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Hot take:
It doesn't matter who wins the LA mayor race, and it doesn't matter if a Mamdani or a Lurie are in charge of a city in 2026.
The contagion that currently dominates American (and global) cities is not driven by politics. It's driven by technology and culture. No person, or system can change this. The decline has already occurred.
Urban power is based on having monopolies on:
1) Retail
2) Education
3) Medicine
4) Technology
5) Culture
6) Employment
7) Government
8) Young people
Retail is completely decentralized. The gap is gone. You can buy anything online and ship it to your door now.
Education has been badly damaged by activist professors, costs, and universities not keeping up with technology. Colleges are now NGO activist farms and mincemeat for the service industry slop economy.
Medicine is becoming increasingly decentralized. Regional surgery centers and suburban hospitals are becoming go-to locations for medical treatments. Telemedicine is cutting traffic into medical districts. Doctors are approaching working-class lifestyles in cities.
Technology has vastly improved the suburban and rural experience. Suburban and rural isolation, once dominant cultural themes in the late 20th century, are nearly gone. High-speed internet, smartphones, EVs, and improvements to the single-family home have made non-urban life extremely livable, with much more improvement on the way.
Culture is drastically shifting away from cities. Urban areas are now dominated with performative, downwardly mobile leftists. Many of them working in journalism and entertainment have completely lost touch with the public. Minority urban culture is seen as increasingly lawless, self-destructive, degenerate, and dangerous. The "cool" factor is gone. Immigrants have gone from hard working anti-communist patriots to scamming economic migrants with no loyalty to the nation.
Employment has never recovered since the pandemic. WFH has won. Countless media depictions in the 1990s of the "miserable commuter / office worker" came to a head. People don't want to ride on trains/busses with homeless people. People don't want to go to office parties or out with co-workers after work. It's not healthy and we all felt that way. There is no reason in 2026 to cram millions of people into a tiny urban sector for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Government, possibly the strongest institution in urban areas, is facing serious crises. 20 of the 25 largest American cities are financially underwater. Corruption has become endemic. Cities are turning increasingly to some perverted form of 21st third-world Marxism while staring at budget deficits and pension liabilities that will cripple them for decades. States are showing significantly less appetites for bailing out urban areas. Cities are now embracing suicidal policies like prison abolition and dramatically cutting police forces.
It remains to be seen if Gen A will buck the trend of young adults moving to cities. Gen Z has continued to move to cities but are choosing mid-size cities and inner-ring suburbs more. Unlike Gen Z, Gen A will be coming up in an era of urban decline. They'll be taught from a young age that cities suck. They'll see the homeless, the costs, and the despair.
Long story short, it's over. I don't pretend to presume what cities will become, but it's not going to be anything like Summer 2016. They'll likely become poorer, isolated, and dominated by crumbling infrastructure and Marxism. Curiosities for sightseeing tourists. Venice for the lucky ones. 1970's Bronx for everyone else.
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