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''Next town over by the railroad track
''Some nights I'm glad it passed us by
''Some nights I sit and watch my home town die''
|'''Tift Merritt''', "Laid a Highway"}}
A town that has lost its main reason for existing, or the support systems it needs to thrive. As a result, it's losing its inhabitants far faster than they're replaced. If this continues to its logical end, this community will become a [[Ghost Town]].
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{{examples}}
== Anime
* In the first ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]'' novel, as well as an episode or two of the anime, there is the town with the man trying to make philosopher's stones out of the red water.
** The [[Expy]] of [[City of Canals|Venice]] in the first anime is dying in two senses - it's sinking under the water (and will be gone in a decade), which is causing people to leave it in droves. The only thing that brings any money to the town anymore is [[Classy Cat Burglar|Psiren]].
* Tokyo
** And unknown to them, Shinji's classmates are all {{spoiler|potential Eva pilots, so even they
* CGI film ''[[Vexille]]'' features this with {{spoiler|the whole country of Japan}} being the victim.
* In ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'', [[Town with a Dark Secret|Hinamizawa]] would have become this had the dam project gone through. In Saikoroshi-hen's 'Ideal World', the project ''was'' approved, emphasizing the fact that while everyone is relatively happier in this world, the [[True Companions]] have not been brought together by their respective problems, and will soon be separated for good.
== Comic Books ==
* Bludhaven, ''[[Nightwing]]'s'' turf, was originally a whaling town; when that industry was outlawed, attempts to transform itself into a manufacturing and shipping center failed, and in modern times, has become a [[Wretched Hive]] even more dangerous than Gotham.
==
* Ta'akan in ''[[With Strings Attached]]'', becoming abandoned due to the restless Baravadans going to search for things to fight out of boredom.
== Film ==
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* Perigord, the setting of the last half of ''[[Phantasm II]]'', as it is yet to be fully razed by The Tall Man.
* Hadleyville, PA in ''[[Gung Ho]]'' until the town succeeds in luring a Japanese company to reopen the town's shuttered car factory.
== Literature ==
* Joe Harman's hometown in ''[[A Town Like Alice]]''.
* ''[['Salem's Lot]]'' by [[Stephen King]] features a town like this...until the process is accelerated to [[Ghost Town]] levels by a [[Our Vampires Are Different|Vampire]] invasion.
** Oatley, New York, in ''[[The Talisman]]''.
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* ''[[The Word and The Void]]'': Hopewell, Illinois is a dying steel mill town peopled by the old, the broken, and those too young to leave yet. Several demonic invasions later it's still standing, but not by much. It says a lot about the setting that [[The Soulless|the demons]] and [[The Heartless|the feeders]] aren't the most depressing things about it.
* Jean Shepherd gave this feeling to Hammond, Indiana in his collection of short stories, ''In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash''.
* Grantville in ''[[1632]]'', until
* Branton Hills in ''[[Gadsby]]'' starts off stagnating, but it improves thanks to the title character.
== Live Action TV ==
* Dibley, in ''[[The Vicar of Dibley]]'' to the point where the birth of a child was celebrated with a statue of that child.
== Music ==
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* "Old Coyote Town" by Don Williams.
* "Blue Collar Town" by David Goldman.
== Tabletop Games ==
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** How about ''Midnight Roads'' or the [[Vampire: The Requiem|Vampire]]-specific ''Nomads''? Anyway, whether it's this or [[Ghost Town]], [[Everything Is Trying to Kill You|all the inhabitants want to kill you]]... or ''[[And I Must Scream|worse]]''.
** The opening fiction to the ''[[Promethean: The Created]]'' corebook takes place in a small town with very few members—they need to invite a psychologist in from out of town to interview a suspect. This is because most of the town has moved away—like in Centralia, PA, the coal veins underneath the town have caught fire and been burning for years. And would you believe [[Frankenstein's Monster]] did it?
== Video Games ==
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* The town in ''[[The Sims|My Sims]]'' seems to be like this when you arrive. In fact, your arrival increases the population by 25%.
* There is one in ''[[Mother 3]]'', which eventually becomes a [[Ghost Town]]. It's {{spoiler|Tazmily Village}}.
* In ''[[Dreamfall]]'', the second game in ''[[The Longest Journey]]'' series, one discovers that the Venice district of Newport, where April Ryan (the first game's protagonist) lived has been ravaged by technological Collapse. Now, homeless people can be seen on every street, and the apartment complex where April lived is now run-down and used as a base for unscrupulous experiments. In Arcadia, the city of Marcuria has begun this process after the occupation by [[The Empire|the Azadi]], and their decision to segregate the city's
* Mars has become this in ''[[Mass Effect]]''. According to the in-game codex, it was once considered ripe for terraforming, but mankind essentially lost interest when the Prothean mass relay was discovered and they began to spread across the galaxy and meet other races.
* Inaba in ''[[Persona 4]]'' has shades of this, several stores in the central shopping area are boarded up, with many of the residents blaming
* If you save Broken Hills from a race war in ''[[Fallout 2]]'', it trucks along fairly well...until the uranium mine runs out. It becomes a Dying Town, and eventually a [[Ghost Town]].
** ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' has Goodsprings which never truly picked up in the first place. Some endings have the town prospering, or at least gaining a semblance of normalcy while other endings have the town being abandoned by all but the most stubborn for fear of the Legion or massacred and left to die by the Courier.
*** Boulder is one too, having been bombed to hell during the first war with the Legion. Only a bartender and some soldiers are left.
