I think what happened in the 1970s was pretty different in that it was an existential threat

to the economic rationale of the metro area.

The businesses, those manufacturing businesses that moved out of the city were moving way

out, either to the suburbs or overseas.

And that meant it wasn't clear what the economic rationale of the city was.

And that only got fixed when sort of a certain set of kind of professional managerial jobs

and technologies arose.

And when immigration brought a lot more people into our cities.

But I don't see that kind of shift happening right now.

Hello and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

So I want you to first second a picture in your head flying over a major American city.

You've done this, I'm sure, if you're listening to this podcast.

Like a city, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Boston, right?

What you see as the plane comes over the city is the relationship between the height of

the buildings and the centrality of them, right?

So even in places like Cleveland's a great example where I think notoriously a kind of

like post-industrial city that really suffered from what was referred to at the time as urban

blight and a white flight and all these things.

You've still got like the major skyscrapers and office buildings are in downtown central

Cleveland.

Big cities that are totally sprawled out like Houston, for instance, have that same dynamic,

although it's a little less like central there, but same thing, right?

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