American cities used to be kind of an example of American industrialization, of finance, of arts and entertainment.

In fact, American cities were something to be envy the world over.

And yet, it seems like for multiple decades now, many of our biggest cities have been in somewhat of a decline. That's not to say

it's been consistent the entire time, but I think most people would agree that on some level,

our cities seem a little bit less grand than they used to be, whether it's issues of crime,

economics, homelessness, you name it. There's problems.

There's significant problems.

And the question is, why?

Is this just the nature of cities?

Because it's not even a problem exclusive to the United States.

Or are there other reasons?

Well, today what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at five major U.S.

cities within the United States. And we're going to ask some important questions about what's happened. Why are many of

these places that you wouldn't want to go and vacation to? They're not places that you would

feel comfortable allowing your kids to just roam down the street and look at various monuments

or shops. Why did this take place? And can it be corrected? All of that and more coming up on this episode of Making the Argument. I'm your host, Nick Freitas with me in the studio, my beautiful bride, Tina, Queen of the Bees. Hello everyone. Then of course we have our resident historian political prognosticator, the Oracle of Virginia, Christian Heinz. How are you, Christian? I'm doing well.

Okay. Let's jump right into this. All right. So for the framing, we're going to take a look at some

various crises that have been impacting some major American cities. And we're just going to ask the

question, like, okay, kind of what happened? So to give everyone on the same sheet of music christian uh take us away so in case you're um not aware cities aren't really

doing that well in the u.s right now um now you could argue that some of them haven't been doing

well for i mean as you know some det Detroit is whole lifetimes, right?

Detroit's become like the primary example of a city that was much like grand and wealthy and

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