What Will It Look Like?

Cities Collapsing throughout the USA

"Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable -- shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service....[Mayor] Brown said that as more people abandon homes, eating away at the city's tax base and creating more blight, the city might need to examine "shutting down quadrants of the city where we (wouldn't) provide services.
"He did not define what that could mean -- bulldozing abandoned areas, simply leaving the vacant homes to rot or some other idea entirely."

Big sections of cities will simply be abandoned to whatever.
My wife and I have done a fair bit of traveling over the last 7 months. From the pacific northwest we came down here to the desert southwest and spent the winter along the southern border.
Our impression is that the country is rapidly undergoing a profound change and it's accelerating day by day. You simply can't believe the number of 'for sale' signs wherever you go. We like to travel the back roads through small towns and it's astounding how many signs there are. Where are all these people going?
Abandoned homes are everywhere and are more and more obvious as weeds takes over. Whole bedroom communities were vacant outside of Salt Lake - mile after mile of newly built but boarded up houses probably built a few years during the insane housing boom but won't ever be bought now - they're starting to decay. Other remnants of our modern day tulipmania are the pitiful planned developments where overreaching towns with big ambitions laid out streets for miles and not one plot was sold.
Foreclosures are everywhere. Mortgage delinquencies are soaring.

I've been wondering what this country is going to look like, what this society will devolve into as the depression gets to the collapse phase.
Because we're in uncharted waters and no one knows an alternative at this point the system will probably stumble along for a while like fingernails that still grow on a corpse. Banks will still send out statements. People will still think credit scores mean something. Money will still be traded out of habit, a lot of people will cling to the old ways desperately out of fear.

But we're going to get to the point where basic human needs get acute. Real unemployment will reach 30, 40, 50 percent. Too many people will be homeless, no jobs will pay enough to afford soaring prices of increasingly scarce stuff. What's going to happen then?

I have a few ideas, please tell me if I'm full of crap or help flesh out some scenarios.

People need roofs over their heads. First the homeless will live in their vehicles, soon the big issue will be squatting in the millions of deserted and vacant buildings all over the country. It'll probably start in the cities and spread.
The elites will rely on their security forces to keep their position at the top of the food chain. Their backs will be against the wall from sheer numbers of hurting people and they'll surround themselves with private armies. Laws and human rights and other niceties will be increasingly disregarded.
Small things now will loom large and be sorely missed when they're gone. Like toilet paper and decency.
Large cities in the US will start to be indistinguishable from third world cities, with central opulence surrounded by vast swaths of territory where people live however they can.
A lot of cities in the SW will see millions of people migrating away as water supplies dry up, air conditioning shuts off. Many of these places were never meant to be lived in.
Small towns that may have decayed over the years will now become isolated and independent as rural people community up, like central government doesn't even exist. The country might fracture even as elites try to centralize and enhance their power.
The internet will disappear as we know it after corporations take it over and destroy it, and local intranets will replace it.
When coffers go dry taxes will skyrocket on everything because that's their default behavior, while barter replaces money in large areas of the nation.
Workers won't paid in any meaningful way so utilities will suffer and shut down. Blackouts, water shortages and trash mounds will be common. Diseases will burn through the now dense populations.
Transportation will be spotty as fuel shortages mount. Already decrepit roads and bridges will fail completely with no repair.
Unless the feds release bioweapons or false flag attacks, they'll be overwhelmed, derided and ignored.
With hardly anything being manufactured anymore, the scattered vestiges of what used to be will be stripped and scavenged for immediate use.
Environmentalism will fall victim to necessity.
Retail will slowly blink out.
Food will get scarce and people will get desperate and there will be crime, lots of crime. Gangs will be everywhere in populated areas out of necessity.
Lots of violence.

After I asked the Mrs for input she reminded me that american collapse will be uniquely severe and she's right. Dmitri Orlov points out that the Russians had the abilities to survive already built into their society when the Soviet Union fell apart; we have no such tools. Safety nets are gone. Smugness and ignorance, a lethal combo if there ever was one, has been nurtured and rewarded to the point that no one knows how to do anything anymore. We've been fractured and separated and estranged from each other where even families are broken up. I call it the Kitty Genovese syndrome, the dark side of american life, and it's going to significantly worsen migrations to the cities when desperate people have nowhere else to go. America will exemplify the aphorism 'the harder they come, the harder they fall'.

I think all this will be spotty with some places much worse than others. As for the time line, some stuff has already started, some not, but if we live the same way in a year as we do now, I'll be very surprised.
Welcome to the Kali Yuga.