Economics Alone Drives Urban Decline
False Assumption: Population decline in major American cities stems primarily from economic shifts like factory closures and job losses rather than high murder rates.
Summaries Written by FARAgent (AI) on February 10, 2026 · Pending Verification
For decades, the respectable view was that big-city population loss was mainly an economic story. Factories closed, rail yards emptied, jobs moved South or overseas, air conditioning made the Sunbelt livable, and people followed opportunity. That was not foolish. Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and New Orleans did lose industrial employment, and economists and urban policy writers had real data showing that deindustrialization and suburbanization were reshaping the map. A reasonable observer in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s could look at shuttered plants and shrinking payrolls and conclude that economics was doing the heavy lifting.
The trouble was that this account kept treating murder as background noise, even when the noise grew deafening. In city after city, population losses accelerated during years when homicide rates climbed and stayed high. Detroit lost residents as its murder rate rose above 5 per 10,000 by the mid-1970s; Baltimore went on losing people through decades of persistent lethal violence; St. Louis and New Orleans showed similar patterns. The old line, that people were leaving because "the jobs left," also sat awkwardly with evidence that many departures came from neighborhoods where daily disorder and fear were impossible to ignore, and that black residents, not just whites in "white flight," were leaving too.
A growing body of research now suggests the economic story was too neat. Studies such as crime-and-urban-flight work in the 2000s, along with newer commentary on Baltimore and other cities, argue that high murder rates were not a side issue but a major driver of who stayed, who left, and who never came. That does not erase the role of lost industry, bad schools, housing policy, or suburban competition. It does mean the old assumption, that urban decline stemmed primarily from economics and only secondarily from violence, is increasingly recognized as flawed.
Status: A small but growing and influential group of experts think this was false
People Involved
- Henry Canaday spent years as an economist and business journalist quietly assembling data that most of his peers preferred to ignore. In 2023 he released a 132-page report examining crime and population changes across 21 major U.S. cities from 1960 to 2023, demonstrating that cities with murder rates above two per 10,000 consistently lost residents while those below the threshold gained them. The report controlled for other economic variables yet still found the murder threshold held, a finding that challenged decades of conventional explanations. His work earned him the role of unwelcome cassandra among urban experts who had long insisted economics alone told the story. [1]
- Alan Ehrenhalt, longtime contributing editor at Governing magazine, brought Canaday’s findings to a wider policy audience by publishing a detailed analysis of the report. He presented the data without embellishment, letting the numbers show that murder rates tracked population loss far more tightly than factory closures or job statistics. The piece appeared at a moment when many city leaders still attributed decline to distant economic forces. Ehrenhalt’s decision to platform the study marked one of the first mainstream policy outlets willing to treat crime as a primary variable rather than a secondary symptom. [1]
- Santiago Pinto and Tim Sablik, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, laid out the standard economic account in the bank’s 2016 annual report. They argued that agglomeration economies, suburbanization driven by highways, and school quality explained why people left older industrial cities. Their essay reflected the consensus view among many policy economists at the time and was widely circulated among urban planners. Both men presented their case in good faith based on the data sets then dominant in the literature. [5]
- Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore repeatedly tied his city’s population losses to the legacy of racial redlining and called for equitable investments rather than direct confrontation of crime and education failures. In interviews following disappointing census numbers he maintained that historical structural racism remained the root cause. His administration’s growth plans reflected that framing, directing policy emphasis toward economic redistribution over immediate safety measures. Scott’s public stance illustrated how political leaders translated the economic-only assumption into concrete local strategy. [6]
▶ Supporting Quotes (8)
“Now Henry Canaday, an economist and longtime business journalist, has come up with some compelling data that purports to show that the connection between crime and population loss may be more direct and more powerful than most experts have believed.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Alan Ehrenhalt is a contributing editor for Governing. He served for 19 years as executive editor of Governing Magazine.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Now Henry Canaday, an economist and longtime business journalist, has come up with some compelling data that purports to show that the connection between crime and population loss may be more direct and more powerful than most experts have believed.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Finally, and most dubious, is the notion that black politicians and people actually engineered the movement of whites to the suburbs for political advantage. [...] In his 24 years as mayor, Detroit’s Coleman Young drove white residents and businesses out of the city, [similar to how] Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe abused white farmers after his country’s independence, openly encouraging their emigration even at a huge cost to the economy.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“A 1982 Brookings Institution study concluded, “Continuing population declines in most large U.S. cities seem irreversible” (Bradbury, Downs, and Small).”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Understanding Urban Decline By Santiago Pinto and Tim Sablik”— Understanding Urban Decline
