10 American Towns That Will COLLAPSE Next: Which One Dies First?

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Every few years, another American town makes the news because it's running out of people, running out of money, or running out of road.

[00:00:08]The signs are always the same.

[00:00:10]A shuttered hospital, a school that closed, a downtown that stopped pretending.

[00:00:16]Some of these towns will survive. Some of them won't. These are the 10 American towns that will collapse next.

[00:00:24]Which one dies first?

[00:00:27]Number 10, Cairo, Illinois.

[00:00:30]Cairo sits at the southern tip of Illinois at the exact point where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi.

[00:00:38]A geographic position that, in the 19th century, was supposed to make it one of the great inland cities of the American continent. Land speculators, including Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842 and famously despised the place, bet heavily on Cairo as the future commercial center of the interior. Mark Twain also passed through and was similarly unimpressed.

[00:01:01]That should have been a sign. At its peak in 1920, Cairo had a population of around 15,000 people. By the 2020 US Census, that number had fallen to approximately 1,700.

[00:01:15]The city lost roughly 89% of its population over a century, not through a single catastrophic event, but through a sustained, multi-decade departure that accelerated with each generation.

[00:01:27]Businesses closed, young people left, tax [music] revenues fell, services contracted, which caused more businesses to close and more people to leave. The cycle is familiar. In Cairo, it has run longer and further than in most [music] places. What remains is a collection of historically significant, but heavily deteriorated buildings.

[00:01:50]The Holiday Hotel, the Customs House, the Cairo Public Library, a municipal government that has struggled for decades to maintain basic services and a persistent unemployment rate that sits well above state and national averages.

[00:02:05]The Fort Defiance State Park at the confluence of the two rivers offers a genuinely impressive view of the point where America's two greatest river systems [music] meet.

[00:02:15]The city around it tells a different story. The racial history of Cairo is inseparable from its current condition.

[00:02:22]The city was deeply segregated for most of the 20th century, was the site of significant civil rights activism in the late 1960s, and experienced accelerated white flight through the 1970s following sustained racial tensions. The economic disinvestment that followed was not simply a market response. A combination of structural racism, deindustrialization, and geographic isolation from larger economic centers produced a city that has been in functional decline for 50 years without a credible recovery plan.

[00:02:56]The population continues to fall.

[00:02:59]Municipal governance is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain at current population levels. Local officials have been reluctant to put a timeline on what happens next, which is itself a kind of answer. Number nine.

[00:03:13]Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown occupies a particular place in the American story of industrial collapse, not just as an example of what deindustrialization does to a city, but as the city where it happened first, [music] visibly, and most completely. On September 19th, 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced it was closing its Campbell Works Plant, eliminating approximately 5,000 jobs in [music] a single day. The date is remembered in Youngstown as Black Monday. It was the beginning, [music] not the end, of a process that would see the steel industry essentially evacuate [music] the Mahoning Valley over the following decade. By the mid-1980s, over 50,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost in the region. The population of Youngstown, which had been around 115,000 in 1977, entered a decline that has continued for 45 years. The 2020 census counted approximately 60,000 residents in Youngstown.

[00:04:16]The city had a population of over 170,000 at its peak in 1930. Half the housing units that existed in 1980 no longer exist. Entire blocks were demolished.

[00:04:27]Neighborhoods that housed thousands of [music] families are now open fields maintained by the city's land bank at significant ongoing expense.

[00:04:37]Youngstown has tried.

[00:04:39]The city became internationally known in urban planning circles in the early 2000s for its Youngstown 2010 shrinking city plan.

[00:04:50]A rare instance of a local government honestly acknowledging that the goal was not growth, but managed [music] decline and planning accordingly. The approach meant intentionally demolishing abandoned housing, converting vacant land to green space, and concentrating services in areas where population remained rather than spreading thin resources [music] across an oversized footprint. It attracted academic attention from planners around the world and was praised as intellectually honest about a reality that most declining cities refuse to name. It did not reverse the trajectory. The population continues to fall. Youngstown faces ongoing challenges with violent crime, concentrated poverty [music] in its remaining neighborhoods, a school system that has struggled financially and academically for years, and infrastructure designed for a city roughly three times its current size.

[00:05:42]The question is not whether Youngstown will look dramatically different in 20 years from how it looks today. It will.

[00:05:48]The question is how many people are still there when that happens [music] and what kind of services they can still expect a municipal government to provide. Number eight, Braddock, Pennsylvania.

