Simulpocalyse: A series of posts looking into the growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking locations in the United States

I coined a new word to describe how we have a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and full blown, post-apocalyptic looking locations, while everyday life goes on simultaneously

Abandoned motel in Studio City, 2021. Graffiti and street art, including a well known piece. This property got demolished a few months later. #steveemigphotos

Check out my Simulpocalypse Pinterest board

Simulpocalypse- (SIGH-mole-pock-uh-lips): A word I coined to describe how we have a growing number of vacant and abandoned buildings, and post-apocalyptic looking locations in the U.S., while “normal,” everyday life goes on simultaneously.

New intro- May 27, 2025- Empty buildings. That’s what this whole Simulpocalypse series of posts is about. I know, that sounds pretty damn boring. But, crazy as it sounds, the huge number of empty and partially vacant buildings in the United States is going to have a big effect our world, and on nearly everyone’s life, in the next few years. Really.

I asked a couple of friends yesterday what came to mind when I mentioned the phrase “empty buildings.” These guys are both older than me, Baby Boomers. Both are quite smart, and avid readers. They have a lot of life experience in a variety of areas. While it seemed odd, they know I’m a blogger, and had some reason for asking. They mentioned many of the things most people would. Hearing the phrase “empty buildings, their first thoughts were “graffiti, vandalism, homeless people, and empty office buildings due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the work-at-home trend.”

Then I asked them if they had heard of UrbEx, or urban exploring. Neither one had. I described what it was. I told them about the themes in the first six Simulpocalypse posts (I’m working on post 6 right now). We got into an interesting discussion about how many vacant and abandoned buildings there are, how commercial mortgages have been turned into investment bonds, the closing of the factories decades ago, and other aspects of this issue. Having dug into all these issues for a few months now, they were surprised at how many abandoned buildings there actually are in the U.S. now, and how much the declining values of office buildings and other commercial buildings tie into so many other things. We had a really cool discussion, and I got some different points of view on this theme.

We have too many retail, office, and even industrial buildings in this country, overall. Commercial buildings in general, ranging from small storefronts and industrial buildings, to malls and huge skyscraper office towers, are declining in value in much of the U.S.. For a variety of reasons, tens of thousands of buildings have become vacant, and thousands more have a lot of unused space. The vacant and abandoned buildings lead to graffiti and tagging, vandalism, drug addicts and homeless people using the buildings, and in some cases, decades of slow urban decay.

These buildings affect everyday people in a variety of ways. There are the actual businesses that used to be in those buildings, the business people who went out of business, and all the people who lost their jobs when the businesses slowed down or closed for good. Then there’s the issue of the property owners getting behind on the mortgages for their buildings, that affects the banks holding the loans, and investment bonds made out of lots of those mortgages that are bundled together. That bad debt is causing hundreds of U.S. banks to have issues, because there are so many buildings, and this is happening in pretty much every town and city, nationwide. In addition to that, cities themselves lose money when building owners stop paying their property taxes, or pay less tax on really large buildings where values have dropped. This can force towns and cities to cut back financially, and to have to cut back on services.

It’s now nearly 50 years since the first big wave of factories started shutting down in the U.S., in the late 1970’s. Hundreds, maybe thousands of those factories, are still sitting empty, still decaying, half a century later. Now, in 2025, we have tens of thousands of empty factories, warehouses, small retail stores, large retail stores, shopping centers, whole malls, office buildings of all sizes, in addition to millions of vacant houses. There are even abandoned amusement parks. All of this, thousands of buildings becoming vacant, and staying empty, across the United States, is happening while everyday life seems to go on.

We haven’t had the worldwide nuclear apocalypse, that the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers like myself worried about growing up. We also haven’t had a global environmental apocalypse, that the Millennials and young Gen Z worry about. That’s good. But we have had thousands of buildings and areas become vacant, abandoned, and sometimes turn into fully post-apocalyptic locations. These places are all over the country, and the number keeps growing. This same thing is happening in many other countries as well. All of these empty buildings will affect most people, at least in indirect ways, like lowering commercial buildings values in their area, affecting their health of their banks, and raising insurance premiums on homes, offices, and other commercial properties. There will be a whole series of effects from all these abandoned places.

Empty buildings. That’s what this series of posts is all about. Now back to the original post I wrote on December 26, 2024, to begin this series. -Steve Emig, May 27, 2025.