““When you live in the place that birthed racial redlining this is the result and what you get, and this is why you hear me talk about investing in our city in an equitable way,” he said.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“The political framing of crack cocaine was exacerbated in 1986 when the death of young, Black basketball star Len Bias, who was widely presumed to be caused by overdose, received significant mass media coverage. As a result, Bias unwittingly became a public symbol of the dangers of crack cocaine.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
Organizations Involved
Governing magazine used its platform among state and local officials to publish Ehrenhalt’s summary of Canaday’s findings, giving the crime-and-population link an audience inside city halls that had grown accustomed to purely economic narratives. The article appeared at a time when many municipal budgets still treated violent crime as a social-work issue rather than a demographic driver. Its decision to highlight the threshold effect between murder rates and net migration quietly undermined years of official talking points. [1]
The Brookings Institution published a 1982 study by Bradbury, Downs, and Small that declared population declines in most large American cities looked irreversible. The report carried the authority of one of the nation’s premier think tanks and shaped a generation of urban policy that assumed economic restructuring had permanently altered the urban map. Its conclusions encouraged city managers to manage decline rather than contest it. [4]
The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond devoted part of its 2016 annual report to an essay that framed urban decline as the product of agglomeration effects, highway-driven sprawl, and school-quality differences. By publishing the piece under its institutional banner the bank lent Federal Reserve credibility to the view that economic forces operated independently of public safety. The report became standard reading for regional policymakers. [5]
Baltimore City government under Mayor Scott embedded the economic-and-historical explanation in its official growth plans, committing resources to equitable investment strategies while downplaying the direct role of homicide rates that had remained elevated for decades. The city’s planning documents treated redlining as the primary historical culprit and violence as a secondary symptom best addressed through economic uplift. This institutional stance delayed more targeted interventions in neighborhoods where residents were already voting with their feet. [6]
▶ Supporting Quotes (7)
“From Governing: ... An economist is making the case for such a correlation, and it carries a ring of plausibility.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“A 1982 Brookings Institution study concluded, “Continuing population declines in most large U.S. cities seem irreversible” (Bradbury, Downs, and Small).”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; author's calculations”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond l 2016 ANNUAL REPORT”— Understanding Urban Decline
“These benefits make it all the more puzzling that a number of prominent U.S. cities have experienced large population declines in recent decades.”— Understanding Urban Decline
“Scott has unveiled a city growth plan which does include the implementation of his crime plan and building public safety.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“The U.S. government response at this time focused on managing the perceived crack cocaine epidemic by criminalizing rather than providing treatment facilities or healthcare services for people who use crack cocaine.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
The Foundation
For decades the strongest case for the assumption rested on visible economic realities that no one could deny. Factories closed, manufacturing jobs moved south or overseas, air conditioning made Sunbelt cities livable, and highways lowered commuting costs; each development offered a plausible mechanism for why people left older industrial centers. Reasonable observers watching Detroit’s auto plants empty or Baltimore’s port-related industries shrink concluded that economic restructuring was the dominant force. The data on deindustrialization looked overwhelming at the time, and the correlation with population loss seemed obvious. A thoughtful analyst in 1980 could be forgiven for seeing these shifts as sufficient explanation. [1][3]
Yet the same period produced murder rates that had no precedent in modern American cities. By the mid-1970s Detroit’s homicide rate exceeded five per 10,000 residents and Baltimore’s climbed toward six; both cities lost roughly 15 percent of their population per decade while the correlation with job loss proved far weaker once racial demographics were examined. Middle-class Black households left high-murder cities such as Chicago at rates comparable to white households, undermining the notion that the phenomenon was simply white flight from economic change. The data showed a stark threshold: cities below two murders per 10,000 gained population, those above lost it, even after statistical controls. [1]
Scholars in the shrinking-cities literature treated deindustrialization as an autonomous process driven by off-shoring, automation, and efficiency gains that no local policy could reverse. This view seemed credible amid real manufacturing declines and produced the sub-belief that urban contraction marked the natural twilight of certain city forms. Analyses of Rust Belt abandonment, however, later revealed that the percentage of African-American residents correlated more strongly with vacant land than the scale of factory closures; Detroit lost far more population and housing than Duluth despite similar job losses because its demographics differed sharply. [3]
