Speaking for the US many populated arid areas are completely unsustainable as population centers (ironically also where most people in the US have been moving for awhile now), especially because water resources haven’t been managed rationally in many arid areas. This story will absolutely be a global one though, see Tehran for one massive example, Lake Mead for another. No water and deadly heat waves are going to make for limitless ghost town tourism attraction opportunities!
The future is bright for abandoned building photography communities!
I think this will happen for reasons other than water too. So many towns in America were built to be in close proximity to train lines, who’s locations today makes no strategic or economic sense.
I believe many will hit critically low population levels where they can no longer support hospitals, schools, grocery stores, churches, etc
This is actually fairly normal through human history. Oasies dry up, mines run out, rivers change, easily fortified locations prove later impractical, trade routes move due to conflict or geography. When it happens within your lifetime, it triggers the cognitive bias of loss aversion. You feel it personally. When it happens a century or two before, it’s a curiosity.
I’ve spent a lot of time in dying or ghost towns, and no one owes any human settlement the right to exist in perpetuity. If humans vanished tomorrow, who would mourn your or my hometown?
Years ago, I went with a girlfriend to visit her relatives who lived in several rural Minnesota towns. As we drove down the highway, we saw lots of little towns with 3 and even 2 digit populations. Some towns were one intersection, sometimes without even a traffic light, but they’d always seem to have a post office, and a couple of bars.
In one low 2 digit small town, her relatives made up nearly half the population, and she took me through several empty houses and buildings that used to belong to relatives, all unlocked. One was an old abandoned forge where some great-great relative had been a blacksmith long ago. We stayed in a family-owned house that was fully furnished, but nobody lived there since an uncle passed away several years before.
That trip was about 50 years ago (!), and many of those towns were already on a long decline back then. Surely many of them have collapsed since then, and emptied out.
They hated him because he told the truth
my dog :(
Actually, he’d just wait outside a pizza parlor on a sidewalk…
Still somehow too soon.
I hope to dive the ruins of Miami one day.
I in a city that is a confluence of two rivers and the next city over is known for its aquifer.
Yet, the city government has hired consultants to come up with ideas for how to handle expected water shortages in the area as a result of development. Not to get all /c/collapse but it sure does make me feel negative about humanity’s effect on the planet.
Add to the list Mexico City, which hasn’t had water for a while.
if you build a city in a DESERT or arid regions, one should be cognizant of the expectation of water shortage.
Mexico city was originally built on a lake.
Well that’s the thing. We have tons of water here. We don’t irrigate. There’s no datacenter. Yet we still managed to fuck it up.
But I agree with your statement. Places like AZ and CA are crazy, growing lettuce and almonds and lawns and having bathtubs and pools is really bizarre behaviour in a desert. We’ve really lost touch with nature.
Fuck, I hadn’t heard about Salem’s water concerns.
I suspect coal country in Kentucky, WV and rural PA and Virginia and the western plains in Nebraska and Kansas, which are already severely stressed with population loss, will see some real ghost towns soon. Especially if the Ogallala aquifer dries up in the latter case.
Not a big guardian fan but I just saw an article about such towns pertaining to Trump cutting the funding that was earmarked to help those kinds of towns transition away from coal.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/29/trump-coal-country
Not a big Guardians fan??? Surely you can’t deny that Jose Rameriez is one of the greatest in the game today!!! Go Guards!
…we’re talking baseball right?
Well it was really the whole Vin Diesel I am Groot thing that didn’t click for me. Otherwise the music in it was pretty great.
A lot of the small towns in Nebraska and Kansas will be ghost towns when the few boomers that still live there pass away as all of the younger generations have already moved away.
no jobs in small towns/rural areas or even red areas unfortunately, so they all move close to big cities.
is that why they are redistricting/gerrymandering so hard in recent years too? it make sense.
How long before MAGAs decide to relocate homeless people to the ghost towns, then complain because they aren’t thriving in an arid desert without access to water?
I recently took a ‘no tolls’ route south through rural Oklahoma and Texas and saw many of these dead and dying small towns.
Many had a fat county sheriff hanging out to ticket people driving through.
It really is sad to see it. Those people are all now living in suburbs and slowly being driven out of their neighborhoods there by cost of living too.
