I Went To The Worst Ghettos In The United States: Part Two

now I've seen a lot of this country I go out of my way to see bad things because that's what you YouTube people want and a lot of the rundown cities I've seen are places most people don't want to go into you can call them ghettos if you want although that word might be a little strong but every place I'm going to show you has large parts of town that are poor dangerous and run down many have been all but abandoned I think it's important for us to see what's happening in our communities if we don't know about these tragedies how do we fix them and for a lot of us looking at this puts our own lives in a perspective as we drive through these areas you'll notice many of the streets are empty sometimes the scariest movies are when you don't see the monster at all [Music] I was on a road trip in Florida one may and spent a lot of my time looking at the beaches and the new sprawl I spent a couple days in Palm Beach you know the richest place in the country home to Mar-A-Lago and seaside mansions well the server at dinner asked if I had ever been to Pahokee and Belle Glade before I was like no so I went there and wow is it bad Pahokee and Belle Glade are small communities in Western Palm Beach County along Lake Okeechobee they call the whole area the muck because it was all swampland until it was drained to put in crops it's a long forgotten about former agriculture Hub way out in the middle of nowhere and a lot of the people who live here are minorities in extreme poverty a lot of what's left here are remnants of cheap housing thrown up for all the temporary field workers what's left have become hovels that look like the god-awful slums of third world capitals I saw lots of rundown Apartments trash a lot of people standing around looking lost a lot of this region feels sad and deserted this is like foreign this area has a history of extreme violence at one point half the men who lived here had felonies there's a history of disease overcrowding poor sanitation malnutrition this area once had the highest HIV infection rate in the country too CBS once called this area the Harvest of Shame it has some of the worst conditions I've ever seen there just aren't a lot of jobs here a lot of what kept this place going was farming but technology has put a lot of people out of work a lot of these migrant field workers can only survive on government assistance now poverty is so bad they've talked about dissolving these communities entirely and just turn them over to the county let them handle it it would be hard to have hope when you don't have money or an education or a trade [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] say what you want about the true definition of a ghetto there's parts of Chicago that are some of the worst places you can live I was in Chicago for a day in the summer of 2021. spent a lot of my time downtown but I knew if I wanted to capture the essence of Chicago I needed to get out into the inner cities the south side of Chicago is known worldwide it's full of murderers gang bangers shootings poverty everything that makes the place miserable they don't measure monthly shootings on the South Side they measure weekend shootings there are at least 800 murders in Chicago the year I was here there's a good chance somebody died in this Hood I'm driving in this very day they shoot at the cops they shoot at each other they just shoot to shoot it's Flawless in some parts of Chicago there just aren't enough cops on the streets there's budget shortfalls early retirements people just do whatever they want here and they know they probably won't pay the price a lot of Chicago neighborhoods like this are seeing huge population declines Inglewood might be the most famous South Chicago Hood it had a hundred thousand people in 1960 and today there's less than thirty thousand driving around here you'll hear a siren every 10 minutes of course I'd be risking my life if I were to try to drive through this area during the night during the day it's actually pretty dead South Chicago being this way isn't surprising what do you think is going to happen when half a city is undereducated and doesn't understand economics or politics and doesn't even care to this is a drug and alcohol mental illness broken family politicians don't give a [ __ ] no God no pride no care in the world thing and that makes me sad for our country a lot of people here grow up with generational poverty and crime what other life could they know this is their normal [Music] this is what Keokuk Iowa used to look like and this is what it looks like today I spent a month traveling throughout the Midwest in the summer of 2022. I documented a lot of the smallish communities that dot the landscape in Iowa Nebraska Kansas Minnesota a lot of the trip was not looking at Devastation that was until I got to Keokuk keokuk's a river town on the Far Eastern side of the state right along the Mississippi now if you know anything about river towns you'd understand that these were once vitally important for our country's economy river towns like Keokuk served as our backbone for shipping and commerce there were dozens of Banks and hotels and lots of very wealthy people here a hundred years ago but that was a long time ago industry changes companies shut down and people leave those who remain have limited options for a middle class lifestyle as I drove through Keokuk I was actually pretty surprised to see just how bad things have gotten here I've been to Russ Bell towns in Ohio Pennsylvania and Michigan but I hadn't really heard too much about Iowa's struggles but it is bad here maybe the worst I saw in Iowa up and down Main Street are boarded up buildings businesses that couldn't remain open because they couldn't cut it financially a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods are filled with homes and disrepair broken windows peeling paint rotting sideboards keokuk's a fading brick broken sidewalk what used to be sort of place some of this is caused by capitalism greed you know moving jobs overseas for bigger profits and some of this was caused by an entire Community unwilling or unable to pick