It should come as no surprise but decades of one-party governance create institutions that grow sclerotic with age and can’t reform themselves.

And it should especially come as no surprise that eventually people, even those who voted for such crap, eventually give up and leave.

And yet all this has come as a surprise to the Democrats who rule almost all of the large cities of the USA, especially the on the East and West coasts:

“People moved to coastal cities because that’s where the good jobs were…. This went on so long that the appeal of central cities.… came to seem almost a law of nature, effortless and eternal. Unfortunately, the pandemic broke the virtuous cycle…. I suspect cities have fallen prey to the same delusion as those people who carefully pack up their laptops while the plane fills with smoke: They are looking around at other people, most of whom seem to be acting pretty normally…. Yes, crime might have risen, and residents might be darkly muttering about moving to the suburbs. But when haven’t city-dwellers threatened to move to the suburbs if the mayor didn’t fix their pet problems right away?… It would be understandable for mayors to look at all the people who have stayed and thought, ‘Well, that’s not so bad.'”

So lets’s look at this sad lot, because these cities dominate their states:

NEW YORK

You can’t fix a problem when you’re denying it’s a problem, How New York Stopped Fearing the Urban Doom Loop and Learned to Love It:

Covid sends the high-wage workers back to their suburban homes, which kills the restaurant and retail and entertainment industries of the city, which is the entire point of even living in or near a city in the first place, and as those businesses die, people realize there is no reason remaining to be in the city, and begin a mass emigration away that kills the cities.

The Democrats’ embrace of violence, crime, and chaos as acceptable substitutes for restaurants, shopping, and entertainment obviously isn’t helping. Covid took away all the advantages for living in the city, and then the Summer of St. George unleashed all the disadvantages of living in the city, with a vengeance.

Including destroying the so-called “magnet” school, NYC Public schools that enrolled kids based on their abilities, which the NYC Democrats think is racist. Closing them is certainly classist because on;y multi-millionaires can afford the truly private schools that do the same thing. And so..

Lex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.

It’s a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools…. adding that he knows 10 Manhattan families who also plan to depart. “And if these policies continue, there won’t be many middle- and upper middle-class families left in the public schools.”

Or in the city paying taxes and spending money on all those little delis. Ten percent of school kids who left during the C-19 pandemic have never returned. One irony here is these selective middle schools were created decades ago by the Democrats to keep middle-class families in the city when crime was pushing them to the suburbs in large numbers.

The moving from the rich Upper West Side of Manhattan started in earnest in 2020 (“The woman was almost crying. They said they survived the ’70s,” as a young couple in the then-high crime neighborhood. “But then in a month, in July, the neighborhood was destroyed.”). Yeah, well Defund The Police was also part of that.

But this late 2020 article, NYC Is dead forever. Here’s why?, was written by the owner of a NYC comedy club (e.g. Liberal, liberal, liberal) and he details the impact of the C-19 lockdowns and shift to remote work on five areas: Business (empty offices), Culture (club closures), Food (closures), Commercial Real Estate (of course), and Universities. He reckons the difference this time from the 1970’s and the 9/11 attacks is internet “bandwidth” and how the departure of people will stimulate the little businesses like clubs and bars and delis in other parts of the USA: “What reason will people have to go back to NYC?” 

Even then Governor Cuomu of New York state saw the problem:

“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house and I say, ‘You got to come back!’” Cuomo said Monday. “‘We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’”

He probably learned that last line when sexually harassing young women.

SAN FRANCISCO

Same again in problems showing long before C-19 but with the schizoid response from locals

LOS ANGELES

For the first time in its history, the population of Los Angeles is in decline, falling by 204,000 between July 2020 and July 2021. LA was once a magnet for investors. But recently many of the area’s corporate linchpins – including aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Hilton Hotels – have left, taking with them high-paying jobs and philanthropic resources.
…
LA was once the country’s most dynamic manufacturing area. But in the past decade it has lost roughly 13 per cent of its industrial jobs – only New York has fared worse among major regions…

Even the city’s port is in decline, the last stronghold of blue-collar labour, with jobs gradually leaving the West Coast for ports like Houston and Tampa.
…
Over the past 20 years, Los Angeles County has lost nearly 700,000 people under 25 – the biggest per capita decline in youth among all large US counties. In contrast, its elderly population has surged by 500,000. 

In late 2020 the city declared that large parties would be banned because of water & power shortages, using the “public health emergency” laws they fell in love during C-19, and then there’s The Road Diet, which is every bit as bad as it sounds:

Los Angeles officials describe The Road Diet as a way to “shift drivers to other transportation options by adding hundreds of miles of bicycle and bus-only lanes.” Which, on the surface, sounds entirely uncontroversial. But the real purpose of The Road Diet, one which they never ever admit out loud, is to make driving on L.A.’s roads so awful, so dispirting, and so soul-crushing that Angelenos voluntarily abandon their cars altogether in favor of Public Transportation.

