Dubuque, Iowa, similar to Atlantic City, was this before Iowa legalized riverboat gambling. The revenue of the casinos has clearly gone into the city and it is now a popular tourist destination with its renovated historic sites, the nearby Field of Dreams, and ski resort.
Big chunks of rural America are filled with places like this. In the 1870s, over 70 percent of the population worked in agriculture; today, it's around 0.8-1.3 percent (depending on how you count seasonal labor and migrating farmhands). This is mostly due to changes in technology of a hundred different kinds: scientific advances have made farmland much more efficient, transportation technology and infrastructure have made it possible to keep food fresh longer and get it farther in that time, machines do the work of multiple people... so all the people who used to work in rural areas now live in suburban or urban areas, so rural areas are now populated much more sparsely than they once were. A lot of small farming towns in the Great Plains feature mostly-boarded-up downtowns and an average population age in the 50s or older. Parts of the (much drier) High Plains fared even worse and completed the transition to full-on Ghost Town.
Lots and lots of former factory towns in the Midwest, including most cities around the Great Lakes (the "Rust Belt"). Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh are but a few cities whose populations today are half of what they were in the mid-20th century (if that). Even those that have bounced back economically, like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, still struggle to shed their former image. It's easier to list the exceptions (cities that have never suffered) rather than those that fit:
Chicago, despite losing a quarter of its population since its historic 1950 peak, has held up due to sheer size (third largest city in the USA) and a relatively diversified economy. note It helps that Chicago has a lot of suburbs and small towns just outside the city limits, where a LOT of the "lost population" now live. There's a running joke in the Chicago area that someone will say the name of their suburb that they're from, them quickly follow it up with a quick "Chicago" afterwards!
Toronto from being the centre of Canadian finance and media (with a well-timed boost in The '70s from Quebec's strict language laws, which led to an influx of anglophones and businesses from Montreal).
Columbus, Ohio, since its economy is heavily tied to Ohio State University (the largest single college campus in the US) and the state government rather than any specific industry that would be at the mercy of economic trends.
Indianapolis definitely fell under this category until the 1970s when it made the controversial decision to consolidate all of Marion County (with the exception of a few enclaves) with Indianapolis to form one large city. The result was the middle class who had fled the city to the fringes of the county in the post-war years were again part of the city and this led to more revenue and a revitalization of the downtown area which occurred decades before many other cities followed suit.
Many fishing communities in Atlantic Canada were devastated with the collapse and shut down of the cod fishery. In the decades since, few have been able to come anywhere close to recovering as fish stocks continue to struggle.
The Detroit area is an incredible example of suburbs that are completely independent of the city they surround.
St. Louis, Missouri used to be this before the city created a massive lower-city cleaning program where they cleaned up and cleared out the lower city.
Gary, Indiana is a few steps away from being a straight-up Ghost Town—either that, or Indiana's own mini-Detroit. Either way, not exactly an ideal place.
Upstate New York, in addition to the usual Rust Belt problems, also had to deal with the loss of the Erie Canal as a viable shipping route after the St. Lawrence Seawaynote The combined river/canal system connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean (the canals bypass dams and dangerous rapids in the St. Lawrence River), giving the Upper Midwest access to lucrative maritime trade. made it obsolete. Rochester was dealt a particularly massive blow around the Turn of the Millennium because its economy was heavily dependent on Kodak, which was lethally slow to adjust to the digital photography revolution. Thankfully, it bounced back due to the tech industry and its thriving arts scene, and just in time, as Kodak filed for bankruptcy shortly after the renaissance. Albany, Ithaca, and to a lesser extent Syracuse also survived due to their universities and, in Albany's case, the state government. Unfortunately, many other upstate cities, like Schenectady, Troy, Binghamton, Rome, Utica, and Niagara Falls, were not so lucky. Even Buffalo, which managed to avoid total decrepitude, still has a lot of examples of post-industrial rot scattered throughout the city, its population having fallen by over half. The Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains has also been hit hard with this, as it was made up of numerous small communities that were dependent almost entirely on summer tourism. Highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th Century when (mostly Jewish) people would flee the sweltering heat of New York City in the summer for the cool mountains, it suffered a sharp decline starting in the 1950s and by 1970 many Borscht Belt communities had become full-on ghost towns.
