• BC
    13.1k
    71823d458590385307ed63fd9c8020d10420107c.pnj

    YouTube has quite a few drive-through videos, where a producer drives through a town and provides a commentary on what we are seeing. I like watching these videos. The videos provide scenic views, though often enough the scenic view is a disaster area. Detroit is the candy bowl of urban collapse videos.

    There are other places in Michigan that are also in dire straits, like Mount Morris city and township just east of Flynt, MI. Mt. Morris is small - 3,131 people in a fairly large area. One third of the population is living below the poverty line, and the average income is low. The average house is worth just 69,000. Only 4.4% of the population have completed college.

    Mt. Morris is the kind of place one thinks of when one was about the opiate, meth, and fentanyl epidemic. It's a place where an unskilled man has at best a slight chance of finding any employment, let alone a good job.

    e2db5b78d16082b1159c8384ae8dbbd6f13801b8.pnj

    Mt. Morris is one of many places in the large spread of the midwest which has economically flatlined; the old economic base (large factories) is gone, and the commercial infrastructure is crumbling in abandonment.

    In addition, these places are FLAT, lacking hills, valleys, thick forests, and large bodies of water. On a cloudy day, the depression is palpable and the geography is debilitating.

    009790e2cf5df61aa7ed1db13124bb5c2d324b0d.pnj

    Still, people live there, willingly, and it isn't all bad.

    b1802428844cd9dabdc7704c1ec9cb7e24a70e2a.pnj
  • BC
    13.1k
    I can find deteriorating neighborhoods in Minneapolis; you can probably find them in your city, too. But in a healthy city, deteriorating neighborhoods are the exception, not the rule.

    Where the core city (Flynt, for example) is the core of the region, and the core is rotting, there can't be much hope. The whole economic landscape is gradually sinking, and a revitalization is extraordinarily unlikely. The long manufacturing boom which began 100 years ago isn't likely to be remotely approximated again.

    Thus, those on the bottom in places like this have no prospects. Is it a surprise that physical and existential pain-reducing drugs are epidemic?

    I don't like it, but it seems reasonable that when the "opiate of the masses" no longer works, real opiates will be sought after.
  • praxis
    6.2k
    Did a YouTube search for my city and it’s supposedly the fourth most neighborly city in the nation, though I suspect a goodly amount of PR foolery in the presentation.

  • javi2541997
    4.9k


    I did a research in my city too. Madrid is the capital city of Spain and it holds many architectural structure related to bourgeois and millionaires, but there are also neighbourhoods which are in decadence.


    Very working class neighbourhood... the buildings are part of Franco's era in the 1950s and 1960s.

    143863_b9d8e8b07c1169b7115d25b2ee57d1f1.jpeg

    238586990.jpg

    FotoCarretera-de-Carabanchel-a-Aravaca_Madrid-1024x352.jpg

    One interesting fact is that all of those neighbourhoods are in the south of Madrid, while the north is for rich people. Between the 1960s and 1990s there were a huge construction works for middle class families. I live in of these working class districts... I don't consider as "bad" but it feels abandoned by public administration.

    This building is similar of the one I live in:
    1065695512.jpg
  • praxis
    6.2k


    I recently learned a bit of Spanish history from reading a bunch of Isabel Allende books. A particularly touching part was when, after Franco took power, a shipload of Spanish asylum seekers arrived in Chile and, despite their fears, were met with dockside fanfare and open arms.
  • javi2541997
    4.9k
    Thanks for reading history of my country Praxis :up:

    I know some about that boat, I think it was called SS Winnipeg. Those Spaniards were fled thanks to Pablo Naeruda who decided to organize their travel to Chile. He first worked as Chilean consul in Spain, before being named consul in Paris. The ship was an old French cargo ship which ordinarily could not take more than 250 persons, but it was adapted so it could carry the 2,200 refugees.
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