🔗 Half of America’s Cities Are Depopulating. We Could Be Headed for a Ghost Town Era.:

When nearly a quarter of an entire city vacates, leaving behind swaths of unused area, it can disrupt basic services—everything from the power grid to water pressure to transit services. “Resource distribution challenges will persist unless a paradigm shift happens away from growth-based planning alone,” the authors wrote.

And pairing depopulation with aging infrastructure creates an entirely new set of social, economic, and policy challenges. “Having an estimation of future population trends can assist authorities in better planning and designing cities and their infrastructure systems for depopulation,” the authors wrote.