New England sports several of these — all former textile mill towns whose mills either moved or went bust in the mid-to-late 1900s. Some managed to bounce back (Manchester, Nashua, and Worcester being among the better examples), while others (Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, Lawrence, Lowell, Brockton, Lynn, Fitchburg, and Fall River, all in Massachusetts, and Pawtucket and Woonsocket, both in Rhode Island) never recovered and are nowadays known for being places that one should avoid at all cost. Like the above-mentioned example of Detroit, however, the suburbs are doing very well in spite of the cities that they service; the Merrimack Valley region does very well despite being home to Lawrence, Lowell, and Haverhill (all of which are known for being highly decrepit and crime-ridden) because of its ties to Manchester and Boston, while the same is also true for Agawam, Longmeadow, and the other suburbs of Springfield and Hartford, both of which are among the poorest and most dangerous cities in the entire Northeast.
Some areas of Berkshire County in Massachusetts can be described as a combination of the above problems of Upstate New York and former industrial New England. While able to transition from textile mills to steelworking, avoiding that same early 20th century decline, eventually the same faults that would come to plague the rest of the Rust Belt would hit the Berkshires as well. This is noticeable mostly in the northern half of the county and Pittsfield, where such industry was concentrated— also because the southern half of the county benefits from the attention of New Yorkers with summer homes around Great Barrington. It isn't necessarily as severe as other examples, though. Despite North Adams having a population on the decline since the 60s, MASSMoCA and the general Berkshire art scene have prevented it from fully crumbling. It also doesn't hurt to have one of the wealthiest and most well-regarded colleges in the nation only a few minutes away. This, however, comes with the caveat of gentrification and a growing divide between new neighbors and pre-existing working class families. Other communitise like county capital Pittsfield aren't nearly as lucky, and many other parts of the already sparsely populated county have been hit rather hard by the Opioid Crisis. It's a weird situation.
Although, Lowell isn't as bad off as a lot of them, due to Tourism brought in by Lowell National Historic Park, which preserves the history of manufacturing in Lowell and the rest of New England, and being the home of one of the state's major universities, UMass Lowell. It only starts to get rough as you head away from the highway and towards Lawrence.
The Niagara Region in Ontario, much like upstate New York across the river, has been in slow decline since the 1970s. There used to be much manufacturing along the Niagara River and Welland Canal, but cheaper products from elsewhere have caused all but a couple of the factories to go bust. The tourist industry took a major hit in 2001 after 9/11, followed by the SARS outbreak, both of which discouraged the usual American tourists from crossing the border. The area now mostly runs on the casinos, wineries, and agriculture.
Towns that base their existence on exploiting natural resources often become these when the resource runs out or becomes obsolete. Examples would be the ghost towns in the Western United States, mining towns in Appalachia, and more mining towns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Some towns that are forcefully evacuated because their national resource makes them toxic.
In the present day, Libby, Montana is fighting a valiant fight against falling victim to this, in spite of the massive zonolite/asbestos presence that was once in the town. The Superfund project spent about two decades working to clean up the town and now certain pockets of it are livable, though generations of its residents will still succumb to mesothelioma.
Odessa, Texas' economy is directly tied to the dwindling reserves of oil in the area. Not good. Ditto for its Friday Night Lights stand-in, Dillon.
Many of the suburbs in the American "Sun Belt" (the southern third of the country, running from Southern California to theCarolinas and Florida) went from Boom Towns to Dying Towns virtually overnight as a result of the 2008 economic collapse. For decades, Americans had been choosing to buy houses somewhere that would be nice, warm, cheap, and sunny to live. Unfortunately, this led to a housing bubble in places that didn't actually have anything else supporting their economic base. Cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Fort Myers, Florida, which were largely nothing but suburbs, have been hit especially hard. Las Vegas survived due to its massive casino-based tourist industry, but it is now surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of pre-built tract houses in the middle of the desert that will probably never sell. Not helping is that the American Southwest has been suffering from long-term drought in the '10s and '20s — in addition to simply having a lack of water usage at a time when the population was expanding, the area is also highly dependent on hydroelectric power for its energy needs from Lake Powell, which experts have started predicting might actually fall to such low levels that it can no longer sustain hydroelectric power generation!