Aggregate statistics on median population growth across large cities reinforced the narrative of temporary decline followed by renaissance. Median growth turned negative in the 1960s and 1970s then positive in the 1980s and 1990s, yet this masked the reality that most cities either declined continuously or grew continuously; only a minority reversed course. When researchers disaggregated the data into continuous-decline, continuous-growth, and reversal groups, the economic-only story lost much of its explanatory power. [4]
▶ Supporting Quotes (17)
“There are plenty of plausible explanations for why this happened. Factories closed and manufacturing jobs departed for the South or foreign countries. Climate control made summer life endurable in previously unattractive places. And then there was crime.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“There are plenty of plausible explanations for why this happened. Factories closed and manufacturing jobs departed for the South or foreign countries. Climate control made summer life endurable in previously unattractive places. And then there was crime.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“this isn’t a simple matter of white residents fleeing in fear of African American violence. Much of the population decline has resulted from middle-class Black residents leaving for suburbs or for other parts of the country. Chicago suffered modest population losses in the last decade mainly because of Black departures. The white numbers actually increased.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Frequently, explanations of their decline center on a depiction of deindustrialization that is natural and inexorable. As off-shoring, roboticization, and other production-line efficiencies undermined the demand for labor, residents struggled to make ends meet, and many eventually moved elsewhere. The notion is that places like Detroit—or at least its struggling neighborhoods—have entered the twilight of their “lives” because of these processes.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“In other studies, race is mentioned, but as either implicitly or explicitly spurious. Here, land abandonment and urban decline are primarily economic processes. Racism is happening in parallel to this, and is perhaps an exacerbating force, but not a causal one driving it. Within such narratives, blacks in northern cities were disproportionately affected by processes of land abandonment primarily because they were the most disadvantaged group when the economic conditions reached their nadir.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“Aggregate statistics support the perception of post World War II urban decline followed by renewed growth. ... The aggregate pattern of decline followed by growth comes across clearly in the decade-by-decade time series of large city median population growth (Chart 1).”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Starting around 1950, the resident population of many large U.S. cities began to shrink rapidly.1 Despite booming national population growth, more than half of large cities lost population from 1950 to 1980. This decline climaxed during the 1970s, when more than two-thirds lost population.”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Then, during the 1980s, large cities’ fortunes appeared to turn around. More than half began to grow again. Even better, during the 1990s two-thirds of large cities grew.”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Several studies suggest that the development of the highway system contributes to “urban sprawl.”12 One study estimated that just one highway passing through a central city reduces its population by 18 percent.13”— Understanding Urban Decline
“A prominent recent study, for example, relies on the school desegregation experience to examine how a change in the public school system affected the school choice and localization decisions of residents. The study finds that school desegregation led to a decline in white enrollment in central city public schools in the South, and this decline was linked to white suburban migration. In non-Southern districts, the response was an increase in white private school enrollment.”— Understanding Urban Decline
“In most U.S. cities, wealthier households tend to live farther away from the city center, though there are a few notable exceptions (such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.).10 One explanation for this is that wealthier households prefer to occupy more land and therefore are willing to live in the suburbs despite higher commuting costs because the price of housing per square foot is lower.”— Understanding Urban Decline
““When you live in the place that birthed racial redlining this is the result and what you get”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“citing statistics that 60% of the firearms recovered by Baltimore police came from out of state. When you include Maryland jurisdictions outside the city, the number is 84%.”— WJZ Exclusive: Mayor Brandon Scott Opens Up About Confronting Baltimore's Struggles
“In the 1980s and 90 s, the U.S. response to crack cocaine was driven by media depictions of an urban, public health crisis primarily affecting black communities in American cities.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
“The perceived crack cocaine epidemic has currently subsided as a focal point in the American psyche, partly in reaction to significant neuroscientific data which refuted the false assumptions that one-time use of crack cocaine resulted in instant addiction issues.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
