The author of the Forbes article, "Ghost Cities of 2100," is careful to caveat her article with disclaimers that whether her fantastic predictions occur is "an open question," and "hard to predict." She also describes certain urban centers that are already experiencing population decline to suppport her conjectures. But I'm not writing about the effect of a major earthquake on San Francisco, rising ocean levels, or the hollowing of heartland America.
I'm writing because the editor of FORBES should have caught the irony of claiming in a "financial" magazine that the decline in San Francisco's population because of rising housing prices could lead it to "disappear entirely." It would seem that the author of the article does not understand the bedrock economic notion of the tie between demand and price. While the population size may be in decline, there can be no possible argument that the decline is due to a general lack of desire to live in San Francisco. On the contrary, the decline is due to the lack of capacity of lower-income (and generally higher density) populations to compete for limited supply of land.
GG Forbes editor. The only purpose of simplistic population-decline-equals-city-death causation analysis is to irritate readers and get them to blog their annoyance.
