American cities rise and fall; can they rise again?: Jarvis DeBerry

Detroit bankruptcy.jpg
Detroit city workers and supporters protest outside the federal courthouse in Detroit while awaiting the bankruptcy decision, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013. A judge announced Tuesday that the city is to become the biggest city in U.S. history to enter bankruptcy. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
[W]hat about the mid-sized places, like Flint...Will they continue to die a slow, agonizing death?" -- Jason Segedy,

New Orleans reached its peak population more than 50 years ago. According to the 1960 Census, there were 627,525 people living in the city. And it's worth noting that the city then was geographically smaller than the city today. The New Orleans East development had not yet begun, so we had 83 percent more people living in a much smaller geographical area than we have now.

Other American cities have had their populations reduced by half. Detroit, St. Louis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, for example, were all huge population centers that have seen their numbers plummet. Detroit's struggles have recently attracted national (if not international) attention.

The city that has so often been used as a synonym for American ingenuity and manufacturing filed for bankruptcy last year, and this year the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department began shutting off the water of customers who haven't paid their bills. According to an editorial in The Detroit Free Press, that department is owed about $75 million from approximately 137,000 residents who are behind and $23 million from about 10,000 businesses. That same newspaper published a major report last year called "How Detroit Went Broke."

But the problems aren't limited to Detroit. Many American cities have hit the skids, and it's worth examining what caused them to decline. A study at looks at the 273 American cities that have spent at least one Census ranked among the top 100 cities in the country.

"Examining this list decade-by-decade is instructive," writer Jason Segedy says, "for it largely tracks the entire history of the nation's settlement patterns - from the initial cultural hearths of Yankee New England and Tidewater Virginia; through the river and canal era; the railroad era; the industrial era; the interstate highway and suburban era; to the decline of the Rust Belt, and the triumph (for the time being) of the Sunbelt - and beyond."

But a study of the cities that have been bustling is also a study in cities that aren't anymore. The website wonders if there's any hope for them: "And what about the mid-sized places, like Flint, that may not have the assets or the resources to ever turn the corner.  Will they continue to die a slow, agonizing death, and literally disappear?  Or will they continue on in a shadow-form, serving as a cautionary tale, and inhabiting some type of uniquely American, urban equivalent of purgatory?"

I wonder what lessons New Orleans should take from other cities' more dramatic decline. Our city is about halfway down the country's top 100 cities list, a far cry from those decades in the 19th Century when the population of New Orleans was in the top 10.

Are we doing the things that will guarantee our success decades down the road, or are we sliding down - but just more slowly than many of those rusting Rust Belt cities?

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at Follow him at