from Silver Doctors:

The costs of being victimized is just one of many reasons homeowners & businesses may realize life & business in core cities has lost its luster…

by Ryan McMaken of Mises Institute

Manufacturing company 7-Sigma made headlines when it decided to leave Minneapolis as a result of the company’s plant being burned by rioters. “They don’t care about my business,” 7-Sigma owner Kris Wyrobek old the Star-Tribune. After more than thirty years in the city, the company isn’t staying, nor are any of the company’s fifty jobs.

But the costs of being victimized in protests is just one of many reasons homeowners and businesses may be realizing life and business in central cities has lost its luster. The ongoing threat of more business lockdowns, more riots, higher taxes, and failing schools may induce many Americans to flee, once again, to the suburbs as their parents or grandparents did.

This goes well beyond the fear of the disease many journalists have assumed is behind the observed beginnings of an exodus from cities. Yes, many in the upper classes have fled the cities for their mountain homes and yachts for “health reasons.” But these people are relatively few in number and their thinking quixotic. They can afford to drop everything and leave cities overnight.

But the larger impacts are likely to be felt as middle class homeowners and business owners conclude they’d simply rather avoid the edicts and neglect of mayors and city councils in central cities who think nothing of issuing job-destroying “stay-at-home” orders while allowing rioters and vandals free rein.

The real cost to cities is likely to emerge over time. It will come in the form of families and shop owners who decide it’s best to move their businesses ten miles down the road to a neighboring city that will actually do something about rioters. It will come in the form of families which decide their next home will be just a little bit farther from the urban dictator-mayors who have the heaviest hands in enforcing lockdowns and business closures. It will come in the form of potential new business owners and homeowners will be decide to never purchase property to start a business in central cities in the first place.

The Decline of Cities at Mid-Century

We may be seeing something reminiscent of what happened in America’s large central cities during the 1970s and 1980s. Many Americans concluded these cities had become unlivable and crime infested. Many concluded these were places that were quite inhospitable to doing business. So they left. (Forced busing for “integration” purposes was a factor as well.)

In some cases, there were dramatic events that illustrated the trend. The late sixties in New York saw several strikes by city workers. Transit and sanitation in the city became a disaster. The 1977 blackout in New York City ended in widespread riots that induced many businesses to pack up and never return. Many households followed.

But for the most part, cities saw an exodus that took many years and slowly hollowed out the finances and tax revenues of big cities. Areas of Detroit fell into ruin. By the mid-seventies, New York City was lurching from one fiscal crisis to another.

“Nearly half of large cities shrank by at least 10 percent” during the 1970s, according to the Kansas City Fed :

St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Detroit each shrank by more than 20 percent. Vast stretches of urban land were left virtually deserted.

More than half of large cities lost population from 1950 to 1980.

There were other factors at work as well, of course. The central cities were often hit the hardest as the old Rust Belt went into decline after the region was destroyed by labor unions and city and state laws that made business in the region inefficient and uncompetitive. Business owners and workers who possessed any real ambition or entrepreneurial spirit had good reason to leave the region altogether.

City centers, built on an old manufacturing-based working class never recovered.

The situation today is a bit different. During the 1990s, core cities began to recover from their mid-century decline and many officials and intellectuals in these areas began cultivating the so-called “creative class” (also known as the “bohemian bourgeoisie“) with the idea that young artists, engineers, architects, and tech workers might be convinced to move into city centers and revitalize local urban economies. It appears to have worked in many cases.

But in 2020 America the hey day of the new techno-city may be over.

Civil Unrest

The case of the 7-Sigma closure in Minneapolis is just the most famous case of central cities’ hostility to businesses within their borders. We’re not hearing about the many small less-notable businesses that won’t re-open in the wake of the riots. In other cities, such as Chicago, city officials are now begging retailers to not leave the city.

Meanwhile, a number of small businesses now within the “CHOP” zone in Seattle are suing the city for abandoning businesses to the whims of the leftist mob.

As reported by the local NBC affiliate, local businesses have been threatened and harassed by the bosses of the “Capitol Hill Occupation Protest” (CHOP) zone in the city. The city government, the plaintiffs have concluded, essentially have abandoned these businesses to the new “government”:

The City’s decision has subjected businesses, employees, and residents of that neighborhood to extensive property damage, public safety dangers, and an inability to use and access their properties.

Minneapolis and Seattle aren’t the only cities with the prospect of continued civil unrest. With forty million new unemployment filings in recent months, the US faces a worrisome period of highly elevated unemployment. Many of the worst-affected workers will be lower-income populations living in core cities. This won’t help the prospect of a speedy return to placid city environments.

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