The Coming Ring City Effect

The Death and Life of Chicago

We're not totally headed in this direction, but we are seeing a trend of an expensive downtown, and people with money moving away from the suburbs, leaving the overall economic situation in suburbs more precarious.

What are strategies that can deal with the problems of lowered tax revenues and increased poverty and reliance on state and county services?

Los Angeles metro is fortunate, because we have a diverse economic base, but there have been prior drops in prices that effectively turned upper middle class suburbs into plain-old middle class suburbs, or even working class suburbs. We've also seen the flipside to that, where affordable working class and middle class areas have become fairly expensive.