What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like
In my last post, I said that the Blue Zones are functionally insolvent. “The well is dry.” Several commenters responded with the observation that they’ve been hearing this story for twenty years or more, but the Blue Zones are still going, so what insolvency and collapse are you talking about?
But the collapse of the Blue Zones doesn’t look like Enron or K-Mart; California doesn’t shut down. The state has 39 million golden geese to cut open. There’s a lot of ruin in a state. But the collapse remains real, and it’s already happening. It looks like this:
In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.
One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere. The Washington Post, 2020, discussing a California city:
Unable to pay its bills after the 2008 financial crisis, Vallejo filed for bankruptcy and cut its police force nearly in half — to fewer than 80 officers, from a pre-recession high of more than 150…
Far from ushering in a new era of harmony between police and the people they are sworn to protect, the budget cuts worsened tensions between the department and the community and were followed by a dramatic surge in officers’ use of deadly force. Since 2009 the police have killed 20 people, an extraordinarily high number for such a small city. In 2012 alone, officers fatally shot six suspects.
In the crisis years of urban collapse, the Detroit Police Department didn’t cease to exist. There were still cops on the street, and a solid 50% chance that they would show up within an hour if you were shot or stabbed.
In the 1960s, when Los Angeles had a population of about 2.5 million people, the city had 3,400 firefighters; in 2025, when an entire historic neighborhood was lost to wildfire, the city had 3,300 firefighters to serve 4 million people, with fewer fire stations. But, see, Los Angeles didn’t collapse. It still had a fire department!
I can go on about this at great length, and you should never pull the cord on the Talking Chris Bray doll, the most tedious child’s toy ever built. But it’s everywhere. I live in a little suburban town where I can walk from one city border to the other in maybe ten minutes. Our city council is proposing a nearly $90 million bond issue to fix streets that haven’t had basic maintenance for well over a decade. All the most basic stuff, the “not having huge potholes” business that makes up the daily work of state and local government, is an emergency.
So: Insolvent? What are you talking about, the Blue Zone governments are still there. But the collapse looks like this:
The collapse is much higher taxes plus shriveling services that totter on the edge of functional meaninglessness, not “government ceases.” The Minneapolis City Charter requires that the city maintain minimum police staffing of 731 sworn officers, LOL. But Minneapolis still has a police department, so.
If you didn’t catch my recent description of Santa Monica — a ruined place that’s a disaster and also full of safe and remarkably pleasant neighborhoods defined by obvious affluence — that’s the flavor of Blue Zone decline: not all one thing or the other, but measurable decay over time. A running battle on social media centers on competing videos (screenshot, click this link to play the footage):
See, San Francisco is a GHOST TOWN, the malls are EMPTY, the city is DYING! And also:
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See, San Francisco is VIBRANT and THRIVING, the critics are liars!
Both of those things are true, but the vibrant parts are shrinking, and the decay is spreading. Of course you can find pleasant neighborhoods and nice places in the Blue Zones, and things that still work. But the trendline is the story, and the rot around the good parts is unavoidable. The presence of some things that don’t suck is poor evidence.
The collapse is a slow downward grind, not a single Black Swan event. And I don’t see evidence against it.
“Slowly, then all at once,” doesn’t necessarily happen over a year, or 10, or even 20. The all at once might not even happen for everyone. But when all at once visits your doorstep, you are unlikely to unsee it.
In NYC, renters will save $$ when the rent freeze kicks in, and the city starts buying properties from landlords who can't afford upkeep at unsustainable levels. While the city's public housing authority NYCHA has a $50 billion deferred maintenance budget. But the vibes!