The Slow Death of a City Block — 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis — demonstrates just how illiquid cities are:
In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it’s ranked 48th.In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That’s out of two and a half million people in the metro area.
In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.
At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They’re stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.
Long after the city has lost it’s economic raison d’être, buildings still stand, crumbling slowly over the course of decades.