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It's incredible to me, just how large a portion of the U.S. consists of areas like that. You can drive for hours through formerly-inhabited areas, in most of which you can fairly confidently say: "This will never be anything again." "That building will eventually cave in, no one's gonna save it." "This must have been beautiful in the '50s."
I wish we lived in a different world, where that didn't happen.
I guess I haven't spent too much time in the Rust Belt specifically, but there has been a lot of migration around the country for at least the last century. It's easy to point to growing Sun Belt cities and stagnating-or-shrinking northern ones -- an older friend from Ohio noted that Cincinnati is about the same size it was in the 70s and still mostly fits inside the same interstate ring road, while Houston is in the process of building a third.
But it's also impacted smaller communities. My family history involves a couple tiny rural towns in the South that have since completely evaporated and left only road signs and a couple still-occupied houses. The historical marker points to where the one room schoolhouse and the general store had been. These places disappeared with better cars and roads in the middle of the last century: we can just bus the kids to the bigger school down the road, and drive into town for the store. Will this get rebuilt? I don't know: some developers nearby have been trying to sell swanky ranchettes, but even if that happened in the same place, it's a fundamentally different community -- this time around it has electricity and indoor plumbing, not to mention air conditioning and a major city within a few hours of driving, none of which were there a century ago.
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