Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Cities of death?

As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:

This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the average age is soaring, and private foundations are awarding scholarships to retain students and attract new ones.
In Pittsburgh, public school enrollment plummeted from about 70,000 two decades ago to about 30,000 and continues shrinking by about 1,000 a year.

Here’s the graphic that goes along with the article:


0518-nat-PITTSBURGH.jpg
Remember that the idea that cities should even have endogenous natural increase is pretty new; in pre-modern public health conditions urban areas were population sinks because of high mortality rates. Their growth was driven by migration from the endless population reservoirs of the rural areas. This situation is different because of the lack fo replenishment. Looking at the map it seems like a good gauge of areas that young people would find boring; Curry county on the Oregon coast for example is very isolated by road from large urban areas

Posted in Uncategorized

Comments are closed.