themselves up and evolve I guess there's an opening here for somebody to come in and snag up a bunch of cheap real estate I suppose those with the widest eyes and a big imagination might see an opportunity a lot of people here today feel forgotten about and here we are spending billions to help other countries when our own backyard looks like this damn sure it's affordable here but that comes at a price residents have a one in a hundred chance being the victim of violent crime and 25 of this community collects welfare a lot of these people aren't defined by poverty though for some people if they have their basic needs God food that's all they need so maybe from the outside it seems worse than it really is but is this our future it's not just Keokuk all up and down the Mississippi or cities that have seen Devastation like this like Cairo Illinois [Music] 300 miles south of Keokuk also along the Mississippi is the small obliterated community of Cairo Illinois there's about 1600 people here these days down from a peak of 15 000 100 years ago I'd heard a lot about Cairo and how it had been gutted by a loss of jobs I was on a road trip on my way to Memphis one day in November and I was finally able to make a detour to see the place and it is bad you could call Cairo an industrial Relic a live look at a ghost town in progress it's the same thing we saw in Keokuk a loss of blue collar jobs and extreme poverty six in ten people here live on welfare back in the day families could get by with the dad working for a factory and Mom raising the kids not anymore unless you want to live on the edge of poverty and despair and crime here is four times higher than the rest of the country too this place used to be the center of Commerce in the 1920s there were Rich merchants and bankers and thriving businessmen wandering these streets this is what it used to look like and after a bunch of floods and riots and all the companies left criming up at one point 15 percent of cairo's population was locked in jail what so a lot of people left when it started to go downhill and a lot of the people who were still here are retired or can't afford to move away some of them are addicts Who Remain addicts because it's so cheap to live here there hasn't been a private residence built here in 50 years they tore up the housing projects because there wasn't a budget to keep them open you can get a house here for as little as 700 these days can you believe that there's a saying from dirt we came to the dirt you'll go ashes to ashes dust to dust maybe that's what we're seeing here but we're in a country where the military says no man left behind and here we have an entire Community left behind can these places be fixed what would it take and are they even worth saving [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] I guess it's all about perspective you can look at a community and your impression is based on your personal situation and experiences rich people will be like God how do they do it poor people are like yeah that's my life people in developing countries are like hey that actually looks kind of nice but few of us know what it's really like to live on a Native American reservation now there are many many many devastated Native American reservations in the USA a long time ago Americans moved into Native American lands and there were big conflicts after the fighting ended the government set aside large areas in some of the most unsuitable land our Native American population has been living in these reservations ever since there's poverty and then there's Next Level poverty South Dakota has two of the poorest reservations in the country one of them's here it's called Rosebud it's 1970 square miles way out in the middle of nowhere since I was already in South Dakota for another project I just had to stop by and see Rosebud I picked the biggest city here which only has 1400 people just about everything I saw in Rosebud was run down trailers and burned out homes a lot of the homes here are now abandoned because the people who lived in them were cooking meth they either burn down or become unlivable so that puts a lot of people here on the streets they already have a problem with housing as it is here so every time a meth user destroys a house that's one less house on this reservation so where does everybody go into these trailers on the other side of town are all these old falling down trailer parks these used to be a somewhat decent place to live but now this is all a true ghetto all the displaced families who have nowhere else to go squish into these little boxes and try to make the best they can many don't have Plumbing or reliable electricity hardly anybody has internet I hear 40 percent of the people on this reservation are homeless [Applause] a friend of mine worked for the tribal council here and she said corruption is rampant imagine that hardly any of the government money that the tribal leaders get actually makes it into the pockets of the people who live here human trafficking drug addiction gangs cartels thieves poverty the Native Americans make up about two percent of our population and they are by far the poorest only three percent of this population is going to make it to the age of 65. what the damn hell everyone these people need more than money they need counseling job assistance education and they need to learn how to live a normal life a lot of them are just stuck in their old traditions and don't have a clue as to how to join the modern world [Music] foreign a lot of ruined downtowns in my day but I don't know if I've ever seen anything like the abandonment I saw in St Joseph Missouri in 2022 . before I show you what it looks like today I want to show you what it looked like in its heyday this was a very Vibrant Community in the 1800s it's located along the Missouri River and St Joe became the last jumping off point for travelers headed to the Wild West this is where the Pony Express began you may have heard of that then over time the railroads and Stockyards and steel makers left the brick makers left everyone left machines and foreign labor took over there really was no reason to be here anymore America