[LouisVanDerWright]

The root cause of this is a reversion to the historical mean of how cities tend to organize themselves. It has never been the norm at any other point in human history for the center of the city to be the most impoverished and undervalued land. That is not logical for the obvious economies of agglomeration and other reasons that fundamentally make cities efficient. The only reason it occurred in the wake of WWII was the burst of capital made availble in the form of swords into plowshares suddenly making bulldozing whole neighborhoods or ramming freeways through urban cores possible.

Prior to WWII these feats were impossible unless you sent an army a la Rome's sacking of Carthage to erase a city from the map. Conversion of the massive military industrial complex ramped up for the production of mechanized warfare during the war to civilian uses unleashed an age of unparallled ability to modify cities. This resulted in everything from urban renewal to white flight to the suburbs themselves. What is happening now is that those wounds are closing and the areas built overnight with those bulldozers are approaching peak depreciation in exactly the same way as urban neighborhoods had during the depression and WWII. Naturally the same processes of decay and disinvestment take hold and before you know it you've got a Dolton or Harvey or Maywood.

This is just the beginning too, what happens to areas littered with boomer era McMansions that Millenials are not interested in and couldn't afford if they wanted to? The market for these white elephants has all but dried up in Chicagoland. You can't move a McMansion in Barrington for even what it was worth in the doldurms of the recession. The prices have continued to collapse with no signs of respite since 2008. There's a lot of wealth in a place like Barrington, but you have to ask yourself where is the tipping point when people start abandoning it in droves as empty mansions become the norm in exactly the same way the mansions lining LSD in Rogers Park/Edgewater or MLK or Michigan Ave in Kenwood were abandoned post war? At what point to people start chopping these 8,000 SF homes into apartments and renting them out to lower income folks as was the exact fate of prewar urban mansions after white flight?

And it's not just housing, the massive sucking sound of the CBD draining jobs out of the burbs gets louder every year. Office buildings and entire corporate campuses in the suburbs are being demolished. The jobs that made living in the next greenfield out desireable are going away, they are moving downtown. All that's replacing them are low income menial businesses like call centers which aren't going to attract the middle and high earners that corporate HQ's once did. This is a serious sea change on the scale of white flight and suburbanization in the 1950-2000 era. This could be a trend into the middle part of this century. Yet no one seems to be discussing it or trying to come up with a plan to chanel or divert these processes.

To make matters worse the suburbs are a series of totally disparate municipalities. Dolton or Harvey don't have a Lincoln Park or Loop to lean on like Englewood or Lawndale had when times get tough. Once shit hits the fan in these small municipalities, they are on their own. There is no golden goose or favored quarter to milk for tax revenue to backstop the bleeding. My prediction is that we will start seeing annexation come back into favor in the not too distant future as the fortunes and resources of the city grow while smaller suburbs fail. At some point it makes more sense for the city to absorb areas incapable of surving on their own if only for the economies of scale the city can achieve when dealing with problems it has many decades of expierience handling.