Economic Restructuring - Geographic Impact

Geographic Impact

Urban landscapes especially in the U.S. have significantly altered in response to economic restructuring. Cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and others face population losses which result in thousands of abandoned homes, unused buildings, and vacant lots, contributing to urban decay. Such transformations frustrate urban planning and revitalization, fostering deviance in the forms of drug-related activity and vagrancy. Older, compact, industrial U.S. cities have been rendered obsolete. Urban spaces become playgrounds for the urban gentry, wastelands for low-paid service workers, and denizens for the underground economy. In some areas, gentrification projects have caused displacement of poverty-stricken residents. Sunbelt cities such as Miami and Atlanta rise to become key business centers while Snowbelt cities such as Buffalo and Youngstown decline. Even housing markets respond to economic restructuring with decaying housing stocks, escalating housing prices, depleting tax base, changes in financing, and reduction in federal support for housing. Soon, spatial divisions among wealthy and poor households exacerbate. Moreover, with the movement of blue-collared employment from central cities, geographically entrenched housing discrimination, and suburban land use policy, African American youths in inner cities become victims of spatial mismatch, where their residences provide only weak and negative employment growth and they usually lack access to intrametropolitan mobility. High-order services, an expanding sector in the industrialized world, become spatially concentrated in a relative small number of large metropolitan areas, particularly in suburban office agglomerations.