makes and then the world takes today St Joe looks like it saw a major battle they say 75 percent of St Joe's downtown architecture is gone now all cast aside for shiny and new say what you want about how it looks now these buildings were built really well a lot of these buildings have some beautiful architecture some people find this fascinating because they're a glimpse of old America like old memories faded over time others like The Haunting beauty of things that are Perfectly Flawed the Germans even have a word for it ruin lust some will say this is the future of America buckle up everyone God I hope not but they might be right not all of Saint Joseph looks like this but I saw some really run down neighborhoods a lot of these hoods are some of the most dangerous you'll find in Missouri but it's amazing how much a little yard work a coat of paint and picking up the garbage would help around here when you live in an area like this what's most important are the people around you if you have family and friends in town I guess a lot of the ugly would disappear maybe the surface doesn't matter and to be honest I think a lot of these people would feel uncomfortable in large manicured burbs where folks have big ideas and goals they came out that called Saint Joseph the second saddest city in the country but how do you define sad are abandoned buildings crime and poverty sad is it sad if you have something and then it's gone if so then yes this place would be sad a lot of people who grow up poor feel they were once destined for great things they thought the world loved them but most of us realize the world loves itself [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] a lot of people write to me and they say you're driving around all these other bad places where are you from what's your hometown look like well to be honest my hometown looks like [ __ ] too I grew up in San Bernardino California I left California in 2010 but I still have family in the area when I go home my journalistic curiosity kicks in and I always drive around to see how bad things have gotten but it wasn't until the last time I went that I did a story on it today San Bernardino looks nothing like it used to be it was about 30 years ago when poverty drugs and crime began moving into our area from Los Angeles then we lost our air force base and a bunch of blue collar industries corruption bankruptcy drugs crime poverty and then homelessness crept in then a lot of the to do people fled and in their place came low income earners it kind of just got worse and worse here every year driving around today you see shuttered businesses and lots of trash druggies wander around aimlessly thieves steal Copper from the abandoned Mall you see mentally ill people on every block downtown along with burned out Office Buildings there's [ __ ] in the streets there's piss on the sidewalks you see homeless people getting medical attention homeless people drinking in the middle of the day there's homeless people everywhere they call them non-domiciled in California now or my favorite dwelling unaffiliated you turn a corner here and you never know what you're gonna see this is where I used to go roller skating when I was a kid this place was called Stardust Roller Rink today it's just dust a lot of the neighborhoods are straight up run down a lot of the people here are very poor there's shootings here all the time and hardly anyone's caught the thieves Rampage the store so often that everything's behind glass now the only way to fix this is to help the poor get housing and jobs I don't know if they actually would be able to pull that off but it's kind of a slap in the face that we give illegal immigrants more help than actual U.S citizens here's what it used to look like here just an upper middle class City about an hour from La where the blue collar folks could make a nice living it was safe and thriving and just a pleasant place to be all these places we've seen are struggling but they're still special to the people who grew up there this is my old Hometown where I learned how to ride a bike went to my first dance and made my first friends but there is nothing here now that hasn't been touched by neglect everything has signs of Abandonment and nobody seems to care it's like they want it to be like this they built this prison themselves when I drive around my old Hometown seems to me these people are both the prisoners and the guards [Music] are countries filled with drug overdoses mentally ill unhealthy and tons of people who were one paycheck away from being homeless we fight Wars and we spend a lot of our money on other countries but here we have a crumbling infrastructure everywhere and no plans to fix it Memphis Tennessee is one of the most tragic examples of America's downfall you've heard about how bad this place is for crime and poverty I had never been there before to see it myself so I went there just before Thanksgiving in 2021 ask anyone you know who knows Memphis well and they'll tell you the south side of Memphis is where the worst of it is so that's where I went at 7 A.M before all the troublemakers were up as I began the drive I saw two cops parked in a lot just on the fringes of the hood they kind of looked at me with blank Expressions I think they thought I was lost and probably wondered why is that guy heading into one of the worst hoods in the country I found the south side of Memphis to be one of the worst parts of any town I had ever seen before I saw kids walking to the bus among burned out homes and trash piles five feet high I saw Sheriff deputies knocking on doors while people were leaving the house for work but overall it was just eerily quiet no cars Birds no barking dogs Memphis was the most dangerous city in the country at the time of my visit and that would make this the most dangerous neighborhood in the U.S there are two violent crimes an hour here on average and by the end of the year Memphis saw 327 MERS that's almost one every day the cops don't want to work here anymore they even tried fifteen thousand dollar signing bonuses to get more law enforcement on the streets that didn't work almost one in three residents lives