YouTube has quite a few drive-through videos, where a producer drives through a town and provides a commentary on what we are seeing. I like watching these videos. The videos provide scenic views, though often enough the scenic view is a disaster area. Detroit is the candy bowl of urban collapse videos.

There are other places in Michigan that are also in dire straits, like Mount Morris city and township just east of Flynt, MI. Mt. Morris is small - 3,131 people in a fairly large area. One third of the population is living below the poverty line, and the average income is low. The average house is worth just 69,000. Only 4.4% of the population have completed college.

Mt. Morris is the kind of place one thinks of when one was about the opiate, meth, and fentanyl epidemic. It's a place where an unskilled man has at best a slight chance of finding any employment, let alone a good job.



Mt. Morris is one of many places in the large spread of the midwest which has economically flatlined; the old economic base (large factories) is gone, and the commercial infrastructure is crumbling in abandonment.

In addition, these places are FLAT, lacking hills, valleys, thick forests, and large bodies of water. On a cloudy day, the depression is palpable and the geography is debilitating.



Still, people live there, willingly, and it isn't all bad.