re: #194 wheat-dogg

There’s a town in Italy that did just that. Its wage-earning population had largely moved away, leaving many properties and businesses vacant. So the mayor of the town decided to invite hundreds of refugees to live there. At last report, it was working well, though ironically the refugees will eventually move on, too.

I had read an article about that. Hopefully, not all the refugees will move on or it will take awhile. If there’s enough young people, it could conceivably take generations for the town to completely decline again..and if the town gets a reputation/culture of being open and accepting refugees and new immigrants, maybe it will always have new people to replace those who leave.

For some places in the US like Detroit, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue. One of Detroit’s big problems is that it was built to have 100s of thousands more people in it than it does now. An injection of 100s thousands of new people could rejuvenate the city and a population that large can set up to be self sustaining.