in poverty in Memphis but I'm gonna guess 90 percent of this Hood does the poor kids many of their parents are locked up I don't know what some of these people are going to do so many low-paying jobs are being automated now there's going to be millions of people phased out of the workforce soon fast food workers retail then what Memphis was on the upswing for a while at one point it was growing faster than Nashville it's home to the blues and Elvis and all that stuff but things started to get dangerous and the white families left taking a lot of jobs and tax money with them today other than criminals and low lives it's mostly just working class people just trying to get by it's hard to live a life when you're living to work and survive a lot of these are good people who've kept their sense of dignity in the face of despair good for them every one of these houses was somebody's dream at one point somebody swept the porch and washed the windows and obsessed over every repair I wonder what they would think if they saw what their Old Pride and Joy looks like now [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I've been to a lot of messed up run down places with terrible poverty and the worst crime in the country I'm rarely intimidated but there was something about East Cleveland that didn't sit right maybe it was a reputation it was certainly the way it looked but there was a feeling kind of an energy on some of the back roads of East Cleveland that made me doubt my decision to get back in there I went to East Cleveland in the summer of 2021 most of the time I go to run down cities in the winter when the skies are gray and the trees were bare I think maybe all the vegetation made it all seem so much worse though a lot of East Cleveland feels very sketch it's definitely dangerous here a lot of the main streets look like they peaked decades ago but going back to the 1950s things were jamming here this was the most densely populated Cleveland suburb a lot of people here made their living in Coal steel and shipbuilding and railroads but then the demand for American-made manufacturing plummeted we know the story jobs went overseas and so people had to leave they needed work and then the ones who moved in were far less motivated there's less than a third of the population that's left in East Cleveland today 40 percent of the homes are vacant and forty percent of people here don't even have a car households here make about 20K a year and one in every 1 000 residents was murdered last year what in the hell people there's nothing they can do or want to do with the price of lumber it would cost more to board these buildings up than the buildings are worth they're actually trying to demolish a lot of East Cleveland Detroit had success turning back its old hoods to Nature this neighborhood probably won't even be here one day so I'm glad I had a chance to see it and this is all a mile or so from a really nice leafy suburb proves you don't have to go too far to find people who have it worse than you really makes you appreciate what you have I feel bad for the children who grow up in a place like this there's millions of people living in areas like this with no hope of getting out [Music] foreign [Music] okay so the places we've seen so far are dangerous but I never really felt threatened in any of them but the weekend I went to Oakland man oh man I think Oakland might be the worst place I've been to I'm not kidding I was in San Francisco documenting the homeless problem in the fall of 2021 and I had heard that was a big homeless problem in Oakland too so I crossed the bridge and spent a weekend in Oakland looking around some of the things I saw in Oakland are just mind-blowing like there were all these Hoovervilles lining the streets on the edge of downtown it all looked like something you'd see on TV something in Haiti or East Asia entire blocks were made out of wood and tarps and whatever the homeless people could scrap together and it did not look temporary I saw entire Camp zones filled with trash where hundreds of people were living hand to mouth in the dirt like they were War refugees I saw blocks and blocks of vacant Warehouse districts that looked like they had been bombed out and then there's the neighborhoods now usually I drive through bad areas in the morning before people get up I drove through oaklands in the late afternoon when they were up and very active this is East Oakland the part of town where the worst of the crime happens now it's not nearly as bad here as it was back in the 1990s when the Bloods and Crips were shooting the place up every night but it's still really bad here and the worst part is there's hardly any police presence here Oakland is straight up Lawless people speed steel shoot up whatever they want and it goes pretty much overlooked cops are outnumbered jails are full only one in four crimes is solved here and every year one in 12 people is shot robbed assaulted or murdered I probably shouldn't have gone in there just about every house here has a gate and bars on the window the whole region is one big maze of fences and walls as I was driving around I was like where's the way to escape now we've seen a lot of places that might not have hope but that's a decision they made anyone can choose hope and any of these people can get out of these places if they really want to I should have stopped and talked to some of the people and asked them why they're still here maybe I should have gotten out of my car more [Music] [Music] now I looked online for professors who had studied Urban Decay and I found somebody who wrote a paper about Urban Decay and mentioned a bunch of the places I've talked about in this video so I figured I'd see if he talked to me and he did okay um Mike you're a professor of urban planning at UCLA and you've written about the decline of some of our biggest cities um personally how worried are you um about the decline of parts of this of America so I guess I'm a little worried I'm going to clarify something very quickly though um what I've written about well I've written about two different things one is some cities that used to be very big that have declined for a