[00:06:00]Braddock is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, about 10 mi east of Pittsburgh, situated on the Monongahela River at the site of one of the most significant events in early American military history, the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, where British General Edward Braddock was killed and a young George Washington led the retreat.

[00:06:22]By the 20th century, Braddock was a steel town. The Edgar Thomson Steel Works, >> [music] >> the first steel plant that Andrew Carnegie built in the United States, opened in Braddock in 1875 and was one of the most productive [music] steel-making operations in the world for decades. The plant is still operating today, one of the few remaining active steel facilities in the Pittsburgh region, but the community that grew up around it is not.

[00:06:49]Braddock's peak population was around 20,000 residents in [music] 1920. The 2020 census counted approximately 1,700 people, a decline of over 90%.

[00:07:03]The physical evidence of this contraction is everywhere. Vacant lots where houses stood, a main street where most storefronts are empty, a Carnegie Library building, the first library Andrew Carnegie [music] ever funded, opened in 1888 that has been struggling to maintain programming and operations.

[00:07:22]>> [music] >> Braddock gained national attention in the late 2000s and early 2010s when its mayor, John Fetterman, who later served as Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor and was elected to the U.S. Senate [music] in 2022, brought sustained media focus to the borough's condition and attempted to attract artists, small businesses, and outside investment [music] as part of a revitalization effort. The coverage was genuine, the effort was real, and the attention was more than Braddock had received in decades. The revitalization was partial at best. The Edgar Thomson Works continues to operate on the river, employing workers who commute mostly from other communities.

[00:08:03]The borough itself continues to shrink around it. The Carnegie Library building, one of the oldest Carnegie libraries in existence, the first one he ever funded, still stands and is still in community use, which is a fact worth noting in a place where so much else has been lost.

[00:08:20][music] Whether the library remains funded and adequately staffed going forward is, at any given [music] moment, an open question rather than a settled one.

[00:08:31]Number seven, Gary, Indiana.

[00:08:35]Gary was built in 1906 by US Steel Corporation, literally incorporated and developed from scratch as a company town to support the construction and operation of what was intended to be the world's largest steel plant. It was named after Albert Henry Gary, chairman of US Steel's board of directors, >> [music] >> which is the kind of naming decision that tells you exactly what century you're in. The city grew rapidly throughout the early 20th century, reaching a peak population of about 178,000 in 1960. The steel industry employed the large of the working population, and the city built the infrastructure, schools, parks, a city hall, >> [music] >> a memorial auditorium, appropriate to a major industrial city of that size. Then the steel industry declined, and Gary declined with it in a way that became one of the most documented examples of urban deterioration in American history.

[00:09:33]The population in the 2020 census was approximately 69,000, down from that peak of 178,000.

[00:09:41][music] The racial dimension of Gary's decline mirrors other Rust Belt cities.

[00:09:46]White flight accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s as the city's population became majority black. Disinvestment followed, and the tax base that funded city services eroded as the residents who remained had fewer economic resources.

[00:10:03]The visual result is extraordinary and grim and equal measure.

[00:10:08]Gary has extensive neighborhoods of vacant, deteriorated, and demolished housing across multiple square miles of the city's footprint.

[00:10:17]The City Methodist Church, a Gothic style church built in 1926 that once seated 1,800 worshipers, has been a ruthless, vegetation-filled ruin for decades, and has become one of the most documented urban exploration sites in the American Midwest.

[00:10:35]Photographed more often since its abandonment than during its years of active use, the Union Station is abandoned. The Palace Theater, which in its time was one of the grandest movie houses in northern Indiana, is a shell.

[00:10:48]Many of the civic and commercial buildings from Gary's peak years stand empty on streets that once had foot traffic and now have almost none. The city continues to operate, maintain and in make and segregate, maintain the remaining population, and attempt various revitalization initiatives tied to its lakefront location >> [music] >> and proximity to Chicago, which is about 25 mi northwest. Several large-scale development proposals have been made for Gary's lakefront over the years, most of them involving casino expansion or mixed-use [music] development. Progress has been limited. The US Steel plant, which has gone through various ownership [music] changes, including periods under ArcelorMittal and back to US Steel, still operates on the lakefront, though at a fraction of its historical employment levels. What Gary becomes next is genuinely unclear. What it was is not coming back. Number six, East Saint Louis, Illinois. East Saint Louis sits across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis, Missouri. Close enough that the Gateway Arch is visible from its streets on a clear day. The visual proximity to one of America's more recognizable landmarks does nothing to address the conditions in East Saint Louis itself, which has been in a state of functional collapse for over half a century. At its peak, the city had a population of around 82,000. [music] The 2020 census counted approximately 17,500 residents. The city's median household income is among the lowest of any city in Illinois. The poverty rate consistently runs above 40%.

