Urban Decay

There are areas in every city that have fallen by the wayside. These small pockets of poverty look like a bomb went off and only pieces of that city still remain. It’s unclear what happened, why the city no longer functions the way it used to be and before you know it, you’ve already driven past it. It’s a glimpse of urban decay. Its deindustrialization, depopulation, changing population, economic restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and an inhospitable landscape. All of those terms are complicated and yet are folded together to describe an issue that is destroying entire areas. Since the 1970’s and 1980’s urban decay has been connected with western and European cites. Since that time period, there have been major changes in global economics. The changes in government policy have led to urban decay because it changed the devolvement of the cities. Another aspect of urban decay is blight. The appearance and effects it has psychologically on people living near empty lots and run down buildings. The empty lots and abandon buildings often attract negative focus, such as gangs. There is no one cause of urban decay. It’s multiple causes that can cause a neighborhood to eventually decay. The socio-economic reasons are slightly too complicated for anyone to grasp but they are important. During the Industrial Revolution, around the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, a boom of rural people moved into the city for jobs. But after economic changes, the cities were in a weak position. Some of these changes include transport. When the transportation went from public to private it got rid of the advantages of having buses and trains. The car after World War II time favored a more suburbanized lifestyle. Even politically, the decisions were more geared towards the development of the suburban life. City taxes were taken and used for building more remote racially separate suburban towns. Soon after World War II, western economics outsourced most of their manufacturing businesses overseas. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, urban areas were shattered even more through the building of the Interstate Highway System. Inner city property values decreased, so financially disadvantaged people began to move in. The new inner city people were usually African American especially during the 1920’s and 1930’s after migrating from the south. The people who were described as “ethnic” fled the inner city and moved into the suburbs.