“The number of Detroit homicides peaked in 1974 at 714 and again in 1991 with 615. Crime rates in Detroit peaked in 1991 at more than 2,700 violent crimes per 100,000 people”— Decline of Detroit
“White flight contributed to the draining of cities' tax bases. Abandoned properties attracted criminals and street gangs”— Crime and urban flight revisited
How It Spread
The assumption spread most effectively through academic literature on shrinking cities that framed decline as the inevitable result of forces beyond any mayor’s control. Journals and conferences treated economic restructuring as the master variable, rendering crime an indirect or secondary concern. This framing shaped grant proposals, tenure decisions, and the language policymakers used when discussing urban futures. [3]
Media outlets amplified the renaissance story with headlines such as the 2001 USA Today declaration that census numbers affirmed an “urban renaissance.” Such coverage focused on aggregate statistics and median growth charts that showed decline then rebound, rarely examining the cities that continued to empty out. The narrative proved comforting because it suggested markets were already correcting the problem. [4]
Federal Reserve publications gave the economic explanation an institutional seal of approval aimed at policymakers who shaped regional development strategies. Essays that emphasized agglomeration economies and commuting costs became canonical references, crowding out alternative hypotheses that emphasized personal safety. The tone was measured and data-driven, which made the omission of homicide statistics all the more consequential. [5]
Local political leaders reinforced the assumption in public statements that attributed population loss to distant historical sins rather than immediate governance failures. Mayor Scott’s repeated references to redlining in Baltimore offered a moral account that required no uncomfortable discussion of local crime rates. Similar rhetoric appeared in other declining cities, creating a feedback loop between official pronouncements and media coverage. [6][7]
▶ Supporting Quotes (10)
“could crime be the main reason so many cities lost so much of their population over the entire period? That might seem a difficult case to make. ... more powerful than most experts have believed.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“could crime be the main reason so many cities lost so much of their population over the entire period? That might seem a difficult case to make.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Within this paradigm, urban decline is natural—not natural in a biophysical sense, but natural in the sense that it is driven by a set of more or less autonomous economic forces that are largely beyond the control of individual city managers.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“A 2001 USA Today headline proclaimed, “Cities Boom Once Again: Census Numbers Affirm an ‘Urban Renaissance’” (El Nasser).”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“The aggregate pattern of decline followed by growth comes across clearly in the decade-by-decade time series of large city median population growth (Chart 1).”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“Urban policymakers in declining cities justifiably want to revitalize their cities and help the people who live there.”— Understanding Urban Decline
“We asked Mayor Brandon Scott why he thinks people are leaving.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“Scott said treating substance abuse and behavioral health, providing better educational opportunities, and repairing neighborhoods must be part of the solution.”— WJZ Exclusive: Mayor Brandon Scott Opens Up About Confronting Baltimore's Struggles
“Meanwhile, mass media pedaled to the American public a fear-mongering, racist narrative of predominantly black “crack baby mothers” who risked burdening the U.S. healthcare system with an epidemic of “crack babies”.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
“The subsequent influx of drug education messages, public service announcements, and curriculums that were created in response to crack cocaine were pervaded by the public and political fear that crack cocaine was destroying a generation of young Americans.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
Resulting Policies
City managers across the Rust Belt adopted hands-off strategies that treated population decline as an inevitable economic process. They limited aggressive intervention against vacancy and abandonment on the theory that market forces would eventually sort the problem. The approach left large swaths of urban land to deteriorate while officials waited for macroeconomic conditions to improve. [3]
The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and similar institutions recommended a mix of place-based policies that directed resources to distressed neighborhoods and people-based policies that provided aid regardless of location. Both approaches rested on the assumption that agglomeration benefits and economic incentives could reverse decline once safety concerns were treated as secondary. These frameworks guided federal and state urban grants for years. [5]
Baltimore’s official growth plan under Mayor Scott committed the city to comprehensive violence reduction through equitable investments rather than targeted policing or school reform. The document framed population loss as the legacy of redlining and prescribed economic redistribution as the remedy. Implementation reflected the belief that crime would recede once underlying economic grievances were addressed. [6]
Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine based on the assumption that crack represented a uniquely destructive racialized epidemic in urban centers. The law produced stark racial differences in incarceration that persisted for decades. Later data showing no pharmacological distinction between the two substances forced partial reform through the Fair Sentencing Act, but the original policy had already shaped a generation of urban criminal justice. [9]