In California, entire counties have been brought low — Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, for example, were marketed as bedroom communities. They were once touted as the affordable alternative to expensive housing in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. The combination of rising gasoline prices (California's strict emissions standards meant the state already had the highest gas prices in the country, even before prices spiked in the mid-2000s), falling housing prices, and the lack of high-paying local employment created a perfect storm for the region, which now suffers from some of the highest crime and unemployment rates in the nation.
One California example, Hinkley, stands out as the location of the tainted water scandal chronicled in Erin Brockovich. After the events of the movie, Pacific Gas & Electric offered buyouts to the residents on the plume. Many chose to cut their losses, to the point that PG&E now owns about two-thirds of the property in the town. The effect on the local economy is unmistakable.
Harvey, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. Home of the Dixie Square Mall (aka the mall from The Blues Brothers), abandoned since 1978. The last portion of Dixie Square Mall was torn down in May 2012. Whether the redevelopment that the city is hoping for actually happens remains to be seen.
Sidney, Nebraska. Once a growing city that boasted the headquarters of Cabela's. Once Cabela's was bought out by Bass Pro, a town of 7,000 people lost 2,000 jobs. You do the math.
San Antonio, Texas was a dying town for most of the first half of the 20th century. Then it was announced the 1968 World's Fair was going to be held there, leading to a surge in development. The Riverwalk came into being, new downtown hotels were built, a convention center sprung up, downtown was transformed from a sleepy hub of shantytowns to a lively center of activity, etc.
Schefferville, Quebec, whose economy was based on iron ore mining. When the mine stopped in 1982, the population dropped from over 5000 to just a few hundred today. The city temporarily lost its legal incorporation status between 1986 and 1990.
Many smaller towns in the Pittsburgh area have been severely crippled by the loss of the steel industry in the 1970s, many of which are along the Ohio and Beaver Rivers. Some of these include towns such as Aliquippa, Ambridge, Beaver Falls, New Brighton, Midland, Monaca (though perhaps not as much), and Freedom — and that's just on the western side of the city. Notable exceptions upon the river include Beaver (the seat of Beaver County), Sewickley (lots of old money here), and Moon (the airport). Since 2000, Aliquippa experienced a 20.5% drop in population, and Ambridge lost 10.1%. However, the area may see some revitalization with a Royal Dutch Shell cracker plant showing up in nearby Shippingport in the next year or two.
A classic example is Sharon, Pennsylvania, which was made up almost entirely of manufacturing facilities, including Sharon Steel, est. 1890, and was located very close to Interstate 80. After the Sharpsville Dam was built in the 1950s to control flooding, thus cutting off trade by way of the rivers, Sharon relied on their connection to I-80 to transport goods as well as rail lines that ran by select factories. Steel manufacturing declined due to overseas competition, and manufacturing in general declined until the recent economic recession practically crippled the town. Sharon Steel was closed in 1992, and nearly all physical remnants were removed by 1995.
The vacation destination Salton City, California, suffered greatly when the Salton Sea's slow evaporation and increasing salinity killed its ecosystem and destroyed its tourism industry. The city is full of half-completed houses, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and roads to nowhere. However, the dirt-cheap land eventually created a housing boom in the area in reaction to California's skyrocketing real estate prices. Its 2010 population was triple that of 10 years previous.
Cars is actually Truth in Television to a point. Many towns that had historically banked on the steady traffic from Route 66 became this or even died completely, largely due to the emergence of the interstate highway system combined with other socioeconomic factors. Stories like Radiator Springs were and still are tragically common. One example of this was Winslow, Arizona, which faced a population and economic decline after being bypassed by Interstate 40, forcing local businesses to close; the city only rebounded after marketing itself on tourism due to its history with Route 66 and building a park inspired by the song "Take It Easy" by the Eagles (which has the line "Well, I was standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" in the lyrics).