What city officials have done is take major cross-city thoroughfares like Venice Blvd, which were once six lane roads, and remove one lane in each direction. That third lane is now reserved for cyclists and permanent parking spaces, and it’s separated from the other two lanes by rows of thick plastic barricades. You can only imagine what these changes have done to what was already an awful rush hour experience even before “The Road Diet” came along.

Sounds familiar to this Aucklander as we experience the same failed attempt to take a sprawling city and turn it into a condensed one.

CHICAGO

I couldn’t forget Ye Olde Second Home, especially not it has a Mayor who’s even more Left than the previous one and filled with plans for taxing people – those who remain anyway:

Hundreds of looters descended on downtown Chicago early Monday following a police shooting on the city’s South Side, with vandals smashing the windows of dozens of businesses and making off with merchandise, cash machines and anything else they could carry, police said.

Oh wait. That was 2020 and he wasn’t the mayor. My bad. Here’s 2023:

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson responded to this weekend’s violent “teen takeover” of the Windy City’s downtown area by urging the public not to “demonize” the hordes of rampaging young people who set cars on fire, clashed with cops and damaged private property.

Same shit, different day.

Chicago is perhaps a little different from the other cities on this list in that it’s population has been dropping since the 1950’s when it peaked at 3.6 million, down to 2.6 million by 2022. But that was driven by massive changes to industry and business. What’s happening now is different, although the same as all the other Democrat cities: crime, hostility to business, especially small business, ever-increasing taxes, increasingly poor city services, especially schools, and decreasing quality of life – and of course this feeds into a state that once held 27 House seats but is now down to 17, with more to lose after the 2030 census:

The latest U-Haul rankings of state migration growth suggests we’re really dealing with a tragedy as Illinois ranks 49/50 as “most moved out of state.” Only California has a “better” track record. 

Oh, and just up the I-94, another great Mid-Western city, Minneapolis, is dying.

WASHINGTON D.C.

This one I’m not so sure about since it has the Federal government to feed off. Of the top ten richest counties in the USA four are located around D.C., a place that produces only hot air and regulations. Notably it does not show up in those charts at the start of the post. Still, people are leaving:

Goodbye, Washington DC (from a NYC city boy and twenty year resident of D.C.)

I did my part, too. My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money. Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay. And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees. I paid taxes on things the government deemed “bad” for me, like alcohol and cigarettes;  taxes on services which organized labor deemed “bad” for them, like rideshare. I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax. Lots of income tax.

All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city. City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others. That was the tacit pact.

And DC broke it.

He only moved sixty miles away but as he said, it could be a different world – and of course all his taxes and spending are gone.

The Demise of My Great City

For a brief period of time, between 1975-79, I served as a police officer. I joined the force as one of a handful who were the first women ever to patrol the streets of D.C. Though short-lived, this was the best education I ever had. You can imagine what I saw and learned about—things I never imagined during my all-girls Catholic school education.

People have stopped loving, respecting, and caring for their city—my city. What a tragedy this has all been.
…
Where are the laws? Where is the sense of dignity, decorum, and decency? The looting, the burning, the destruction—and all in the capital of the United States of America.

And these departures are of the people these cities can least afford to lose: educated, well-paid, law-abiding, and often young, Millennials Are Fleeing Cities For Refuge From Democrats’ Disasters:

For twenty-somethings leaving a small town for the big city, the feeling of liberation and possibility can be exhilarating. Mom and dad, and their rules, are finally in the rearview mirror. But what’s up ahead is often worse—the welcoming arms of an even stricter authority known as leftist city government.

Many millennials are discovering this the hard way and making a U-turn. New Census Bureau data shows millennials are increasingly trading in urban life for the suburbs and even switching states entirely.

And don’t think it’s just millennials who are leaving

And all these cultural factors feed back into economic factors – just in case you thought this is just something that can be solved by changes to tax rates and business incentives:

Exactly, that is the one common theme that underlies all of the other negative factors listed that are driving people out of these once-great American cities:

Look at Chicago and understand this is every city, every town, under Democrat rule. If you’re a working middle-class American, you’re fighting for your life and voting Democrat is suicide… The core ideology of the radicalized Democrat party requires dissolving the rule of law….Everything from Democrat speech codes to economic policy is based on variables of grievance and entitlement, not absolute principles that apply equally to everyone. What you’re allowed to say and do, what you’re allowed to own, depends on your class, race, and politics.

Or as the Powerline folks put it in Our Collapsing Cities, quoting from the great Conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton:

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

Given that a falling private sector economy and population means that the Democrats can actually increase their power in spite of their failures – because the vacuum of weakened neighbourhoods and their little institutions is filled by government and government workers (and government unions) – I don’t think even a Detroit ending will change this situation. As horrible as it may be to contemplate, law-abiding, community-minded, well-paid workers are going to have to leave these places to the Left-wing grifters and the sociopaths.