is elected. And naturally, people
start to move. The white residents flee to the
suburbs. It's a classic white flight story like
we saw in the U .S., but on hyperspeed. They
are replaced by low -income black workers and
a huge influx of immigrants from all over Africa,
all looking for a foothold in the new South Africa.
So far, that sounds like a fairly standard, if
rapid, urban transition. It is. But then comes
the phenomenon of hijacking. You have to explain
this term. How on earth do you hijack a 30 -story
skyscraper? This isn't like hijacking a car.
This is organized crime syndicates targeting
a specific apartment block. Imagine you're a
legal resident there. You come home from work
one day. The locks on the front door are changed.
And there are men with AK -47s standing in the
lobby. And they just say, this is our building
now. Basically, they drive out the official property
management company. They intimidate the legal
registered owners of the building until they're
too scared to ever come hear it again. Then the
gang becomes the de facto landlord. They go door
to door with guns and collect the rent from everyone.
But I'm guessing they don't use that. rent money
to pay the bills. Of course not. They pocket
all the cash. They don't pay the municipality
for water. They don't pay for electricity. So
after a few months, what does the city do? They
have to cut the power in the water. Right. So
now you have a 30 -story glass and concrete tower.
There are no elevators. There are no lights in
the hallways. There is no running water. Oh,
my God. The sanitation, the smell. People are
literally throwing their trash and human waste
out of the windows. It creates what's known as
a vertical slum. And it's terrifying because
it shows just how fraggle the whole system is.
We assume if we have a deed to a building, we
own it. But if the police won't come and the
courts are paralyzed, that piece of paper means
absolutely nothing. It's pure anarchy. It's the
total collapse of the rule of law, but contained
within the four walls of a single building. Precisely
that. Okay. We've seen the donut. We've seen
the banlieue. We've seen the hijacked tower.
I feel like I need a shower and a stiff drink.
Uh -huh. But we have to ask the big question
at the end of all this. Can we fix it? That is
the multi -trillion dollar question. Yeah. And
the history of fixing urban decay is, in some
ways, almost as tragic as the decay itself. Let's
talk about the big American solution, urban renewal,
with a capital U and a capital R. In the mid
-20th century, the U .S. strategy was brutally
simple. The neighborhood is the problem. The
old buildings are the problem. So knock them
all down. Slum clearance. Get the bulldozers.
They leveled entire neighborhoods, displacing
thousands of people, and they replaced them with
massive projects, the most infamous of which
is Pruitt Ego in St. Louis. Pruitt Ego is the
poster child for failure. It is the... absolute
Titanic of public housing. It was built in the
1950s. It was huge. It was modern. It won architectural
awards, but they didn't provide any funding for
maintenance. They packed it with the city's poorest
residents and completely isolated them. It became
a zone of intense crime and poverty almost from
the day it opened. And how did that story end?
It ended with dynamite. By the 1970s, the government
admitted total defeat and just imploded the buildings.
You've probably seen the footage. It's this iconic.
slow motion demolition that came to symbolize
the death of that whole utopian idea of public
housing. So the expert consensus now is that
urban renewal, that whole bulldozing strategy,
was a complete failure. Largely, yes. The source
material calls it misguided. Because when you
bulldoze a slum, you aren't just destroying rotting
buildings. You are destroying a community. It
might be a poor community, but it's a community
with social networks. You scatter those people
to the winds. You don't solve the problem of
poverty. You just move it somewhere else. So
if the government can't fix it with bulldozers,
what about the free market? What about gentrification?
Ah, gentrification, the word that everyone loves
to fight about online. A source calls it a double
-edged sword. And it absolutely is. On the one
hand, it is the primary means of a natural remedy.
Capital flows back into a neighborhood. Buildings
get fixed. The roof that was leaking for 20 years
finally gets repaired. The tax base recovers.
The city financially stops dying. But the other
edge of the sword. The people who live there,
through all the hard times they get priced out,
their rents skyrocket. The corner store that's
been there forever gets replaced by a boutique
coffee shop selling $12 lattes. And this leads
to this fascinating new phenomenon that's mentioned
in the notes. The decay of the inner suburb.
Yes. This is so important for understanding where
we're heading now. As the city centers get wealthy
and gentrified again, think about Brooklyn, think
about downtown L .A., the poor are pushed out.
But where do they go? They go to those first
ring inner suburbs, the ones that were built
in the 1950s. Exactly. The Levittowns of the
world, the places that are now 70 years old.
The infrastructure is aging. The shopping malls
are dying. Poverty is migrating from the urban
core to that first suburban ring. So the donut
is slipping again. The hole is turning into the
donut. The hole is filling up with gold and the
dough is starting to go moldy. It's this constantly
shifting geography of poverty. Are there any
success stories? Is anyone actually doing this
right? Well, Europe offers a slightly different
model, which is often called new urbanism. What's
that? Europe has a built -in advantage. Their
cities have good bones. They're older. They have
those dense, walkable, historic quarters. Right.
It's a lot easier to fix up a charming 19th century
brick row house than it is to fix up a decaying
1970s strip mall. That's it exactly. People want
to live in the row house. So in a place like
home in Manchester, they've gone through this
incredible three stage cycle. Walk us through
the home timeline. Stage one, 19th century working
class housing, kind of slums, but a traditional
street grid. Stage two, the 1950s and 60s. They
bulldozed it all and built those awful concrete
high rise towers. Total disaster. And stage three.
The 1990s, they finally admitted the towers were
a catastrophic mistake, so they bulldozed the
bulldozed neighborhood again. And what did they
build in its place? Let me guess. Did they basically
go back to stage one? Pretty much. They built
what are called new urbanist developments, traditional
style houses, mixed -use buildings with shops
on the ground floor. They put the street grid
back. low rise human scale building. So we spent
50 years and billions of pounds just to realize
that the Victorians kind of had it right in the
first place. In terms of urban geometry. Yeah.
It turns out humans like human scale places.
We like streets. We like corner stores. We do
not like vast windswept concrete plazas between
identical towers. So let's try to wrap this all
up. We've been all over the world. We've looked
at the ruins. What is the big overarching takeaway
from all this? I think the biggest takeaway is
that. A city is not a statue. It's not a fixed
thing carved out of stone. It's a flow. It's
a living, breathing organism. It metabolizes.
It metabolizes, exactly. Money flows in, money
flows out. People move in, people move out. Policies
shift the currents. It's this constant cycle.
Construction, flight, decay, and then, if you're
lucky, rebirth. But we have to remember the human
cost of that cycle. Always. When a city sheds
its skin like that, real people get hurt. Generations
of family wealth are wiped out. Communities...
that took a century to build are scattered in
a decade. There's one last concept in the notes
that I just want to leave everyone with. It's
the idea of ruined porn. Ah, yes. The Instagram
aesthetic. Right. People who travel to Detroit
or the abandoned resorts in the Catskills just
to take these beautiful artistic photos of the
decay. It's clear we have a deep fascination
with it. We do. We find a strange beauty in the
failure. It's romantic in a way. But I would
challenge everyone listening. Don't just look
at the photos online. Look at your own city.
Yeah. Next time you're driving home from work,
actually look out the window. And ask yourself,
what stage of the cycle am I seeing right now?
Am I in the American donut? Am I seeing the French
Banlieue model? And look really closely at those
suburbs. The strip malls with half the storefronts
empty. the aging apartment complexes? Are we
witnessing the quiet birth of the suburban prairie?
That is the question for the next 30 years. On
that cheery note, this has been The Deep Dive.
Thanks for exploring the ruins with us. Keep
looking closer. We'll see you next time.