long time right and that describes Detroit Cleveland Buffalo you know Cleveland right now is its population is probably a third of what it was in 1950 it used to be one of the biggest richest cities in the country it isn't today so it's a relatively small city um our biggest cities you know New York Los Angeles uh the the San Francisco Bay Area you know big in terms of population big in terms of economy um are not declining I have written about this they have a lot of troubles but their troubles actually stem from the fact that they're growing so fast right so there are two different things going on and I worry about both of them right I think anyone who studies cities worries about the fact that cities like Detroit Milwaukee Cleveland have struggled now for decades and haven't quite been able to get back to where they once were and also worry about places like Los Angeles where I am now uh that despite on paper you know having a lot of economic growth a lot of job growth a lot of things seem to be going wrong here right we have a huge homeless population people are upset by our transportation system upset by our housing costs so I'm worried about both but they are two very different problems who do we blame for the decline in our in the cities that are that are going downhill who or what do we blame well I'm not uh blame is a is sort of a word I try to avoid and I guess I'll I'll ask again like when you say going downhill right are you talking about Detroit are you talking about San Francisco because they are two two very different things yeah the the cities that were once good that are now abandoned where people are leaving um Buffalo some towns in the midwest places like Memphis places like East Cleveland um the cities that were once good yeah yeah and and I just want to clarify because I used to live in Upstate New York they're still good these are places that a lot of people call home and they love them a lot right I don't want to just say they're bad places right I think that's a little bit insensitive but they they've run into trouble right um and I think the common denominator in a lot of these places is that uh in some ways at some point the rug got pulled out from under them by which I mean the the economic reason for their existence changed and so if you look through out the Rust Belt what you often see is cities that were built along large either bodies of water or waterways because that gave them a big advantage in a manufacturing economy and two things happen right that manufacturing economy no longer was viable in the Midwestern states for a bunch of different reasons but one of the biggest ones was just that you could get cheaper labor somewhere else and those waterways were no longer as important as they once were because we built highways and we got air travel and and on and on and on and so this this huge Advantage they once had wasn't there anymore and and what happened is you know I'm simplifying greatly for for a handful of these places um they couldn't diversify their industrial base and start doing something else and I don't you know maybe someone smarter than me knows who to blame for that but but there's a fair amount of luck that's involved right so so to give you an example uh in 1980 Boston and Detroit were both in probably equally Dire Straits Boston's per capita income was probably just a little bit higher than Detroit's but both of them had been losing a lot of population lost a lot of industrial base um there were cities that had been built along waterways to have a lot of manufacturing and it disappeared and Boston turned itself around um honestly one of the reasons it turned itself around was just there's a ton of universities there and so in an economy that was turning away from manufacturing and what we might call unskilled labor toward knowledge-based labor and how to work for us just ready to go and Detroit didn't Detroit for a city of its size in in 1960 1970 1980 really didn't have that many universities right it certainly has Wayne State University of Michigan's not far whereas Boston is just like you know you walk down the street you bump into a college and that helped like is that to Boston's credit not really I mean it was sort of an accident of History and so um now you can then say I think that uh because of that you know people continue to leave Detroit um people didn't move there as much uh people who did move there were drawn less by job prospects and more by the fact that the housing was cheap right all these things sort of add up and compound each other and so what happens is that once you know what once decline starts and I'm sort of talking about Detroit but this could apply to Milwaukee here Cleveland I don't mean to pick on Detroit it's just sort of an archetype um you end up in kind of a vicious cycle right where uh you don't have jobs and so people leave and your tax base shrinks and then once your tax base shrinks it's it's harder to do a good job governing the city right it's harder to deliver services and one of the things about declining cities that makes this so vexing is that and the people leave but the land area doesn't change right Detroit is no smaller in land area than it was in 1950 but it's much much smaller in terms of population which means that this this lower base of people and a lower income base of people now has to provide services to the same amount of land right you still need to have fire trucks and police cars that can cover that whole area in a short amount of time you need to be able to maintain a huge infrastructure that stretches out the entire land area of the city on less money and so what do you do right you're either going to not do it as well because you just can't raise enough money to do that or you're going to have to tax the people who are left at a higher rate to get the money guess what both of those things are going to encourage more people to leave right lousy services or higher taxes and so it's uh um I I think it's a little less accurate to think of this in terms of blame and more accurate to think in terms of without some external help um once a city enters into this process it's just very hard to get