Eh one thing about the Pacific Northwest is the area was actually pretty depressed from the 70s through the 2000s, the cities hollowed out by suburbanization of the period – the “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE please turn out the lights?” billboard. (Thoroughly white Oregon spawned an “urban growth boundary” instead of white flight, but also had the timber collapse to face)

And had big down-and-out wreckage scenes that you’ve personally been exposed to. Remember “grunge”, and how heroiny and despairing it was? That was Seattle! Portland had the “heroin is so passé” Dandy Warhols, and remember “Faces of Meth”? That was the Multnomah County Sheriff, so us.

And eventually those problems were kinda solved with each other – all the taxpayers move out, so we give vouchers to rent the houses they left to functioning addicts. We lean into federal food and healthcare programs so crackheads with a pickup truck full of scrap metal get fed and cared for, and local stores (and farms! Cascadia was kind of a backwater of national supply chains) get paid, and local kids with the aptitude get trained as x-ray techs and anesthesiologists, and the pharmaceutical industry that’s kind of a decades-on development of unlimited fresh water from the Columbia for chemical plants has a medical research sector to articulate with…

And it was all held together by low cost of living, prices, and rent, essentially by how far the area was operating below built capacity. It’s not obviously capable of containing that much wreckage at merely a bit below capacity, let alone over.