[00:12:26]Infrastructure, roads, [music] water, sewage, has been in various states of disrepair and managed crisis for decades. East Saint Louis has not had a functioning hospital within its city limits since the early 2000s. Residents requiring emergency medical care must cross the river to Saint Louis or travel to other facilities outside the city. A city without a hospital is making a statement about what level of service it can provide its residents, even if that statement is unintentional. The city school system has been subject to state oversight and intervention multiple times. The police department has operated significantly understaffed relative to the crime rates it manages.

[00:13:07]Basic municipal services have been repeatedly disrupted by budget crises.

[00:13:12]Former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, who dealt with East Saint Louis's fiscal crises in the 1990s, described the city's situation directly. East Saint Louis is a community that needs a fundamental rethinking of what it is and what it can be. The current model is not sustainable. That assessment was made in the 1990s. The fundamentals have not changed.

[00:13:34]What keeps East Saint Louis from complete institutional collapse [music] is its position in the Saint Louis metropolitan area. The hospitals, the employment centers, the regional infrastructure across the river sustain a population that can functionally access those resources even while living in a city that cannot provide them independently. In practice, East Saint Louis functions less as a self-sustaining city and more as an outlying district of a metropolitan area that happens to sit in a different state with different tax structures, different service obligations, and no formal mechanism for the regional economy that sustains its residents to also fund its municipal government. That gap between where people live and where the economy that supports them operates is the structural problem that no city plan has yet solved. Number five, Flint, Michigan. Flint's water crisis, which began in 2014 and entered the national consciousness in late 2015, is probably the most widely covered municipal catastrophe of the past decade, but Flint's problems began long before the water, >> [music] >> and the water crisis was a consequence of the city's broader fiscal and demographic collapse [music] rather than its cause. Flint was a General Motors company town in the most complete sense. By the mid-20th century, GM employed about 80,000 people in Flint across multiple plants. The United Auto Workers Union was founded in Flint in 1937 following the Flint sit-down strike at the Fisher Body Plant, one of the most significant labor actions in American history, lasting 44 days from December 1936 to February 1937, ultimately winning recognition for the UAW as the bargaining representative for GM workers. The peak population of Flint was approximately 196,000 in 1960. The 2020 census counted about 81,000 residents. GM's employment in Flint had fallen to a fraction of its peak by the 2000s, and the Buick City Complex, once one of the largest automotive manufacturing campuses in the world, was demolished starting in 2002.

[00:15:49]The water crisis began when state-appointed emergency managers overseeing Flint during a fiscal emergency switched the city's water source from Detroit's system to the Flint River in April 2014 as a cost-cutting measure. The Flint River water was more corrosive than the previous source and was not properly treated, which caused lead to leach from the city's aging pipe infrastructure into the drinking water supply. Children were exposed to elevated lead levels for over a year before the problem was publicly acknowledged. The long-term health implications for the children affected are ongoing. State and federal funding for infrastructure replacement and health remediation has been allocated. The lead service lines in Flint have been largely replaced through a federally supported replacement program that took several years to complete. The water coming out of Flint's taps today meets federal standards, but the underlying conditions that made the 2014 decision possible, a shrinking tax base, inadequate municipal revenue, aging infrastructure across every city system, and a population that continues to trend downward, have not been resolved by pipe replacement. Flint's fiscal situation is managed through a combination of state support, federal funding, and the kind of sustained outside intervention that most cities of comparable size do not require and would not accept. [music] The population continues to decline. The manufacturing jobs that built the city are not returning. The 2020 census counted about 81,000 residents, down from a peak of approximately 196,000 in 1960. The city's trajectory over the past 60 years is a straight line in one direction.

[00:17:37]Nothing in the current economic or demographic landscape suggests that line is about to change direction.

[00:17:43]Number four, >> [music] >> Stockton in California.

