Urban decay is a fact, Mencius Moldbug says — which was reinforced by his recent visit to see his in-laws in Ohio:
Sibyl’s aunt and uncle are very much blue-staters in a red state, and they live in a half-gentrified section of Columbus, “Olde Towne East.” (I feel the East deserves an extra E as well.)Olde Towne Easte has seen some changes in the century of our concern. And not changes for the better. Basically, my sister-in-law, her husband and their two children live in a neighborhood of crumbling mansions. Some have now been restored. Some, like one we saw only three blocks away, are more or less crack dens.
My in-laws are not the people who built these mansions. They are not anything like the people who built these mansions. Nor is anyone in the neighborhood — not the SWPL Obama voters, not the Section 8 Obama voters. The world that built these mansions — the Midwest of Booth Tarkington (have a look at Penrod if you want to see Middle America before progressivism) — is no less dust than the Caesars. Yet its dwellings remain, mostly.
And all this is normal, of course. Completely unremarkable. While I was in Ohio, I asked people a simple question: what happened to Olde Towne Easte? Why did it decline? Why did the mansions of the town pillars of Columbus crumble? Why was the same phenomenon seen in so many other American cities? And where did all these people go?
I got not a single answer that made any sense. For example, people would say: “they moved to the suburbs.” Why? “It was a trend.” Indeed. My stepfather, who is a creature not of Ohio but of Washington, was crafty enough to know where this was going. “I used to own a big old house on Capitol Hill,” he said. “Do you know what it cost to heat?”
Have you ever heard of a civilized human society, anywhere on the planet, any time in the past, departing from its present location and moving singly or in atoms to another, unless it was in some sense fleeing? Not surprisingly, people did not like being asked this question.
“Urban decay” is a fact. You know urban decay happened, I know urban decay happened, Wikipedia knows urban decay happened. But as the page, obviously authored by some prominent chronicler of the human condition, so poignantly explains:
There is no single cause of urban decay, though it may be triggered by a combination of interrelated factors, including urban planning decisions, tight rent control, poverty, the development of freeways and railway lines, suburbanisation, redlining, immigration restrictions, and racial discrimination.Perhaps I should edit the page and add heating costs. In other words: why did urban decay happen? It just did. Answer unclear — ask again later.