The decline of the West: America’s Pacific cities face a bleak future

As recently as the early Nineties, when the great cities of the Midwest and East Coast were careening toward what seemed like an inevitable downturn, the urban agglomerations along the Pacific coast offered a demonstrably brighter urban future. From San Diego to the Puget Sound, urban centres along America’s western edge continued to thrive and expand as migrants from other parts of the country, and the world, crowded in.

In the process, the Pacific cities seized the economic initiative. The West Coast became home to the country’s premier trade entrepôt and its dominant entertainment and technology centres, and home to five of the world’s six most valuable companies.

Yet now these same cities — despite differing histories and industrial mixes — face a precipitous decline. Never before have all the burgeoning cities of the future, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, started to shrink. This is, at least in part, a reaction to high prices, relentless property crime, homelessness — San Francisco’s rate of homelessness, for example, is twelve times the national average — and diminished economic opportunity, particularly for the middle and working classes.

At the same time, big companies like Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Jacobs Engineering, Fluor, Bechtel and McKesson have moved headquarters; others are shifting their operations elsewhere, largely to more business-friendly and less costly regions in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Tennessee.