[00:17:46]Stockton has the distinction of having been the largest American city to file for municipal bankruptcy in US history at the time it did so in June 2012. The city emerged from bankruptcy in 2015 after a Chapter 9 process that involved painful reductions to city services, employee pensions, and debt obligations to creditors. The bankruptcy was the culmination of a specific set of decisions. During the housing boom of the early 2000s, Stockton undertook an aggressive expansion of city facilities.

[00:18:19]>> [music] >> A new arena, a marina development, an expanded city hall, various infrastructure investments, largely financed through debt instruments tied to optimistic assumptions about continued growth. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, Stockton was among the hardest hit cities in California. Home values dropped catastrophically. Foreclosures swept through residential neighborhoods.

[00:18:46]The tax base that underpinned the debt service evaporated. Post-bankruptcy Stockton has been working to stabilize its finances, and there are genuine signs of recovery in some sectors.

[00:18:58]The city is the seat of San Joaquin County, has a state university campus, and sits in the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley with genuine economic activity.

[00:19:09]But it also consistently ranks poorly on metrics including violent crime rate, unemployment, poverty, and educational attainment. The city's population is around 322,000. [music] It is not a small city, which means that the scale of the problems is proportionally larger than in a declining Rust Belt town.

[00:19:30]Stockton's challenges are not primarily demographic contraction, but fiscal management, inequality, and the consequences of geographic position between the Bay Area's extreme cost and the Central Valley's limited opportunity. Former Stockton Mayor Ann Johnston, speaking after the bankruptcy resolution, said, "We didn't go bankrupt because we were a poor city. We went bankrupt because we made decisions as if we were richer than we were." That [music] honesty about causation is useful, whether the lessons were fully absorbed is another question. Number three, Atlantic City, New Jersey. Atlantic City built its entire identity around gambling, and then gambling became legal in too many other places to sustain that identity.

[00:20:16]The city's casino industry began in 1978, when Resorts International opened as New Jersey's first legal casino.

[00:20:23]Capitalizing on the state's 1976 voter referendum that legalized casino gambling specifically in Atlantic City.

[00:20:32]For a brief period in the 1980s, Atlantic [music] City was the most visited tourist destination in the United States. The casinos drew enormous revenue. The boardwalk filled with visitors.

[00:20:44]The city seemed to have found a sustainable economic model. The problem was that model's vulnerability. As other states legalized gambling through the 1990s and 2000s, [music] particularly Pennsylvania, which opened casinos in 2006 and immediately drew customers who had previously traveled to Atlantic City. The customer base eroded.

[00:21:07]Atlantic City went from having a regional monopoly on East Coast gambling to being one of many options within a few hours drive of its target market.

[00:21:17]Between 2014 and 2016, five of Atlantic City's 12 casinos closed. The Atlantic Club, Showboat, Revel, [music] Trump Plaza, and Trump Taj Mahal.

[00:21:29]The closure of five major casino hotels in two years represented a collapse of the city's primary industry in real time, eliminating thousands of jobs and devastating the municipal tax base.

[00:21:42]The city's general obligation bonds were downgraded to junk status. The state of New Jersey took over Atlantic City's finances in 2016 through an emergency intervention that gave the state direct control over the city's budget and spending.

[00:21:57]Several new casinos have since opened, and the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and Ocean Casino Resort both opened in 2018, [music] partially replacing the revenue lost in the mass closures. Sports betting, legalized in New Jersey in 2018 following a Supreme Court ruling, has added a new revenue stream, and New Jersey's online and mobile sports betting market has become one of the largest in the country. The fiscal situation has improved from the acute crisis point of 2016, and the state relinquished direct financial oversight of Atlantic City in 2021.

[00:22:34]But Atlantic City's population of around 38,000 lives in a city that exists in service of an industry that operates in an increasingly competitive national market. The poverty rate exceeds 30%.

[00:22:48]The median household income is well below the New Jersey state average.

[00:22:52]Vacant lots where casino hotels once stood are a persistent feature of the city's landscape. The non-casino economy, the one that would sustain the city if the gambling industry contracted further is thin. The city's future depends on an industry whose fortunes are tied to consumer preferences, competitive markets in surrounding states, and macroeconomic conditions that Atlantic City has no control over.

[00:23:16]That is a precarious foundation for a municipal budget, and Atlantic City has already learned once what happens when it gives way. Number [music] two, Chester, Pennsylvania. Chester is a small city in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, about 15 mi south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River.