A non-industrial example is Kalaupapa, Hawaii, which was founded in 1866 as a leper colony. By 1969, Hansen's disease—aka leprosy—was treatable and better understood, so the state ended its forced exile and moved to close the colony. However, many former patients wished to stay since they knew their disfigurements would make it virtually impossible to reintegrate with society. As a result, the state closed Kalaupapa to new arrivals but has allowed the former patients to live there for the rest of their lives. As of early 2023, only four of the original patients remained, with two others who lived there having been sent to Honolulu for specialized medical care (the rest of the town's 82 residents are state and national park employees). When the last of the now-elderly patients moves or passes away, the state plans on turning the colony into a memorial park.
Geographers and sociologists have studied many American and Canadian towns which have died or shrunk considerably over the past several decades and determined that one by one the following will happen, usually in this order: A major employer closes, major retailers close, the town government dissolves or consolidates with the county, the school closes, the Post Office closes.
Other
Many smaller towns on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia were originally founded as boomtowns for rubber plantations and tin mines during the late 19th and early 20th century; this dependence on single sources of income became their undoing when the price of rubber and, ultimately, tin finally crashed for good, decimating their bread and butter and leading many of its younger talents flocking for greener pastures in larger towns or cities or abroad. The vast majority who chose to stay and contribute to whatever was left of the town's economy are now 50-somethings or older, which is very telling of the future of these towns.
State capitals do not fare better either. The Kuala Lumpur-centric nature of the country's economy after independence naturally sent new job seekers gravitating to the national capital and its surrounding satellite towns, or alternately the state capitals of Penang and Johor or Singapore. The scarcity of free land for new development within old town centres would also prompt developers to construct new suburban towns on the outskirts, taking with it long-time townies who simply favour more peace and quiet. It's thus unsurprising to find capitals for lesser-known states suffering from acute urban decay and desolation, even during festive seasons, when people are supposed to be returning to their hometowns.
This is an enormous problem in Russia, where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of so-called "single-factory towns". Many of them were built during the mass industrialization in the 1930s and had almost the entire adult population working on some sort of heavy machinery factory or power plant. When the USSR bit the dust, many of the factories were shut down or forcibly bankrupted, leaving entire cities unemployed and rapidly depopulating.
A typical example is Yurievets, Ivanovo Oblast. Once home to several factories, currently all are in ruins or disassembled. The population is half of what it once was and below the official minimum to qualify as a town, and survives on subsistence farming and working shifts in neighboring cities. You can often find abandoned houses if you wander in the streets.
Former East Germany is infamous for this. Since German reunification, there has been a constant exodus of people from rural areas, small towns, and fairly large cities to move towards the area that was former West Germany. These emigrants are also disproportionately young and women. High rates of unemployment and crime, low salaries, and rising amounts of neo-Nazi activity are all common reasons why people emigrate. It also doesn't help that most of the national economic activity, and large demand for skilled workers, is concentrated along the western parts of the country. What became East Germany wasn't exactly known for being a thriving economic center compared to its western and southern counterparts even before the split. While the trend has reversed recently in the larger and more prosperous areas of the East (Leipzig, Dresden, etc.) or tourist trap towns (Erfurt, Weimar, Potsdam, Stralsund, etc.), the future remains unclear whether the states there would be able to recover demographically.
The aforementioned tourism, thanks to the East controlling an impressive half of Germany's world heritage cities, has given some hope in making these smaller cities prosperous once more while everything else is going to rely on immigrants (which may be hard to do given the East's homogeneity) and making young people stay (which may start working given how cheap the east is compared to the increasingly expensive west and south). Leipzig, former East Berlin and Dresden have begun competing for young people with former West Berlin and Munich in this regard by styling themselves as hip, cheap and great for artsy youth or history lovers.
A very special case is Kursdorf, a village in the middle of a major airport. As in, between the two landing strips. Since 2017, the population of the village is zero, as nobody wanted to move in and everyone who could scrape together two euros moved out.
This was and to a great extent still is a problem in Britain, which ran its industrial base ragged during the Second World War and was forced to nationalize many heavy industries to prevent their total collapse. Then The '80s happened and things got worse. As mentioned above, if you ever visit one of these towns, do NOT mentionMargaret Thatcher.
