Having visited there some decades ago, I recently fell into learning about the precipitous decline of Portland, Oregon. One video that I viewed about Portland mentioned Hartford, Connecticut, a city where I lived for several years that has been experiencing a decline comparable to Portland. This led to me reading articles about the economic and crime problems facing other cities that I have either lived in or visited in the past—Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and others—which was both enlightening and depressing. Apparently, a lot of our great urban centers are no longer quite so great. The inflection point for American cities this century was the Covid-19 madness that fueled an astonishing and unprecedented move toward remote work and online education, which has decimated the corporate work environments and higher education institutions that were once the Read more