Study Predicts Thousands of U.S. Cities as Ghost Towns by 2100

In 2100, the urban U.S. might look very different, in part because thousands of places might be so empty that they look like ghost towns. Findings released in Nature Cities say that the number of people living in about 15,000 cities across the country could drop to very small amounts compared to what they are now. Cities all over the U.S., except for Hawaii and Washington, D.C., are expected to lose money.

"The way we plan now is based on growth, but almost half of the cities in the U.S. are losing people," says Sybil Derrible, an urban engineer at the University of Illinois Chicago and senior author of the paper. "The main point is that we need to stop planning based on growth, which will require a huge change in the way cities are planned and built."

u.s. citiesPhoto byPhil Stock World

Derrible and his coworkers were first hired by the Illinois Department of Transportation to look into how Illinois's towns will change over time and what transportation problems will arise in places where people are leaving. But as they looked more closely, they saw that these kinds of predictions would be useful for places all over the U.S., not just the big ones like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Uttara Sutradhar, who is writing the lead study and is getting her PhD in civil engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, says, "Most studies have focused on big cities, but that doesn't give us an idea of the size of the problem."

The writers looked at information from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, which is an annual survey of people's lives put together by the U.S. Census Bureau, from 2000 to 2020. This helped them figure out how the population is changing in more than 24,000 towns and make predictions about how it will change in another 32,000.

They put the predicted trends into the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which are a shared set of five possible future climate scenarios. Based on how much global warming happens, these possibilities show how population, society, and the economy might change by the year 2100.

Based on their predictions, the authors found that between 12 and 23 percent of people will be moving out of about half of U.S. cities by 2100. These places include Cleveland, Ohio, Buffalo, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The results show that some of those places, like Louisville, Ky., New Haven, Conn., and Syracuse, N.Y., are not currently showing declines but are likely to in the future. "Right now Texas may have a lot of growth, but if you had looked at Michigan 100 years ago, you might have thought Detroit would be the biggest city in the U.S. now," Derrible says.

The authors found that the Northeast and Midwest will probably be the most influenced by people moving away. And in terms of states, Vermont and West Virginia will be hit the hardest. More than 80% of towns in these two states will shrink. About three quarters of the towns in Illinois, Mississippi, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Michigan could also see fewer people living in them.

The authors looked at current trends and found that about 40% of the more than 24,000 cities are now growing. This includes big cities like New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, and Houston, which are all losing people. On the whole, though, the places where people are most likely to move to by 2100 are usually in the South or West.

The Source: scientificamerican