Britain is pretty much what happens when an entire country becomes a dying town. The wealth generated by the old empire is long gone and economic activity is centered mostly in London, with even that starting to run out and die off post-Brexit. Those who could afford to leave for the EU and the economic opportunities there, have all done so.
Many coastal towns in Britain began as isolated villages and hamlets until the boom in seaside holidays which started in the middle-late 1800s when the tourist demand caused them to expand into seasonal "must-visit" places based on hotels, boarding houses, and the associated infrastructure. Blackpool, for instance, became a "cheap-and-cheerful" location for nearby industrial cities to send their people on cheap holidays throughout the summer months. This supply-and-demand relationship persisted well into The '50s and The '60s, until rising affluence and the relative ease of overseas travel opened up cheap, attractive, holidays in sunnier hotspots such as Spain. Suddenly, Rhyl or Skegness or Southend did not seem so attractive for a summer holiday. Go to Rhyl in North Wales now and you find a derelict, crumbling, town with most of its grand seafront boarding houses crumbling or turned into homeless hostels, and tired, dated, seedy, attractions which are relics of its former glory.
Many capitals when they cease to be one. Especially when they were built from scratch for no other purpose but to serve as a national capital, often (and rapidly) going all the way to Ghost Town — e.g. Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire.
Right in the middle of The '70s, for purely political reasons, the PolishPeople's Republic completely changed its administrative divisions, going from 17 to 49 voivodeships.note (basic unit of administrative division, think provinces or states) Suddenly a lot of provincial towns and small cities were elevated to the position of region's capital and gained central investments, mostly into pompous infrastructure. After the fall of communism merely 14 years later, two-step reform was initiated and in 1999, the country was reorganised back into 16 voivodeships. As for the remaining 33 former capitals, most suffered massive population outflow, dwindling their already small population, while the former seats of administration are at best rented out for office spaces - in most cases, they are just boarded up.
Former industrial towns suffer from similar problems as those in Russia mentioned above. After the fall of communism a lot of old industries either went bankrupt or have been taken over by "foreign investors" and dismantled, leaving empty factory buildings that crumbled into ruins over the years while the people moved to seek work elsewhere.
There are lots of mining towns in the middle of the Australian bush that previously had populations of thousands or even tens of thousands when the mine was especially large. Now, many are completely empty, or have just a few hundred people and a filling station. There are also some towns that had their populations dwindle to almost nothing after trains stopped coming that way.
Many towns around the Aral Sea, like Mo'ynoq, had populations of thousands employed in the fishing industry. Now, due to the Aral Sea shrinking, many of these towns are located miles from the nearest shore; fishing boats◊ and ships◊ lie scattered on the dry land that was once covered by water. Ongoing desertification and unemployment led to depopulation and a decline in living conditions of these who decided to remain.
Much of Central Asia suffered this fate centuries ago after the trade routes known as the Silk Road were bypassed by the circum-African seaborne links between Europe and South/East Asia. The overall effect was akin to the fate of towns bypassed by upgraded highways writ large.
Many rural communities in Japan that have no tourism to thrive on suffered from heavy population loss. This is mostly caused by the combination of closing of industries, young adults migrating to major cities for career, education, and cultural opportunities, and low birth rates leaving mostly the elder population.
There are some towns, such as Haapamäki, in Finland, which were built near some railway route and most people there used to work for VR (the national railway company). Then VR centered things to bigger cities.
In Armenia, there are a lot of these outside of the capital Yerevan. Towns devastated by the 1988 earthquake in the north have it the worst, although most of the buildings have been rebuilt. Other towns that were big tourist spots in Soviet times like Dilijan have seen business dry up since independence from the Soviet Union. And villages along the border with Azerbaijan have shrunk due to the dangers posed by ceasefire violations in the ongoing conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh. People from small villages across the country are leaving in large numbers to the cities, or worse, to Russia or the US.
This is a major problem in some regionsnote Teruel, Soria and Asturias to cite some of Spain as villages and towns are depopulated by young people who move to the cities looking for employment and a better life, leaving mostly elderly people behind.
is a few steps away from being a straight-up Ghost Town—either that, or Indiana's own mini-Detroit. Either way, not exactly an ideal place.