▶ Supporting Quotes (5)
“it is driven by a set of more or less autonomous economic forces that are largely beyond the control of individual city managers.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“The mixed record of any one type of urban revitalization policy suggests that a combination of “place-based” policies (which direct resources to help certain low-income areas) and “people-based” policies (which provide assistance to people regardless of where they live) may be more successful.”— Understanding Urban Decline
““We are making sure we are fully committed to the comprehensive violence reduction plan and making sure we’re tackling the issues of having an inefficient city government. It’s why I brought in a city administrator and we’re going to be building a 21st century government that handles issues and that’s how we’ll get people to Baltimore,” he said.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“Bias’s death and surrounding media coverage were used as catalysts for significant drug policy changes, including the enactment of the U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which established minimum sentencing for possession of crack cocaine.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
“However, recent U.S. justice system data from the 2019 fiscal year shows an staggering 81.1% of smokable-cocaine trafficking offenders were black.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
Harm Caused
The human cost appeared most clearly in the steady exodus from high-murder cities. Detroit lost residents at roughly 15 percent per decade in the 1960s and 1970s as its murder rate climbed above five per 10,000; Baltimore shed nearly 40 percent of its population since 1960 while its rate reached six per 10,000. St. Louis lost six percent of its residents between 2019 and 2023 with a murder rate of 7.3 per 10,000. Much of the outflow consisted of middle-class Black households seeking safer neighborhoods, not merely white flight. [1]
Entire neighborhoods emptied out across the Rust Belt. Researchers counted 268 neighborhoods in 49 cities that lost at least half their housing units to abandonment and demolition since 1970; in extreme cases such districts covered half or more of a city’s land area. St. Louis lost 59 percent of its 1950 population by 2000, while Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland each lost more than 45 percent. The resulting vacant land became both symptom and cause of further disinvestment. [3][4]
Poverty concentrated in the remaining population. By 2015 Detroit and Cleveland reported poverty rates of 40.3 percent and 36.2 percent respectively, while their suburbs gained more than a million residents and saw rising median incomes. The contrast illustrated how the assumption that economics alone drove decline had left city cores trapped in a cycle of safety failure and fiscal erosion. [5]
Daily life for those who stayed grew grim. Residents described avoiding walking alone at night, witnessing neighbors’ murders, and losing faith in local leadership after high-profile cases went unsolved. One Baltimore man, Charles Rheubottom, was killed in a case that remained open years later, deepening community distrust. The fear compounded the economic losses the official narrative had tried to isolate. [8]
▶ Supporting Quotes (10)
“It began its greatest decline in the 1960s, just at the time when the murder rate was moving alarmingly upward. Its murder rate per 10,000 residents was well under 1.0 in the 1950s; by 1975 it was up above 5.0. In those years the population was falling by about 15 percent per decade. ... Baltimore has lost nearly 40 percent of its population since 1960; ... St. Louis had a murder rate of 7.3 per 10,000 residents from 2019 to 2023 and lost 6 percent of its population.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Baltimore has lost nearly 40 percent of its population since 1960; during most of those years it experienced an uninterrupted rise in its murder rate, reaching 6.0 per 10,000 in 2020 before beginning a modest recent improvement.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“St. Louis had a murder rate of 7.3 per 10,000 residents from 2019 to 2023 and lost 6 percent of its population. New Orleans lost 5 percent of its people amid a murder rate of 6.0.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“The region is home to 268 neighborhoods in 49 cities where at least half of the housing has been abandoned and demolished since 1970 (Hackworth 2016a). In many of those cities, extreme housing-loss neighborhoods (EHLN) compose half or more of the city’s land area.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“These cases highlight a pernicious cycle that is not exclusively economic in origin, and is very difficult for city managers to escape. Social conflict can lead to diminishing economic investment; diminishing economic investment can lead to social conflict.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“Vast stretches of urban land were left virtually deserted. ... Over the longer period, 1950 to 2000, the cumulative population losses of some declining cities have been staggering. St. Louis lost 59 percent of its population. Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Detroit, and Cleveland lost more than 45 percent each.”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“For instance, in Detroit and Cleveland, 40.3 percent and 36.2 percent of the population, respectively, were below the poverty line in 2015. Meanwhile, the average income of the surrounding suburbs has risen.4 In fact, the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) surrounding many declining cities have grown in population since 1950. For example, the Detroit and Baltimore MSAs each added more than one million people between 1950 and 2010.”— Understanding Urban Decline
