“Urban Dystopia”

It is a short walk from my door to one of London’s busiest arteries. The first two minutes of the walk are usually pleasant, especially in summer, when a luscious thatch of untrimmed leaves bow down from the road’s many trees. There is the occasional roar of an accelerating driver drunk on testosterone and the odd shouting voice, but mostly it’s people padding along with their dogs and neighbours chatting.

But then the idyll ends. The road that leads up to the Tube station and the artery has a major bus stop, a rubbish collection point, a taxi rank, and a Deliveroo rider rank. This culminates in one of London’s most persistent homeless encampments, with tents, begging, traipsing, drug-taking, drinking and Tube loitering. The permanent residence for two cackling women is a stinking underpass. There are more stragglers and smells in the unavoidable (above ground) cement passage required to rejoin the pavement going north.

First and foremost, I avoid all confrontation,” Robert Freeman, a 47-year-old bus driver in Queens, remarked to the New York Times. “Me, I just concentrate on driving, and I don’t say nothing.” It was an apt summary of the city’s attitude towards petty criminals, who have been all too happy to take advantage of New York’s deteriorating public order — including in Freeman’s line of work.

On May 3, 2013, violence erupted in the hallways of Woodlawn High School.

As many as six separate fights between unruly students broke out that day – part of an annus horribilis that saw 61 arrests made at the racially diverse school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Looking on in despair was Norman Browning, who had recently spent 15 years volunteering as a sports coach at Woodlawn.

A suburb of Atlanta sought to secede as well.

For decades, Democrats have controlled the nation’s largest cities. The results have been catastrophic, including high crime rates, blight, failing public educational systems, rampant poverty, and an expanding homeless population.

These horrific outcomes are due to Democrats supporting failed policies, such as raising taxes, increasing regulations, growing the government, and refusing to prosecute violent criminals. Consequently, citizens voted with their feet and left in droves, a trend which has started to accelerate.

Lessons from a previous American tumble

American cities are littered with street camps, drugs, and a motley crew of addicts, alcoholics, dropouts, vagrants, criminals, and the mentally ill. From Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood to San Francisco’s Tenderloin, from Portland to New York, from downtown Los Angeles to Seattle’s Highland Park, thousands of American urban districts are sites of danger and disorder.

The tragedy unfolding on our streets may seem unprecedented. But drug-fueled urban squalor is nothing new in the United States, and we could learn something from how our forebears handled it.

Stores fleeing from rising theft will leave residents in cities like New York with fewer places to shop, less merchandise to buy, and higher prices to pay.

The rising social disorder and crime of the 1970s and 1980s drove out not only hundreds of thousands of residents from New York City, but also many businesses. Within a few years, entire communities lacked basic amenities like supermarkets and drugstores; empty storefronts littered shopping districts. That started to change only when crime began falling in the 1990s and neighborhoods rebounded—first in New York and then in other big cities—prompting national retailers to begin setting up shop in places that they had once avoided. Thousands of stores and tens of thousands of jobs blossomed in New York alone thanks to this retail revival. But those gains are vanishing before our eyes as rising retail theft is driving a new era of closings.

Toronto with Chow’s sales tax.