back on track yes some people will say um socialism is the reason for a city's decline some will say it's unrestrained capitalism or I guess Case by case yeah but I mean I think the problem with big big sort of declarations like that is is you can look at San Francisco for instance and some people will look at San Francisco and say the problem here is capitalism like look at all the tech and some people say no the problem is socialism in San Francisco for crying out loud look at all the you know all the subsidies and the leftist government and so forth uh but you know if the problem's capitalism then you know why is housing relatively inexpensive in Houston which is I'm sure just as capitalist as San Francisco is and if the problem socialism like people seem to love Helsinki right we're pretty socialist really well run really well governed like I think that it's not that useful to try and grab a big vague ideological term and blame it for something specific happening to a particular City do people in cities make mistakes yeah absolutely um and if you're and the thing is if your economy is on the edge those mistakes can be quite costly right Boston has more of a cushion in many ways than Milwaukee or Cleveland does they can fumble around a bit because people just want to be in Boston because of the jobs um but I'm I'm not sure how helpful it is to just say like capitalism socialism I mean I think it it's something people on Twitter do but you know I don't think it really sheds too much light on things yeah that that's what the YouTube commenters usually say whenever I talk about this stuff everybody wants to blame uh socialism and capitalism and it's there's a big blame game that they like to go back and forth with yeah I will say you know one one I think common problem and and so this I don't want to again get into blame but it's a recurrent mistake that's happened throughout the latter part of the 20th century and probably into the 21st dealing with these cities that have lost a lot of population has been a desire on the part of policy makers which is somewhat understandable to try and get them back to like what they once were right to and this is again I think understandable especially for people who live there and remember it right I mean people are very fond of the places they live like I'm sure you are I am I mean and so we don't always think totally rationally about them and so sometimes the economic development assistance that a place like a Detroit or a Cleveland will get is sort of like well if we build you know this convention center or this Sports Stadium or this you know if we spend a lot of tax dollars to lure this company there uh the comeback begins and we're gonna be the Detroit or Cleveland or Milwaukee of your you know a global Center of power and so forth that almost never works right and I think it often ends up just being money thrown at uh you know money for like a better term money kind of thrown down the drain right you know dumping huge amounts of money into a football stadium or a big Convention Center or or even just to try and get some company to put its headquarters into downtown um what's much more realistic is is also a little less sexy right which is like we should give assistance to these cities to help their school districts um help make them safer help make their services more reliable because at the end of the day if you want people and firms to move to a city you know you can never fully control that right but but the reliable thing is not like hey we have an NFL stadium it's this is the kind of place you and your employees would actually like to live right that that you've got good roads and good Transit and and schools where your kids you know you'd be happy to have your kids go there and so forth and so I think there's been a little less a lot of urban policy in the United States has what we call a capital bias right we want to spend money on big structures and things that we can cut ribbons in front of and be like yay um and and a little bit less uh we spend less than we should on the types of services that actually are harder to see but they do pay off a lot better which is like good investments in schools just routine maintenance of of our sewer lines and electric grids and stuff the things that make day-to-day life sort of good um and so I do think you know uh if you were to to sort of want to sort of have a a blame I guess there there's been a little too much focus in just the sort of Economic Development world over time and it is getting a little bit better on you know we want to just bring it back to the Glory Days rather than like let's just get this to a place where um for a lot of people the quality of life is just a little bit better mm-hmm yeah in your paper you discussed um not only giving cities money for some of that stuff but there was also a theory that you give people money so they can leave the place and that will help too yeah I mean I think that's this is a long-standing debate sort of related to what I just mentioned in economics and urban policy which is that when a city does decline um are we responsible the broader ways say like the U.S for instance are we responsible to that city as an entity or responsible to the people who live there first and foremost right and there's a there's a strong case and I think you can you can there's a counter case too but there's a strong case that says look if if we're looking at Detroit or Cleveland I would say we're worried about these places oftentimes what we mean is that we're worried about there are people in them they don't have a lot of good options um because they don't have a lot of good options they're they're constrained in what they could do uh is is the right thing to do to step in and say hey we're going to try and rebuild this city around you so that it gives you more options or is it to say look you know here's x amount of dollars um if you want to stay where you are by all means do it but if you really feel like you do better in Houston or Phoenix or wherever use that money and go strike out on a fresh start uh and I think that if there's a case for that sort of what we call person-based