"Many cities across the United States could become ghost towns by 2100"

From United Press International (also on blogroll at right), January 14:

Many cities across the United States could become ghost towns by 2100, according to new research published Thursday.

"Close to half of the nearly 30,000 cities in the United States will face some sort of population decline," researchers from the University of Chicago in Illinois wrote in a journal article published in Nature Cities. 

Major cities in the Northeast and Midwest are already slowly losing population. While cities in the South and West regions are experiencing a population increase, some major cities in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee are slowly depopulating, the researchers found.

Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh could see depopulation of 12 to 23 percent by 2100 while cities like Louisville, New Haven and Syracuse -- not currently showing declines - likely could soon....

....MUCH MORE

Very related over longer time frames:

"BAD LOCATIONS: Many French towns have been trapped in obsolete places for centuries"

From the Economic History Society's blog, The Long Run, July 17:

 
John Speed (1610), 17th century map of Beaumaris. Available on Wiki Commons. 

Only three of the 20 largest cities in Britain are located near the site of Roman towns, compared with 16 in France. That is one of the findings of research by Guy Michaels (London School of Economics) and Ferdinand Rauch (University of Oxford), which uses the contrasting experiences of British and French cities after the fall of the Roman Empire as a natural experiment to explore the impact of history on economic geography – and what leads cities to get stuck in undesirable locations, a big issue for modern urban planners.

The study, published in the February 2018 issue of the Economic Journal, notes that in France, post-Roman urban life became a shadow of its former self, but in Britain it completely disappeared. As a result, medieval towns in France were much more likely to be located near Roman towns than their British counterparts. But many of these places were obsolete because the best locations in Roman times weren’t the same as in the Middle Ages, when access to water transport was key.

The world is rapidly urbanising, but some of its growing cities seem to be misplaced. Their locations are hampered by poor access to world markets, shortages of water or vulnerability to flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters. This outcome – cities stuck in the wrong places – has potentially dire economic and social consequences....

....MUCH MORE

I'm wondering if the study was funded by either a large moving & storage company or civil engineers angling for a (big) project or two,
I went to look for the published paper but there has been a change of ownership of Economic Journal, so here's the version at one of the author's personal LSE sites
Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012’ by Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

Older version at SSRN:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2359539

And:

A Tale of Two Cities: Hamburg and Lubeck—Lessons in Trade, Geography and Urbanism