Used to have a really nice commuter rail that connected to the city, now there’s a six-lane highway that clogs up twice a day.
Welcome to the American dream nightmare.
It’s the 1970s car friendly town - so car friendly noone wants to go there anymore, because there is nothing than car infrastructure and car pollution. It doesn’t have to be like this, take back your towns folks!
So once upon a time, America was a place where anyone could come to get a good job. In fact, if you were walking down the street in the middle of the day, someone would stop you and say, “Come work here, please.” Practically begging you to get benefits, a pension, and you could buy a house on your salary.
This is because manufacturing was a huge part of the post-WW2 booming American economy, they needed bodies to run the machines, and you didn’t have to know anything or be specially trained, you could just go in and start being productive on day one. Shows like Mad Men, where a bunch of men were sitting around, getting paid to think, that was far more rare than it is today. Most people did something in a factory or warehouse.
Then, international trade became increasingly cheaper. Then countries with poor human rights (ie slaves) were able to undercut companies who were using an American workforce to produce the same product. As execs cut costs to keep up, the workforce became more opinionated, some forming unions, which increased the cost of labor. So beginning in the 60’s and 70’s, they started moving all the manufacturing overseas to areas with cheaper labor. My parents were from Baltimore, they and their parents and everyone they knew had all worked at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow’s Point (a mill producing steel) almost their entire lives. In the 70’s they started decreasing the workforce, then it got sold to a German company, who moved most of the operations overseas, and by the 90’s my grandparents were basically forced into retirement with a great pension and health insurance, as guaranteed by their union.
Oddly enough this is exactly what happened with the great recession in 2008: overseas companies started offering less-regulated investment opportunities, this put pressure on our own oversight to deregulate - which they did. Then American businesses started packaging more and more risky home loans (called sub-prime loans), and investors were buying them at prime rates because home loans were such a sure thing.
I remember from my life, in a suburb of DC, when a poor family moved into the neighborhood. They had habits that we were not familiar with, to put it politely, and they kinda stuck out like a sore thumb. They only lasted a few months, then got foreclosed on. Basically what had happened was there was pressure on banks for more home loans, so they started offering loans to people who couldn’t normally afford a house, and probably didn’t fully understand the implications of a home loan. The bank probably just told them “Free Money!” and they said ok. But then they couldn’t pay, and this happened so often everyone probably remembers something like this happening around that time.
So anyway, globalization has caused these small towns that used to house workers for a factory to become frozen. Usually around the time the mill closes or massive layoffs happen, workers will move to greener pastures, businesses that relied on them will close, leaving the town in whatever state it’s in. And that’s why you see so many towns exactly like what OP is describing.
Did you just shit on pretty much the whole UK?
Would you classify your castles as “every building is bricks” or “random pile of gravel”?
I’m not British, but the vast majority of their buildings indeed seem to fall into either the “bricks” or the “gravel” category - not just castles.
All our houses are brick based. Source: own house in UK, made of bricks.
But don’t understand why it’s portrayed as bad here?
Yea imagine buildings being made of bricks and not match sticks
Nope, the American midwest. Most of my state is like this.
Baltimore is this but somehow an entire city.
Am I missing something? Aren’t most buildings bricks? Or is that just because I live in London?
Not here in the USA!
In the US houses are held together by thoughts and prayers.
Plastic on exterior walls, paper and chalk on interior walls, and tar and gravel on the roof.
Early this year forest fire fighters in Alberta were complaining that new houses have so much plastic in them that they were combusting and consumed in like 5 minutes making saving them impossible and slowing the fire’s spread harder.
I’m having a hard time finding the quote. I found this explaining houses burn faster now than before because of plastic https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/modern-homes-burn-8-times-faster-than-50-years-ago-1.1700063
Considering the ridiculous heat of those forest fires 5 minutes is believable
I can believe it; in the UK our fire regs have become rather stringent due to the Grenfell fire, though those changes are mostly on flats/buildings more then 3(?) storeis etc.
The PVC external cladding can melt from a mid to large sized bonfire 10-15 foot away. We can’t use it to clad houses above the 2nd floor, though there are exceptions if your replacing existing cladding. So if you want to add a former to your loft you have to use tiles now.
Though there’s this interesting product called magply which is roughly as strong as ply, but is made from magnesium oxide and silicate. It’s considered incombustible so you can clad with it, then render it.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing different materials used in areas prone to forest fires
Pine with a light dusting of steel & cardboard.
Brick isn’t as common in the US. It’s more “regional.” I’m most towns, you’ll have like one or two brick buildings and that’s it. A town hall, maybe a church.