assistance it really is based on this idea that like our ability from a like to to you to affirmatively use policy to bring back a city is really limited like we've tried for a long time to sort of reignite growth in Rust Belt cities and it just hasn't worked so that's not to say no Rust Belt cities have come back right but often when they've come back it hasn't really been because of you know the government's sort of saying it will it will it will make that happen um but we do know that if you we do know that people are leaving these places anyways right that like this is the story of your buffaloes in Detroit it's like people leave and and people also when they don't move there and so if you want to give some people money they probably will go to places where there are more jobs and so forth and make a better life for themselves um the the one thing I'd add to that is just that if you do that right if you were to give cut everybody in Detroit a check and a bunch of them left you're not absolved of the responsibility of what happens to to the folks who stay right which is to say that if what you've done is just encourage even more out migration then the same problem exists for the people in Detroit who are left behind which is now they have even fewer resources um and so one thing that that my co-author and I in that paper you wrote suggested was you know people are going to leave history shows people are going to leave these places anyways um and if the government was to say okay we want to help with that migration that's fine but there still needs to be some assurance that if you stay in one of these shrinking cities uh the the basic services are are on point right that they're safe that the fire department and the ambulance will get to the house that the houses aren't falling apart um and so again that sort of suggests that there would be some place based Aid just based on like these places do have to be livable mm-hmm so all biases aside and and leaving out you know what you actually would want to see how do you feel that some of our bigger cities that are in a free fall can actually stabilize and turn themselves around one day or are they beyond help oh yeah I do um and and it's sort of because it's for a couple reasons one is that again it's very hard for us to know where the next shot of growth is going to come right like in again in 1980 people thought Boston was doomed people thought New York was doomed right like go watch Serpico it's just like this you know the popular version of the Des Moines like it was doomed uh there was a sign outside the airport in Seattle that said well the last person leaving please turn out the lights and then what happened like eight years after that Bill Gates got homesick he had started Microsoft in New Mexico got homesick they went home him and Paul Allen to Seattle and now Seattle's a tech you know it has too much Prosperity is what most people there would tell you it's a weird thing to say but that's what they would tell you and and so these are sort of Strokes of Fortune that can be very consequential and it would be wrong to just look at um uh any given city in the US and said well you never recovering um at the same time like it's hard to predict that or count on it right and so I do think there are and and there's lots of people besides me who do a lot more work on this kind of issue than I do um and they'd have better more specific policy ideas but I think that uh it while it is true that sort of growth predicts growth and decline predicts decline um there's no reason at all why we have to say that these cities just have to continue to spiral you know I do think there are things that can be done and again it's you step in not to sort of make them start growing like gangbusters that's just not something the government's very good at but yeah stabilize them uh make them so that they are you know that right now these are still places that lots of people live in and love and couldn't imagine living anywhere else but they could use some help to just kind of make their services better and I think that's something that can very much be done yeah and you hear over and over I do personally we give all this money to Ukraine 100 billion dollars to give us money overseas when our own cities are crumbling and we've got depression and economic instability and do you agree with that or do you do you have an opinion on that no I mean I think you know we we do spend a lot of money on our own cities um and it's just it doesn't end up getting publicized a lot because you know it's it's nowhere nowhere near as uh sort of exciting or newsworthy or what have you as a war in Ukraine which sort of came out of nowhere and and now and occupied the world's attention um the and you know the federal budget is is awfully big um so it's it's there is room for us to uh to spend in our own cities and help out other countries I think the I I think well there's but I think there's there's two points that could be raised for that one is that again um we could just and I I know very little about foreign aid to the Ukraine's military so I'm not even going to try and talk about the merits or demerits of that I I think I'm generally in favor of it but um what is it the money we spend on our own cities as I mentioned already we don't even necessarily have to spend more we could just spend it a little bit more wisely right tax breaks for big firms to locate places tax breaks for sports stadiums if more of these just became sort of investment in basic services that would go a long way and you wouldn't actually even see the total dollar amount being spent change very much um the second thing though just related to uh to sort of foreign countries is that if you wanted to give a lot of uh our struggling cities are shot in the arm you could let in more immigrants right I mean there's just people all over the world who would love to live in the United States and this is not the way our immigration system works right now um and there's pluses and minuses to changing it to this but if you said to people like yeah you can come but like for the first five years or something you gotta live in Detroit I mean