Not Actually Declining

This isn't about anything specific, but in stories about urban American there's generally an underlying narrative about urban America that its problems are the problem of decline. And of course that's true of plenty of cities (and small cities and towns and rural areas), but it isn't universally true. It's true that most inner cities face the familiar decades-old problems, as the effects of decades of decline haven't been magically fixed overnight, but the 'fixes' for these problems are a bit different in a place with a potential for growth (population, economic) than in places without that potential.