The thing is, when times are great and everything is growing, it's really easy (and often necessary) to expand infrastructure to accommodate all the new activity. And the go-go fever pitch makes it easy to get big. In an economy that hits its stride the investments pay out cash like nothing before. But when the situation changes, usually due to an innovation and another region capitalizing on it, no one is willing to scrap the old infrastructure and start over.
It's worse for municipalities because there's always that last holdout at the end of the road. He's not going anywhere, so you still have to supply him with the same services that you built when the street was full. Or buy him off, but that gets tricky too. So every town has the potential to become Detroit or Pittsburgh. In the case of Detroit, well, we all know what happened there. But in Pittsburgh, due to geography and historical norms, the actual city is fairly small. Greater Pitt is made up of a dozen or so boroughs and townships, independent governments that are fairly autonomous. Some do better than others, but the power and tax revenue is highly distributed. So some neighborhoods crumble, some thrive. And the money is spent locally. This meant that neighborhoods like Oakland were able to maintain a fairly good tax base (helps that University of Pittsburgh and CMU are there... another topic) and grow their high-tech and medical industry. This had a spillover effect for mostly residential Squirrel Hill, Wilkensburg and the other neighborhoods that didn't have to send their money to City Hall for redistribution.
So-cal is marketed as the Hollywood Tinseltown, but in reality oil and aerospace built the city of angles. Now that there are only two big airplane manufacturers in the world and oil is evil, the city is just running on momentum and the port. It's a mature/declining city. The best thing they could do is redefine the boundaries, cutting loose their old neighborhoods to let them become their own entities, with their own services. But we know that's never going to be an option, the cities are too addicted to the big number budgets and power-mad politics.
"Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City"
Atlantic City
Bruce Springsteen
The thing is, when times are great and everything is growing, it's really easy (and often necessary) to expand infrastructure to accommodate all the new activity. And the go-go fever pitch makes it easy to get big. In an economy that hits its stride the investments pay out cash like nothing before. But when the situation changes, usually due to an innovation and another region capitalizing on it, no one is willing to scrap the old infrastructure and start over.
It's worse for municipalities because there's always that last holdout at the end of the road. He's not going anywhere, so you still have to supply him with the same services that you built when the street was full. Or buy him off, but that gets tricky too. So every town has the potential to become Detroit or Pittsburgh. In the case of Detroit, well, we all know what happened there. But in Pittsburgh, due to geography and historical norms, the actual city is fairly small. Greater Pitt is made up of a dozen or so boroughs and townships, independent governments that are fairly autonomous. Some do better than others, but the power and tax revenue is highly distributed. So some neighborhoods crumble, some thrive. And the money is spent locally. This meant that neighborhoods like Oakland were able to maintain a fairly good tax base (helps that University of Pittsburgh and CMU are there... another topic) and grow their high-tech and medical industry. This had a spillover effect for mostly residential Squirrel Hill, Wilkensburg and the other neighborhoods that didn't have to send their money to City Hall for redistribution.
So-cal is marketed as the Hollywood Tinseltown, but in reality oil and aerospace built the city of angles. Now that there are only two big airplane manufacturers in the world and oil is evil, the city is just running on momentum and the port. It's a mature/declining city. The best thing they could do is redefine the boundaries, cutting loose their old neighborhoods to let them become their own entities, with their own services. But we know that's never going to be an option, the cities are too addicted to the big number budgets and power-mad politics.