What are they built from then?
https://time.com/6046368/wood-steel-houses-fires/
It’s one of the few places in the world where wood is the dominant material used in new-home construction—90% of homes built in 2019 were wood-framed, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
despite lumber shortage and wildfires, tornados and wood eating insects
Lumber is cheap, concrete is expensive. If the US were to switch to concrete, construction would become substantially more expensive everywhere in the world.
It’s not like you can’t use concrete in the US even if you want to. Commercial architecture and public infrastructure use it all the time.
Wood and sheetrock
Wood mostly.
London is an extremely old city. In the US, the older areas with older buildings like New York often have brick, but almost everywhere else, where most structures are less than a century old, they use alternatives. Most commonly this is lumber framing with exterior siding (either wood or plastic), interior sheet rock (“drywall”), with fiberglass insulation in between.
I love Old Style beer.
Old Style and Portillo’s
love driving thru these and seeing the old signs. hate the fuckin 25mph speed traps
Got pulled in one of these driving through a small town on a US highway. 55mph road until you hit the town and it’s 35mph. I missed that sign and got pulled for a warning. -_-
And these towns tend to have like 2.75 cops per person and they aren’t afraid to pull you over for going 26mph.
One time, I was driving through one of these old towns, and I got pulled over because I didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign. Admittedly, I was in the wrong, but the judge in town was insane, and coincidentally the father of the sheriff who pulled us over. So the judge tried to have me and the people in the car executed in some crazy deathcoaster contraption unless I agreed to marry his daughter (who bore a striking resemblance to Gus Polinski) but thankfully we managed to get out of there. Also, we got to party with Digital Underground for some reason.
Nothing but trouble in that town it sounds like. Best stay away.
Did they make you repave the street too with Bessy?
Tupac was involved with this, right?
Yep, his first acting credit.
Did the judge have a dick nose? Sounds like something that happened to me once.
I lived in one of these town for four years. Just before I moved there, they’d made national news for pulling over an ambulance. It was hauling ass taking someone to the hospital, but the local cops felt that issuing a ticket was more important.
The town is also the county seat and regional state patrol center. It’s the highest ratio of law enforcement to citizens in the entire state.
The first day we arrived my wife was pulled over for doing just over 25. Welcome to town!
What traffic laws can ambulances even violate!?
They still have to follow the rules of the road. In my state legally even running code 3 (lights and sirens) they are only legally allowed to go 5mph over the limit. And if there is an accident the ambulance driver is basically automatically assumed at fault.
Ah, I sorta just assume they had some kind of wide spread exemption in a lot of situations.
There really isn’t. Most of the laws regarding that is “driving with a due regard to safety.” You can’t just blow through intersections willy-nilly. A lot of progress has been made with driving code 3. A lot of studies have shown it honestly doesn’t improve patient outcomes based on the limited time gained. There are exceptions of course.
Rural Iowa here, the only one I can’t find within walking distance of me is the bottom middle, and probably because I haven’t walked the entire town yet.
I feel like living in such a town would be very depressing.
You don’t know any different until you move out.
Except the internet has changed that to some degree (but definitely not entirely)
you’re assuming the town has internet fast enough to load more than a few pictures of the outside world per decade
Can confirm. Most of my state is like this.
Depends on the specific town. Some still have some life left, others are dead.
This gave me big flashbacks of where I grew up. It was great as a kid, a ton of urban exploration opportunities, but I wouldn’t want to live there now.
I genuinely am interested. I assume this is for the US. Did houses get bulit with bricks in older days and why did they move away from it?
I live in europe an have only seen brick and cement Houses here
Cheddar actually made a good video on this topic. The US switched to wood during the postwar boom because it was faster and cheaper to build houses and buildings out of wood, because wood is abundant here.
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People are missing an opportunity by not selling the gravel.
Replace the Pepsi Machine with one that sells Worms and you’ve nailed my area.
Your picture is actually of active, well-used railroad tracks. Old unused tracks are rusty and weed-grown. If the rails are shiny it means that trains pass regularly and knock the rust off. If there’s no weeds it’s because the railroad actively sends out crews to maintain the tracks.
the railroad actively sends out crews to maintain the tracks.
Damn, the railroad spawns its own crews for maintenance? That’s crazy
I was just in Japan and even some of their active rail lines have huge 4 ft tall weeds growing in the rail yards
Weed control is a fairly new thing but not an environmentally friendly thing. Maybe Japan doesn’t like spraying pesticide all around.
Wouldn’t surprise me. In Germany the largest customer for Roundup/Glyphosate is DB, they spray that shit over around all rails.
So THAT’S what looked off… And reminded me of where I moved out of…
Only in America
Could really be Canada too :/
Reminds me of HASTILY MADE CLEVELAND TOURISM VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY
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