In the Alps, there are already quite some ghost towns. Small towns either turned into touristic villages or disappeared over the last 50 years. Others were border towns that slowly went out of business. So many are hanging in by a thread, with increasingly old population.
I read something that villages in the alps are looking for new residents. But most of them are bankers or other people with office jobs, and they are like: no, we don:t need better wifi, you guys are useless in the real world.
It happens everywhere.
Current structures favour moving to cities. Farming and mining (which are the biggest job sectors that require people living in rural areas) are getting more and more automated, which means that there are fewer and fewer jobs in these fields. At the same time, huge, automated businesses win financially against smaller businesses operated with manual labour, so the small farmers are dieing off as well.
Manual jobs are often seasonal (e.g. picking fruit), and they are filled with seasonal foreign workers who don’t live in the rural areas either.
WIth fewer people living in rural areas other jobs (e.g. factories) also move to the cities, further removing rural jobs.
All of that push more people to move to cities and so on.
The impending demographic change accelerates that trend too.
Good for affordable housing?
not if they’re abandoned because they don’t have accessible clean water, affordable power etc…
people aren’t walking away from livable places.
🤫 that’ll upset our precious 1%
I could see them buying up places and doing the slumlord thing but otherwise, it’ll be a net loss for them too: fewer educated workers for their empires
but I doubt they’ll care until it hurts.
free realestate
It’s happened before with mining towns and the early days of the oil boom. Lots of still abandoned towns in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t think it will happen within 30 years, but for sure, with climate change a lot of places where it was possible to get water will no longer be able to get access to it easily.
30 years? No, it’s happening now. But it’s not an off switch that is triggered and it’s the end. It’s more of a wiggly line that goes just above sufficiency, then just below on an ever worsening overall decline as ever increasing and extreme measures are taken to adapt. The emergency is only prolonged and the inevitable is people will have to move as there are limits to trucking in water from a cost and availability perspective.
I mean people are running out of water now, but I don’t think there are many ghost towns, yet.
You can recycle your water very well. Vegas has a very low loss rate. It will be cheaper to pipe water in to replace losses than build an entire new city.
The problem repeatedly seems to come down to a decision of “cost now, money saved later” versus “money saved now, much bigger cost later”.
The choice always seems to be the latter
I highly doubt in this scenario. Water is not that expensive even shipped, and you only have to ship in the losses. Building anything let alone a brand new city? Fucking insane. Think about every house, business, and industrial builiding. It’s unreal.
There won’t be an explicit decision to up and leave to create a new city, don’t get me wrong. What I expect is that these cities will continue to make the cheapest, politically convenient attempts at solving the issue which will only lead to it being more and more expensive to live there comfortably. People will naturally leave to other neighbouring cities or towns that are in less of a dire situation
Water is not that expensive even shipped
Not right now but as it becomes scarce in the area, that cost will go up exponentially. As the cost rises, people who can’t afford it will start leaving - lowering the incentive to ship water out that way (a smaller market). That further pushes up the cost forcing more people to leave until it snowballs into a ghost city
There won’t be an explicit decision to up and leave to create a new city
No. Shit. Sherlock.
Do you understand that you recycle water? Set up the system like Vegas and your toilet flush today is your drinking water tomorrow. It doesn’t go poof into the ether JFC. That means you only have to ship in the losses JFC. Piping in water losses is fucking easyyyyyyy. Relocating millions of people is harrrrddd. JFC you people have no idea how things work. Water prices will go up yes, quite a lot when you consider it’s close to free right now. It’s not going to be a expontially increasing graph until the end of time like you’re talking. I’m gonna leave this conversation.
You willing to bet a city on that?
Bum fuck nowhere might go under because there’s no business there anyway. Vegas is not going anywhere.
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Vegas is a destination to its own now. Collapse isn’t happening. Give your head a shake.
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It’s an experience now. You can disagree with it, but it is. It hasn’t been just for gambling for a long time.
vegas is declining, it will collapse sooner or later. they are tyring to stave that off with sports stadiums, they dont see the money in gambling anymore.
There’s a tourism decline because of Trump. Long term it’ll be fine.