this population would go way up and it there's a lot of evidence out there that's pretty persuasive that if you want to inject some Vitality into an urban area a bunch of immigrants will do it like they show up they're entrepreneurs they're hard workers you know that this is a lot of the product of selection bias which is like what kind of person actually picks up and moves across the world is a very ambitious person um and so you know uh that is uh that's one way you could help foreign people in foreign countries and help our own cities is just let more people into the United States yeah no I agree uh doctors nurses teachers meet all police officers yeah like some of the core Industries and and um job the stuff that's important it's hard to get people to do these things they can't get people to that they don't want to plumb they don't want to be electricians anymore they don't want to do Lumber they don't want to drive trains um I I personally think that's because the college was told you've got to go to college the trades no you don't do that anymore you got to be smart and go to college and you know and and that has fallen out of favor and so kids these days that want nothing to do with the respectful trades that that in the 50s through 80s were like a backbone for a lot of families that's how they made their money that's right and I think so you know um and wages in some of those fields not all but some of those fields have contracted a bit too which makes them less attractive but um yeah it would uh it's I think there are there there's jobs that a lot of native born Americans don't want to do for a variety of reasons I think the the sort of cult of college that you that you've mentioned is a part of it for sure um other reasons as well but that a lot of people around the world would just love to do them in the United States and it would be uh in many respects a win-win right so that's one thing worth considering one more question why why are people so whenever I publish a video that's about you know ghetto and like dangerous and bad and declining those videos get 10 times as many clicks as when I'm like here's a really pretty little town in the midwest like why are people so fascinated by by ghettos and urban blight and decline uh that that might actually be a better question for a you know a psychologist or a something like that um you know I I think you see the same thing just in popular culture and movies though right which is that we're we're drawn in not in our personal lives right I mean but we're drawn by the idea of danger and dysfunction and pathology and so forth um and and you know in many ways it is uh you know in some ways it's harmless like I'm a pretty pacifistic guy but I like watching movies where people shoot at each other because I know it's fake um but in some ways it is there's been a lot of work done by sociologists I think about uh the the extent to which people's appeal for that and then the Market's sort of supplying it because there is a demand for it does create in some respects sort of a unrealistic and and sort of negative ideas of what it's like to live in some of these places right which is to say that like there are places in the country that absolutely have a lot of problems but again you know you can go to uh a public housing project or a low-income neighborhood in in Los Angeles and and you know understand a lot of people there are are having a tough time and you might personally not want to live there but it doesn't come close remotely to sort of like what you might expect from a stereotype you know all that's flying and you know just so it's a um I think it is a it's like a feedback loop where for whatever reason and I don't pretend to understand it uh the typical person is drawn more to stories like that than to upbeat stories and then so we Supply them and then on it goes yeah I think people just part of it is they like to see feel better about themselves and and watch like oh my God these people are suffering God at least I'm not suffering like that like I mean it could be a it's a although I wish if that there could be something to that I wish that they whoever was acting motivated on that impulse would take the next step and just have a little more just sort of General gratitude right rather than just clicking onto the next video um because those of us who who do live in um in kind of healthy places uh and and stable communities and so forth uh you know I think we we should we do take it for granted a little bit and we should be quite grateful for it and we should think more about what we can do to to make sure everybody has that that option yeah I agree are you looking to move and need advice I do Consulting that's right I'll sit down and talk about where the next perfect place for you and your family should be I do it all the time together let's find you a new home that's safe and checks all your boxes and I can also help you find your new house too email me and I'll work with you on not just helping you figure out where to move but I can help you find your perfect home too that's right I know awesome reliable agents all over the country and I'd love to connect you to somebody who can help you search for that perfect home hey guys if you learned something new about America or what it's like to live in America great you should think about subscribing and turning on your notifications you can also click one of these videos or playlists for more this this age next manager this has been a Corner House Entertainment production

Channel: Nick Johnson

Views: 5,844,840

Keywords: moving to florida, florida realtor, california real estate, new jersey mortgage loan, worst oakland neighborhoods, illinois, where are the worst ghettos in america, united states ghettos, where are the worst cities to live, where are the most dangerous cities, crime, driving tour, worst neighborhoods, high crime, california, oakland, florida, ohio, iowa, south chicago, chicago, missouri, st. joseph, new jersey, tennessee, memphis, worst memphis hoods, tennessee realtor, moving tennessee

Id: lf_IaLAXQCA

Length: 60min 5sec (3605 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023