Urban Decline Quotes

Things of this World are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State. Thus People, Riches, Trade, Power, change their Stations; flourishing mighty Cities come to ruine, and prove in time neglected desolate Corners, whilst other unfrequented places grow into populous Countries, fill'd with Wealth and Inhabitants.

The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat.

When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.

There's no way New Orleans will ever be the city it was. I think it will have half the population. They may create a sort of Disneyland at the French Quarter for tourists. The rest I don't know.

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

Detroit's financial challenges - the decline of the American auto industry, the impact of the global economic recession, declining population, and an erosion of the municipal tax base - are key to understanding what led this great city to an inability to provide basic city services or to carry out the normal functions of a municipality.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

Not every town can or should be saved.

I'd probably put myself in the top 1% in knowledge of blight in the city of Detroit.

Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.

I think of what's happening in Detroit as part of something that's much bigger. Most people think of the decline of the city as having to do with African-Americans and being in debt, and all the issues like crime and bad housing. But what happened is that when globalization took place, following World War II, Detroit's role as the center and the symbol of industrialization was destroyed. It wasn't because we had black citizens mainly or a black mayor; it was because the world was changing.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.

Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.

The City of London and Wall Street are not going to be great places to be in the next two or three decades. It's going to be the people who produce real goods in charge – the farmers and the miners.

People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was from 1900 to the '60s.

In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger - and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.

Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.

When I came to Philadelphia in the late '80s, it was going through a very difficult time.

It is not age which killed Boston, for no cities die of age; it is the youth of other cities.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

The population of Seoul is decreasing but a large population is not a key element of an advanced city.

Whole towns, communities and forms of agriculture with their homes, schools and churches have been built up under this system of protection [tariffs]. The grass will grow in a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun millions of farms if that protection is taken away

For of those [cities] that were great in earlier times, most of them have now become small, while those which were great in my time were small formerly.

I love New York. New York made me the man that I am, and I always rep it to the fullest, but right now it's completely different from what it was and anybody that says it's for the better is straight up lyin'. Straight up lyin'!