The Cities That Keep Rhyming
The Cities That Keep Rhyming
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
Oakland. Baltimore. Cleveland. Memphis. Philadelphia. Newark.
Portland. Seattle. Denver. Kansas City. Cincinnati.
At first glance, these places don’t belong in the same sentence. Different regions. Different political cultures. Different eras of growth. Some are old industrial cities still trying to recover. Others are young, rich, and supposedly “the future.”
And yet the conversation around them has started to converge.
People talk about disorder. Exit. Loss of confidence. Businesses quietly leaving. Families recalculating. A sense that something essential has slipped—not all at once, not dramatically, but steadily.
This isn’t partisan chatter. It shows up in local reporting, police blotters, commercial vacancy rates, and the decisions people make when no one is watching.
So the question practically asks itself:
What do all of these places have in common?
The answer isn’t ideology. And it isn’t a single demographic explanation. It’s a sequence—a pattern that has repeated often enough to stop being accidental.
I. Each City Scaled Around a Dominant Growth Model
Every city on this list expanded rapidly by leaning hard into one engine.
Chicago had rail, slaughterhouses, and heavy industry.
Detroit had autos.
Baltimore and Newark had ports and manufacturing.
Cleveland and Cincinnati had steel and production.
Oakland rode logistics and Bay Area spillover.
Portland, Seattle, and Denver rode tech, lifestyle migration, and services.
For a time, this looked like success. Jobs were plentiful. Housing expanded. People arrived.
Specialization works—until it doesn’t.
What looks like resilience in an upswing often turns out to be leverage when conditions change.
II. Growth Outpaced Ownership
Here is where things quietly tilt.
In each case, cities absorbed large numbers of people to meet labor or growth demand. What they did not do—at scale—was create durable pathways to ownership, mobility, and independence.
Work was available. Ownership was harder.
Renting was easy. Rooting was not.
As long as the engine kept running, this imbalance stayed hidden. When the engine slowed or shifted, it became decisive.
People with ownership adapt.
People without it are trapped.
That isn’t ideology. It’s math.
III. The Engine Changed Faster Than the City Did
Eventually, the underlying model weakened.
Factories automated or left.
Ports lost traffic.
Manufacturing hollowed out.
Tech matured, consolidated, and required fewer people.
Housing costs rose faster than wages.
The economy didn’t disappear. It narrowed.
The population built for the old model remained.
This is the fork in the road.
IV. Politics Replaced Feedback
Once economic feedback weakens, something fills the void.
In many of these cities, politics stepped in where markets and enforcement retreated. Outcomes stopped being treated as signals and started being framed as moral claims.
In Portland, prosecutors openly deprioritized theft and drug offenses in the name of equity. Shoplifting surged. Small retailers closed—not because demand vanished, but because enforcement did.
In San Francisco, open-air drug markets were tolerated for years under the language of compassion, even as overdoses soared. Only after public anger became impossible to ignore did officials reverse course.
In Baltimore, clearance rates for violent crime collapsed long before crime itself became a national talking point.
This is how decline becomes stable: not through catastrophe, but through normalization.
An Important Asymmetry
This pattern isn’t destiny.
Philadelphia disrupted it briefly in the early 2000s. Enforcement tightened. Crime fell sharply. Confidence returned. The city gained population.
Then the political winds shifted. Standards loosened. The old equilibrium crept back.
The lesson isn’t that reform is impossible. It’s that it requires sustained insistence on reality.
What This Pattern Produces
Over time, the same symptoms appear:
• disorder that never quite triggers emergency response
• selective enforcement that teaches people where the lines really are
• capital that stops arriving before anyone admits it’s leaving
• rhetoric that grows more moral as results worsen
Cities don’t collapse. They drift.
Why New Cities Should Pay Attention
Some readers will object to grouping places like Denver, Seattle, or Portland with older industrial cities.
They’re right—for now.
These cities still have wealth, talent, and momentum. What they’re losing isn’t money yet. It’s feedback.
History doesn’t repeat.
But it does reuse structures.
A Final Observation
Cities fail when work, ownership, order, and accountability drift apart.
They recover only when those things are deliberately brought back into alignment.
Everything else—slogans, funding, task forces—is secondary.
Bob: If the same story keeps showing up in different cities, maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s a system.
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The Dog That Didn’t Bark — Yet
One city has been conspicuously absent from this list.
New York.
For decades, New York has been the exception people point to when every other city begins to rhyme. It had Wall Street to absorb shocks, media to frame outcomes, academia to supply moral language, and cultural gravity strong enough to keep capital arriving even when fundamentals weakened.
New York didn’t avoid the sequence.
It buffered it.
Now that buffer is thinning.
The city is about to run a full-scale experiment with openly socialist leadership — not at the margins, not rhetorically, but structurally. Taxes, enforcement, housing, capital mobility, and labor incentives will all be tested at once in the one city that has always been able to say, we’re different.
This is the stress test.
If capital stays, the pattern breaks.
If capital leaves quietly — not all at once, not dramatically — then New York joins the list, and the argument is over.
The deeper question isn’t whether New York loses prestige. It’s whether prestige still matters when capital, media, and influence are no longer tethered to geography. When publishing fragments. When academia loses rank. When culture moves faster than cities.
New York has always been the place where consequences arrived last.
Now we’ll find out whether it still gets to arrive last — or whether the system finally catches up.
Bob: The dog that didn’t bark isn’t proof of innocence. Sometimes it just means the storm hasn’t reached the house yet.