*** Primm too, having hit by bandits recently. The NCR, independent and even some Legion endings
** ''[[Fallout 3]]'' has the village of Arefu, which has all of four people left.
* ''[[Skies of Arcadia]]'' gives us the ironically-titled "Esparanza." Built by sailors from all over the world, Esparanza was meant to be a port town or headquarters of sorts for sailors who wanted to take a crack at penetrating the seemingly-unpassable Dark Rift. Unfortunately, no one ever passed through the Rift, and everyone who came back from the trip were hollow shells of their former selves. It didn't take very long for the hope to wither...
* Pyrite Town (and the base camp known as "The Under"), in ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'' was a former mining town, but with its mine dried up, it has fallen into a [[Wretched Hive]].
* Kakariko Village is basically this in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]]'', but because most of its inhabitants were killed.
* ''[[Arcanum]]'' has Dernholm. In the backstory, it was the thriving capital of the nation of Cumbria, but when their king [[Jumping Off the Slippery Slope|suddenly went mad with power and hatred of technology]], he dragged Cumbria into a hopelessly one-sided war against the ''much'' better equipped nation of Tarant. When the player arrives at Cumbria in the game proper, it's lost nearly all of its power and prestige, and Dernholm itself is a barely held together village whose people desperately try to survive, but have little hope of doing so due to the king's ever-escalating insanity and his [[Complete Monster|sickeningly depraved]] Guard Captain. {{spoiler|Depending on the player's actions, Dernholm, and Cumbria and general, can begin a slow but sure path to recovery in the epilogue.}}
* ''[[Diablo]]'': [[Meaningful Name|Tristram]] was going through this stage during the first game, what with the demonic invasion and slowly being bled dry by a steady wave of heroes drawn to the town by said demonic invasion. Then the town completely [[Doomed Hometown|flatlined]] at some point before the second game.
* Winterhold in ''[[Skyrim]]'' was once a grand, vibrant city that rivaled Solitude and Whiterun in sheer
** Ivarstead is also dying a slow death. One man is reluctant to allow his daughter to go to Riften with her new paramour partly because Ivarstead will have no future if more of the younger generation leaves. The main attraction of Ivarstead is that it is the closest settlement to the mountain where the legendary Gray-beards reside.
== Western Animation ==
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* Green River from ''[[An American Tail]]: Fievel Goes West'' is essentially this by the time the Mousekewitz family arrives, a withering old west former [[Boom Town]]. Upon seeing it Mama remarks that they'd been "schnookered".
* Dirt in ''[[Rango]]''. {{spoiler|A case of the town being killed on purpose, as the mayor deprives the citizens of water so that he can use it to buy off their land and create a new community while the old one is left to die.}}
== Real Life ==
=== North America ===
* Big chunks of America are filled with places like this. In the 1870s, over 70 percent of the population worked in agriculture. Today, around 3 percent of the population or less works in agriculture. This is mostly due to changes in technology of a hundred different kinds. Scientific advances have made farmland much more efficient, transportation technology and infrastructure have made it possible to keep food fresh longer and get it farther in that time, machines do the work of multiple people... so all the people who used to work in rural areas now live in suburban or urban areas, so rural areas are now populated much more sparsely than they once were.
* Lots and lots of former factory towns in the Midwest, including most cities around the Great Lakes (the "Rust Belt"). [[Motor City|Detroit]], [[Cleveland]], [[Milwaukee]], and [[Pittsburgh]] are but a few cities whose populations today are half of what they were in the mid-20th century. Even those that have bounced back economically, like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, still struggle to shed their former image. Names of sports teams often still reflect the past (ie, Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Milwaukee Brewers). It's easier to list the exceptions (cities that have never suffered) rather than those that fit:
** [[The Windy City|Chicago]] has held up due to sheer size and a relatively diversified economy.
** [[Toronto]] from being the center of Canadian finance and media (with a well-timed boost in [[The Seventies]] from Quebec's language laws which led to an influx of anglophones and businesses from [[Montreal]]).
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* Harvey, Illinois. Home of the [http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/dixie_square_mall.html Dixie Square Mall] (aka the [[Blues Brothers]] mall), abandoned since 1978.
* [[Other Cities in Texas|San Antonio, Texas]] was a dying town for most of the first half of the 20th century. Then it was announced the 1968 World's Fair was going to be held there, leading to a surge in development. The Riverwalk came into being, new downtown hotels were built, a convention center sprung up, downtown was transformed from a sleepy hub of shantytowns to a lively center of activity, etc.
* Some theorized that Memphis, Tennessee nearly became one around the
** And surely [[Elvis Presley|Graceland]] had something to do with it.'
* [[wikipedia:Schefferville, Quebec|Shefferville]], whose economy was based on asbestos mining. When its ore mining stopped in 1982, the population dropped from over 5000 to a just few hundreds today. The city temporarily lost its legal incorporation status between 1986 and 1990.
* A pretty unique example is found in Centralia, Pennsylvania. In 1962, a coal seam fire started under the town, producing both heat and toxic fumes. By 1984, the government determined that the town was uninhabitable and it would be so expensive to put out the fire, that it was cheaper to buy all the homes and relocate the entire population. Around 50 residents refused to move, despite the lack of anything to sustain a town. As of 2010, there were still 10 people living there.
=== Other ===
* Many smaller towns on the west coast of [[Malaysia|Peninsular Malaysia]] were originally founded as [[Boom Town|boomtowns]] for rubber plantations and tin mines during the late 19th century and early 20th century; this dependence on single sources of income became their undoing when the price of rubber and, ultimately, tin finally crashed for good, decimating their bread and butter and leading many of its younger talents flocking for greener pasture abroad or in larger towns or cities. The vast majority who choose to stay and contribute to whatever that is left of the town's economy are now 50-somethings or older, which is very telling of the future of these towns.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Settings]]
[[Category:Small Towns]]
[[Category:Truth in Television]]
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