[00:23:34]It has a population of around 34,000 people and a history as an industrial and shipbuilding city that goes back to its founding in 1682, making it one of the oldest cities in Pennsylvania. Today, it is one of the most financially distressed municipalities [music] in the state, and in 2020, Chester became the first city in Pennsylvania history to be placed into receivership. A receiver, a state-appointed official with authority over the city's finances, was assigned following a determination that Chester could not manage its fiscal obligations independently. The city's pension obligations, accumulated over decades of contracts with municipal workers, were consuming an unsustainable share of city revenue. The infrastructure was deteriorating, basic services were being cut. The receivership process involves the receiver having direct authority to renegotiate contracts, restructure debts, and make spending decisions over the objections of elected city officials. Chester's school district, the Chester Upland School District, has been in a state of financial crisis for years, requiring emergency state funding multiple times to maintain operations.

[00:24:47]The district serves a population with extremely high poverty rates and has struggled academically and financially simultaneously. The population of Chester has declined from a peak of about 66,000 in 1950. The industries that sustained it, shipbuilding, steel fabrication, chemical manufacturing, are gone. The city's position in the Philadelphia metropolitan area provides some access to regional economic activity, but Chester itself captures little of it. The receivership process is ongoing. Chester may survive in some form. Its proximity to Philadelphia, its access to transit, and its status as a county seat provides some institutional anchoring. Whether it survives as a city capable of providing adequate services to its [music] residents, rather than simply as a legal entity managing its own wind down, is the more relevant question.

[00:25:38]Number one, East Palestine, Ohio.

[00:25:43]East Palestine made international news on February 3rd, 2023, when a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed on the edge of the town, leading to a controlled burn of vinyl chloride that sent a large plume of toxic smoke over the community and surrounding region. The event drew national attention, visits from federal officials, and extensive media coverage of a small Ohio town most of the country had never heard of. But East Palestine's challenges predate the derailment by decades.

[00:26:15]East Palestine is a small town of about 4,700 people in Columbiana County in northeastern Ohio, positioned in the Rust Belt landscape that characterizes much of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. The town's economy was historically tied to manufacturing, ceramics, steel fabrication, and related industries that declined through the deindustrialization of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

[00:26:43]The population has been declining since the 1950s, when the census counted around 5,900 residents.

[00:26:51]The derailment and its aftermath added a new and specific layer of difficulty.

[00:26:56]The controlled burn of vinyl chloride produced phosgene, hydrogen chloride, and other combustion products that spread [music] through the town.

[00:27:04]Residents were evacuated, then allowed to return.

[00:27:08]Questions about air quality, water quality, and long-term health implications from [music] exposure to the combustion products and the chemical spill itself became the focus of sustained community concern and legal action against Norfolk Southern.

[00:27:23]The EPA and state agencies conducted testing of air, water, and soil in and around East Palestine throughout 2023.

[00:27:32]The results have been the subject of ongoing dispute between regulatory agencies, Norfolk Southern, and community advocates, with residents reporting persistent health symptoms and concerns that official testing did not fully characterize the exposure. Norfolk Southern announced settlements of over $600 million to resolve claims related to the derailment, including payments to affected residents, the state of Ohio, and other claimants. [music] The settlement, finalized in 2024, was substantial, though community members and advocates argued it was insufficient relative to the long-term health and economic impact on the town. The combination of pre-existing economic fragility, population decline, a depleted tax base, and now the addition of a documented chemical contamination event and its ongoing legal and health aftermath makes East Palestine the town on this list with the most acute and most recently compounded set of challenges. The $600 settlement provides resources that a town of 4,700 people would not otherwise have access to. [music] Whether those resources translate into genuine long-term recovery or whether East Palestine continues the slow demographic [music] and economic contraction that characterized the town before anyone outside Ohio knew its name is a question that will take years to answer.

[00:29:02]10 towns from a steel city that invented the concept of shrinking city planning to a chemical spill town that became a household name overnight. From a gambling city that bet everything on a single industry to cities that simply ran out of the economic engine that built them in the first place. None of these places failed because the people in them stopped trying. They failed because of deindustrialization, racial disinvestment, fiscal mismanagement, geographic isolation, a disaster that arrived on a freight train, or all of the above simultaneously. The question the video title asks, which one dies first, doesn't have a clean answer because towns don't die all at once. They get smaller and smaller and the services get thinner and the buildings get emptier until the question becomes impossible to avoid answering. These are the 10 American towns that will collapse next.

[00:29:57][music] Which one dies first? Hit that like button and subscribe if this one was worth your time. More of this coming.