(Daily Mail) A small Arkansas city suffering from severe population decline and economic turmoil has become so abandoned that properties are on offer for as little as $400.
Pine Bluff, a bleak metro that saw its population drop from 49,000 to 41,250 residents from 2010 to 2020, made headlines this month after being panned in a YouTube documentary from Abandoned Atlas.
In the movie, filmmaker Michael Schwartz said witnessing the city’s decay ‘shocked’ him, saying: ‘It seems like every time I turn a corner, there is another abandoned home or building left behind.’
While a number of homes are on the market for just hundreds, they lie empty as the lack of opportunities and myriad social issues – including a high homicide rate – have driven people away.
Anyone who does buy one of the ‘bargains’ faces having to spend many thousands more to make one of the abandoned homes inhabitable again.
This abandoned house in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, is on sale for just over $400. The city has many similar ‘bargains’ – although it also suffers from myriad social issues too
Schwartz notes that the arrival of two paper mills further drove the population to over 57,000 in the 1970s – over 25,000 more people than live there today.
But its struggles began with the mechanization of the agriculture industry, which severed the economic foundations Pine Bluff was built upon, and the subsequent outsourcing of manufacturing work.
‘The economy continued to change, kids continued to leave,’ State Representative Vivian Flowers, who represents the area, told the New York Times in 2021.
‘And so then your tax base shrinks, and your ability to deal with infrastructure and beautify the city — all of that suffered.’
When the 2020 US census was announced, Pine Bluff’s 12.5 percent population decline since the previous census in 2010 earned it the unenviable title of America’s fastest shrinking city.
In Pine Bluff’s heyday in the 1970s, over 25,000 more people lived there than today
