Nearly Half of American Cities Shrinking

In 1879, Bodie, California, housed 10,000 people across more than 2,000 buildings perched at 8,735 feet in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Within six decades, it was empty. The pattern repeats across America: a thriving community one generation, a collection of empty buildings the next. Now researchers predict 15,000 U.S. cities could follow Bodie's path by the end of this century.

The Scale No One Expected

Sybil Derrible, an urban engineer at the University of Illinois Chicago, spent years analyzing census data from 32,000 American cities. Her team's conclusion, published in Nature Cities in 2024, contradicts nearly every assumption underlying modern urban planning: 43% of U.S. cities are already losing residents. Between now and 2100, cities could experience 12-23% depopulation on average. Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh top the list.

The geography of decline concentrates in predictable regions. Over 80% of cities in Vermont and West Virginia are projected to shrink. Illinois, Mississippi, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Michigan each face similar prospects for about 75% of their municipalities. The Rust Belt's struggles with deindustrialization have been documented for decades, but the research reveals something more systemic: depopulation isn't an anomaly affecting a few unlucky places. It's becoming the norm.

Uttara Sutradhar, a doctoral candidate on Derrible's team, explains why this caught planners off guard: "Most studies have focused on big cities, but that doesn't give us an estimation of the scale of the problem." Researchers tend to track New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago while ignoring the thousands of smaller cities that quietly hemorrhage residents.

Why Communities Vanish

Historic ghost towns tell straightforward stories. Bodie boomed when prospectors discovered gold in the 1850s. Saloons, gambling halls, and brothels multiplied. Then the ore ran out. Two catastrophic fires—one in the 1890s, another in 1932 that destroyed 10% of remaining structures—accelerated the inevitable. By the 1940s, Bodie was abandoned. Resource depletion created the town; resource depletion killed it.

Today's causes operate more slowly but no less decisively. Lower birth rates mean fewer young people replacing aging populations. Manufacturing jobs that once anchored entire regions have moved overseas or disappeared into automation. Climate change makes certain areas increasingly difficult to inhabit—not through sudden disaster, but through accumulating inconveniences that tip migration decisions. Rising housing costs in some markets push residents toward cheaper alternatives, while state tax policies create incentives to relocate across borders.

The Varosha district of Famagusta, Cyprus, demonstrates how quickly political upheaval can empty a place. In 1974, as Turkish forces invaded Cyprus, 40,000 residents of this upmarket resort fled. The wealthy and famous had vacationed there; within days, it became a frozen time capsule. Only in 2021, after five decades, did authorities reopen it to tourists. The buildings remain, but the community that animated them is gone forever.

The Planning Problem

Urban planning in America operates on a fundamental assumption: cities grow. Zoning laws, infrastructure investments, tax revenue projections—all presume an expanding population will eventually fill available space and justify current expenditures. This made sense when birth rates remained high and internal migration redistributed people from declining areas to growing ones.

That model breaks down when 43% of cities are already shrinking. "Depopulation is everywhere," says Justin Hollander, an urban planning scholar at Tufts University. The Illinois Department of Transportation commissioned Derrible's research specifically to understand transportation challenges in depopulating areas. How do you maintain roads, bridges, and public transit when the tax base keeps shrinking? How do you justify new infrastructure when projections show fewer future users?

Derrible argues for an "enormous cultural shift" away from growth-based planning. This means accepting that some places will contract, then designing policies that manage decline rather than denying it. Consolidating services, right-sizing infrastructure, and facilitating voluntary relocation all become tools in the planner's arsenal. The alternative is what happened to Bodie: maintaining the fiction of viability until sudden collapse makes orderly transition impossible.

When Abandonment Happens Overnight

Some ghost towns empty gradually over decades. Others clear out in hours. Pripyat, Ukraine, housed workers at the Chernobyl nuclear plant until the 1986 disaster. Authorities evacuated the entire population within a day. Hashima Island, off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, once housed coal miners in densely packed apartment blocks. When the coal ran out and the mine closed, the island emptied completely. It later appeared in the James Bond film "Skyfall" as a villain's lair—a role perfectly suited to its eerie abandonment.

The difference between gradual and sudden abandonment matters less than it seems. Whether a city empties in 24 hours or 40 years, the result is the same: infrastructure built for thousands serves dozens or none. The emotional and economic consequences for remaining residents parallel each other. Property values collapse. Services disappear. Schools close. The last holdouts face impossible choices about whether to stay or join the exodus.

Planning for Fewer People

The 15,000 cities projected to become ghost towns by 2100 won't all empty completely. Many will shrink to shadows of their former selves—places where schools built for 500 students now serve 50, where downtown blocks contain more vacant storefronts than operating businesses, where infrastructure maintenance costs exceed the tax base's ability to pay.

Accepting this future requires abandoning cherished myths about American dynamism and endless growth. It means some communities will need to be intentionally wound down rather than perpetually propped up. It means infrastructure investments should account for future contraction, not just current needs. And it means politicians must find ways to discuss managed decline without sounding defeatist.