The amount of ghost towns in the US and elsewhere will skyrocket in our lifetimes and become a normalized thing

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• hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is actually fairly normal through human history. Oasies dry up, mines run out, rivers change, easily fortified locations prove later impractical, trade routes move due to conflict or geography. When it happens within your lifetime, it triggers the cognitive bias of loss aversion. You feel it personally. When it happens a century or two before, it’s a curiosity.

  I’ve spent a lot of time in dying or ghost towns, and no one owes any human settlement the right to exist in perpetuity. If humans vanished tomorrow, who would mourn your or my hometown?

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  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Years ago, I went with a girlfriend to visit her relatives who lived in several rural Minnesota towns. As we drove down the highway, we saw lots of little towns with 3 and even 2 digit populations. Some towns were one intersection, sometimes without even a traffic light, but they’d always seem to have a post office, and a couple of bars.

    In one low 2 digit small town, her relatives made up nearly half the population, and she took me through several empty houses and buildings that used to belong to relatives, all unlocked. One was an old abandoned forge where some great-great relative had been a blacksmith long ago. We stayed in a family-owned house that was fully furnished, but nobody lived there since an uncle passed away several years before.

    That trip was about 50 years ago (!), and many of those towns were already on a long decline back then. Surely many of them have collapsed since then, and emptied out.

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  • Gonzako@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    my dog :(

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Actually, he’d just wait outside a pizza parlor on a sidewalk…

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  • ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They hated him because he told the truth

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• CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I in a city that is a confluence of two rivers and the next city over is known for its aquifer.

  Yet, the city government has hired consultants to come up with ideas for how to handle expected water shortages in the area as a result of development. Not to get all /c/collapse but it sure does make me feel negative about humanity’s effect on the planet.

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    if you build a city in a DESERT, one should be cognizant of the expectation of water shortage.

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    • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Well that’s the thing. We have tons of water here. We don’t irrigate. There’s no datacenter. Yet we still managed to fuck it up.

      But I agree with your statement. Places like AZ and CA are crazy, growing lettuce and almonds and lawns and having bathtubs and pools is really bizarre behaviour in a desert. We’ve really lost touch with nature.

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    • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Mexico city was originally built on a lake.

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  • wavebeam@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Fuck, I hadn’t heard about Salem’s water concerns.

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• tronx4002@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I think this will happen for reasons other than water too. So many towns in America were built to be in proximity of train lines who’s location today makes no strategic or economic sense.

  I believe many will hit critically low population levels where they can no longer support hospitals, schools, grocery stores, churches, etc

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• Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I hope to dive the ruins of Miami one day.

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• tensorpudding@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I suspect coal country in Kentucky, WV and rural PA and Virginia and the western plains in Nebraska and Kansas, which are already severely stressed with population loss, will see some real ghost towns soon. Especially if the Ogallala aquifer dries up in the latter case.

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  • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Not a big guardian fan but I just saw an article about such downs pertaining to Trump cutting the funding that was earmarked to help those kinds of towns transition away from coal. www.theguardian.com/…/trump-coal-country

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Not a big Guardians fan??? Surely you can’t deny that Jose Rameriez is one of the greatest in the game today!!! Go Guards!

      …we’re talking baseball right?

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  • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    A lot of the small towns in Nebraska and Kansas will be ghost towns when the few boomers that still live there pass away as all of the younger generations have already moved away.

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    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      no jobs in small towns unfortunately, so they all move close to big cities.

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    is that why they are redistricting/gerrymandering so hard in recent years too? it make sense.

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• BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  How long before MAGAs decide to relocate homeless people to the ghost towns, then complain because they aren’t thriving in an arid desert without access to water?

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• FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I recently took a ‘no tolls’ route south through rural Oklahoma and Texas and saw many of these dead and dying small towns.

  Many had a fat county sheriff hanging out to ticket people driving through.

  It really is sad to see it. Those people are all now living in suburbs and slowly being driven out of their neighborhoods there by cost of living too.

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• Eq0@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  In the Alps, there are already quite some ghost towns. Small towns either turned into touristic villages or disappeared over the last 50 years. Others were border towns that slowly went out of business. So many are hanging in by a thread, with increasingly old population.

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  • FatVegan@leminal.space ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I read something that villages in the alps are looking for new residents. But most of them are bankers or other people with office jobs, and they are like: no, we don:t need better wifi, you guys are useless in the real world.

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It happens everywhere.

    Current structures favour moving to cities. Farming and mining (which are the biggest job sectors that require people living in rural areas) are getting more and more automated, which means that there are fewer and fewer jobs in these fields. At the same time, huge, automated businesses win financially against smaller businesses operated with manual labour, so the small farmers are dieing off as well.

    Manual jobs are often seasonal (e.g. picking fruit), and they are filled with seasonal foreign workers who don’t live in the rural areas either.

    WIth fewer people living in rural areas other jobs (e.g. factories) also move to the cities, further removing rural jobs.

    All of that push more people to move to cities and so on.

    The impending demographic change accelerates that trend too.

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• darkmogool@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  free realestate

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• Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Good for affordable housing?

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  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    not if they’re abandoned because they don’t have accessible clean water, affordable power etc…

    people aren’t walking away from livable places.

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    • Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      🤫 that’ll upset our precious 1%

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• Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I don’t think it will happen within 30 years, but for sure, with climate change a lot of places where it was possible to get water will no longer be able to get access to it easily.

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  • Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    30 years? No, it’s happening now. But it’s not an off switch that is triggered amd it’s the end. It’s more of a wiggly line that goes just above sufficiency, then just below as ever increasing amd extreme measures are taken. The emergency is only prolonged and the inevitable is people will have to move as there are limits to trucking in water from a cost and availability perspective.

    climatecosmos.com/…/americas-quiet-crisis-10-citi…

    latimes.com/…/california-water-crisis-state-inter…

    medium.com/…/here-s-what-i-saw-in-a-california-to…

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    • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I mean people are running out of water now, but I don’t think there are many ghost towns, yet.

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• reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It’s happened before with mining towns and the early days of the oil boom. Lots of still abandoned towns in the middle of nowhere.

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• someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You can recycle your water very well. Vegas has a very low loss rate. It will be cheaper to pipe water in to replace losses than build an entire new city.

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  • NotSteve_@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The problem repeatedly seems to come down to a decision of “cost now, money saved later” versus “money saved now, much bigger cost later”.

    The choice always seems to be the latter

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    • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I highly doubt in this scenario. Water is not that expensive even shipped. Building anything let alone a city? Fucking insane. Think about every house business and industrial builiding. It’s unreal.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You willing to bet a city on that?

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    • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Bum fuck nowhere might go under because there’s no business there anyway. Vegas and Phoenix are not going anywhere.

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