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Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?

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This is made complicated because before cities go bankrupt they try to stay alive in ways that cause people and industry to leave (such as reducing school funding, reducing road maintenance, raising taxes, etc). As such, by the time the city goes bankrupt there will be other things to point to, but the underlying failure was that the city ran out of money and was trying to work around that.

And really what does bankruptcy mean for a city? It doesn't meet it's liabilities. It probably has some assets so those will be seized. That really doesn't extend to any property owned by others.

From 2008, "What Happens When City Hall Goes Bankrupt?":

* https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=607402...

it means that school budgets get slashed, public transit is greatly reduced, road maintenance stops etc.

I think that’s a rather unfair question as cities should be resilient to significant population shifts. The world isn’t constant so the inability to handle change means you already have issues.

Population shifts don’t just happen in an afternoon if a city can’t deal with a 10% population decline over a decade it was already in dire straits. Pensions for example are’t inherently an issue, it’s just a debt that should have been prepaid over the ~30 years these employees where working for the city.

A great many US cities were losing population in the post-WWII era including some that are now regarded as "elite" coastal cities. Boston, for example, was losing population well into the nineties and, lots of universities notwithstanding, had no real major tech industry left by the time Teradyne moved out. (All the local computer companies and defense contractors were out in the suburbs/exurbs.)

So some cities did weather the cycles. Others like Detroit not so much--at least outside of certain core areas.

Wouldn't these be good examples? Boston is a pre-car city that weathered population decline well. Detroit was a city that rebuilt itself around the car and experienced decline.

The levels of decline were different however. As were a lot of other particulars.

Boston/Cambridge long had a major research university base as well as a fair bit of industry especially in East Cambridge and what's now the Seaport area. Also a significant financial/legal/etc. district. A lot of the industry did have significant declines maybe a couple of times in the 20th century. East Cambridge was really only revitalized in a major way when Pharma/biotech came in during the 80s/90s--and the Seaport redevelopment is ongoing.

There certainly have been efforts in Detroit and apparently the riverfront gentrification has progressed considerably but the city as a whole still is in generally poor shape and for a variety of reasons is probably less attractive overall than coastal cities are.

ADDED: And Boston may be a "pre-car city" and does have a decent public transit system but most adults still own cars because a lot of their friends and activities will be outside the city.

Detroit never rebuilt because intellectuals in places like Boston cooked up economic policies that pulled the rug out from under American manufacturing and heavy industry with predictable consequences for any city depending upon them.

Cambridge and Boston had a significant manufacturing base at one point. https://historycambridge.org/industry/

In the U.S. population shifts in major cities happened rapidly after the desegregation. As an example of this the population of Pittsburgh was around 600,000 in 1960 and is around 300,000 today. The people that left tended to have higher paying jobs due to the wage gap between whites and blacks at the time. Local taxes declined significantly and since the U.S. largely funds k-12 education from local taxes the schools were badly affected. Once the spiral starts it’s hard to reverse.

Before desegregation ambulance, trash, and other city services used to be paid for using taxes. My unpopular view of all this is that whites largely decided that they didn’t want to pay for things that benefitted blacks and this very much adversely affected large cities. I don’t know to what extent this plays into what the Strong Towns article talked about but it seems reasonable to think it plays a part.

It seems clear to me that a city that loses say half its population is not going to be able to just absorb that and move on. Like a large ant colony, a large number of ants are needed to support and maintain it.

Ant colonies are resiliant to large population drops. Colony size depends not just on species but also time of year and available food. As to cities, there isn’t a minimum viable size we just call tiny cities towns.

Trouble is poor don’t pay taxes but consume a lot of services. If the middle class and rich who do pay the bills leave them a city can have a huge decline in coke from a small population decline.

This is straight up false. In local and state taxes, poor people pay a far higher percent of their income.

Over 50% of people pay $0 in income taxes. Yes, they pay sales taxes and generally property taxes indirectly as part of their rent - but they provide 0 in revenues as far as state, local, and Federal taxes are concerned.

The top 10% of income earners pay 80% of the taxes.

This is only true if you ignore payroll tax, social security, gas tax, tolls, and other highly regressive taxes. Where is your 10/80 stat coming from? https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2020/ paints a very different picture: the top 20% of earners pay 75% of income tax while making around 75% of the income.

The majority of people do not pay any income tax and also receive numerous credits. This means they are net gainers of the tax system by not only not paying anything but actually receiving bonus money for things that they aren't taxed on.

When you add up all those other things, it amounts to essentially nothing. At the end of the day while we have certain pols demanding high earners "pay their fair share", the truth is most people pay nothing and the highest earners pay for almost everything. These are just the facts. I suspect the "fair share" nonsense is just trying to leverage jealous tendencies in certain people that can't be bothered to address the root cause of their shortcomings: themselves.

First government services go disproportionately to support the wealthy. Just look at the density of cops : population in rich vs poor areas etc.

As to tax burden it only looks like that i you ignore the US has several different income taxes and many non income taxes. A homeless drunk who spends most of their money on cheap alcohol pays a higher percentage of tho income in taxes than any of the US billionaires.

Naming one specific income tax as “the income tax” was a brilliant idea that has been doping people for decades.

Then offer fewer services, plenty of poor cities exist around the world.

I can't, because every American city I can think of experienced redlining and white flight, which led to the loss of population, business, and investment.

Also, a lot of states don't allow municipalities to file for bankruptcy.

Detroit? The industry is still there but they've lost 50% of their population. But the whole point of the video is when you build these big suburbs and suburban development patterns you're on the hook for their cost no matter if anyone is living there or not.

This is an odd example.

Detroit literally lost hundreds of thousands of auto manufacturing jobs.

The companies only remain there in a token fashion.

Detroit's population has been declining for 60 years, and the population of the Metro area is still in the millions. The city itself is at 624,177 in '20. The downfall is years and the making and has to do with more than auto manufacturing. It's not like the nearby cities stuck with a single point of failure for a century, manufacturing is big but varied and the economy diversified over time. Across the U.S. manufacturing has been sensitive to the rise of competing economies.

strongtowns actually names Detroit as a very early adopter of suburban city planning and sprawl. The argument is they are in part reeling from the impact of these policies faster than other cities.

Not a city, per se, but counties, yes.

Orange County, CA circa 1994. Bonds & securities shenanigans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Citron#County_bankruptc...

New York City came 1-day close to declaring bankruptcy on 16 October 1975.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...

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