“Baltimore City’s population is at it’s lowest in more than a century according to new census data. ... She says she’s packing up and moving to Glen Burnie. "Not because I don’t love Baltimore, because I love Baltimore and I love all people, because that’s what makes the world go around, but it’s too much, it’s too much going on,” she said.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“"Not at all," Taylor said. "I'm so scared to walk anywhere. Bullets have no names. It makes me sick to my stomach knowing I have to go somewhere by myself."”— Bleeding Baltimore: Mapping The City's Violent Crime & Searching For Solutions
“Data shows only roughly ten percent of the population who qualify for drug treatment ever receiving care for problematic drug use in the U.S.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
Downfall
The assumption began to lose its grip when Henry Canaday published his 2023 report dividing cities by murder rates. Those below two homicides per 10,000 gained population over the long term; those above lost it, even after controlling for economic variables. Three-quarters of low-murder cities grew in recent years while high-murder ones continued to shrink. The threshold effect held across decades of data. [1]
Comparative analysis of Rust Belt cities delivered another blow. Detroit and Duluth suffered similar manufacturing job losses, yet Detroit’s population and housing stock collapsed while Duluth’s did not; the decisive difference was demographic, with Detroit at 80 percent Black and Duluth at two percent. Such findings suggested that racial composition and associated crime patterns explained more variance than deindustrialization alone. [3]
Census data disaggregated into continuous-decline, continuous-growth, and reversal groups exposed the misleading nature of median statistics. When growth was decomposed into national, regional, metropolitan, and local components, the purely economic story no longer accounted for the divergent paths of American cities. Experts such as Jason Johnson and Anirban Basu began citing uncontrollable crime and failing schools as primary drivers of Baltimore’s losses. [4][6]
On the drug-policy front, a 1993 study in JAMA demonstrated that crack use prevalence showed no race-specific patterns, and neuroscientific evidence refuted claims of instant addiction or unique dangers compared with powder cocaine. SAMHSA reports confirmed similar rates of illicit drug use across racial groups. These findings undermined the racialized epidemic narrative that had justified the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity and contributed to later sentencing reforms. [9]
▶ Supporting Quotes (9)
“He divides cities into two categories: those that sustained a rate of less than 2 murders per year per 10,000 population and those that consistently experienced a higher rate. The ones below 2.0 nearly all gained people in the period he examined; those below 1.5 gained substantially. Cities with rates above 2.0 suffered population losses. This holds true, Canaday reports, even when other factors such as climate and economic change are taken into account.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“He divides cities into two categories: those that sustained a rate of less than 2 murders per year per 10,000 population and those that consistently experienced a higher rate. The ones below 2.0 nearly all gained people in the period he examined; those below 1.5 gained substantially. Cities with rates above 2.0 suffered population losses.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“Baltimore, he reports, has a police force about 8 percent smaller than the one it had in 2019; it also recorded a murder rate, most recently, of 5.6 per 10,000 residents.”— Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage
“When measured, the level of deindustrialization is far less associated with land abandonment and population loss than the percentage of African-American people in a given city (see Hackworth 2016b, 2016c).”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“The difference, for example, between the percentage of vacant lots in Detroit and Duluth (Minnesota) is vast, but the relative loss in manufacturing jobs is similar. The percentage of African American people living in each city, by contrast, is vastly different. Detroit is over 80% black, while Duluth is just over 2%. This pattern holds across the Rust Belt.”— Urban Decline Is Not Natural – Métropolitiques
“On closer examination, however, the aggregate pattern of large city decline followed by renewed growth poorly describes the actual growth of most large cities. ... So, contrary to popular perception, the period 1950 to 2000 has seen the sustained decline of one group of large U.S. cities, the vigorous growth of a second group of cities, and the decline followed by growth of a smaller third group of cities.”— 2003 U.S. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000
“"When crime doesn't seem to be controllable and people don't feel safe, they don't want to live like that,” Jason Johnson said. It’s not just crime economist Anirban Basu says is forcing people out. He says education is another major factor.”— The driving factors behind the population decline in Baltimore City
“A 1993 JAMA publication confirmed that the prevalence of crack cocaine use did not depend on race-specific factors and showed that crack cocaine use did not differ significantly for African Americans or Hispanic Americans as compared to white Americans.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
“Additionally, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration reports data confirms there are no statistically significant differences in the rates of illicit drug use between racial and ethnic groups.”— A cultural and political difference: comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France
Sources
-
[1]
-
[3]
-
[4]
-
[5]
Understanding Urban Declinereputable_journalism
Santiago Pinto and Tim Sablik · Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond 2016 Annual Report · 2016
-
[6]
-
[7]
-
[8]
-
[9]
-
[10]
-
[11]
-
[12]
Related False Assumptions