A few of my high school friends and I were sitting around the living room of my best friend’s house, our usual hangout spot. It was a year after we had graduated high school, the summer of 1985, in Boise, Idaho. A commercial for the movie, Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome came on TV. A young Mel Gibson, and singer Tina Turner starred in the post-apocalyptic thriller, where two factions of survivors fought for their dominance. One of my friends quipped, “Man, the apocalypse better hurry up and happen, or we’re all going to have to go out and find real jobs.” We all laughed, “Yeah, no kidding.” Compared to working on an assembly line for life, the post-apocalyptic scenario looked like more fun, to be honest.

The guys in our group that day were all some of the older members of what would later become known as Generation X. We grew up having to hide under our tiny school desks, for regular drills, preparing for the possibility of a nuclear war. Even in 2nd or 3rd grade, we had figured out that our little desks wouldn’t do shit in a nuclear attack, or even a tornado, but we had to do the drills anyway. The Soviet Union (Russia & Co.) was the enemy of the U.S. then, and an all out nuclear war/nuclear apocalypse was widely feared by most people. During our childhood, a series of post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows drilled the possibility of a full scale nuclear holocaust into our psyche. These were some of those post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows that came out, or played on TV, when we were kids and teens:

The Time Machine- (1960)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

The Omega Man (1971)

Soylent Green (1973)

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Roller Ball (1975)

Logan’s Run (movie-1976)

Ark II (TV series- 1976)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Logan’s Run (TV series- 1977)

Mad Max (1979)

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

The Day After (TV movie- 1983)

The Terminator (1984)

Mad Max 3- Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

and years later, my personal favorite post-apocalyptic movie

Tank Girl trailer (1995) Tank Girl opening scene

None of us saw all of these growing up, be we all some of these movies and TV shows. Between movies and TV shows like these, and the news reporting about the continuing threat of a Soviet Union first strike nuclear missile attack on the United States, the idea of World War III and a nuclear apocalypse was always a possibility in the back of our minds. That’s how my high school friends and I came to joke about that day in the summer of 1985. The first U.S. factories were beginning to shut down as we were in junior high and high school. That day of joking about the apocalypse was 39… almost 40 years ago.

In those four decades since, our world has changed in ways none of us could have predicted in 1985. One of the first factories to shut down was a steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1977, across the state from where I lived then. Forty years later, Youngstown had not recovered. Detroit, the city I knew as a kid to be the thriving industrial giant where many American cars were made, became the poster city for the decline of what’s now known as the Rust Belt. Gary, Indiana, much smaller, but a city built around a huge steel mill, had become another city now known for 20th century urban ruins. Almost every former industrial city now has abandoned factories that now look like something out of the post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows we watched as kids.

This article on the Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal website has photos of Plymouth Locomotive Works, an abandoned factory in the small town of Plymouth, Ohio. This is the first factory that I remember my dad taking me to when I was a kid, and the last one he worked at, before our family moved to New Mexico in 1980. We moved because there were rumors that PLW was going to get bought out and shut down. When I visited this factory in 2010, a guy living right next to it said it closed in 1983. These aren’t just places we’ve seen in videos and photos, many of us, including me, have memories of these buildings when their businesses were thriving.

These abandoned buildings include factories, dead malls, storefronts in small towns and larger cities, along with whole subdivisions, amusement parks, hotels, and other sites are all over this country, and many other countries as well. But we didn’t have the feared World War III and nuclear apocalypse, so feared when I was a kid in the 1970’s. These abandoned sites are mostly the victims of a combination economic, technological, and social apocalypses. No one declared war on American factories, rather a combination of new technologies, new business practices and laws, and economics led to the factories being closed and abandoned. Yes, millions of U.S. jobs were lost to outsourcing work to other countries. But a similar number of jobs were lost to industrial robots, mechanical innovations, and computer-led systems. The now prolific ATM machines took around 800,000 jobs away from bank employees, to cite one non-industrial example. In addition, some places, like the 9th ward in New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and more recently, Asheville, North Carolina, devastated by Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024, are the product of natural disasters not economic ones.

Homeless hand-built dwelling, in a park-n-ride that turned into a park-n-live during the pandemic. San Fernando Valley, CA, 2021. #steveemigphotos

In addition, we have growing homeless populations in nearly every major city across the U.S., and many smaller cities and towns. There are also regions ravaged by long term unemployment, rampant drug use, and crime. We have individual locations, whole areas and regions, and groups of people that are living in somewhat post-apocalyptic conditions.

As someone who has managed to live many, many years at various levels of homelessness, without drugs and alcohol, an idea occurred to me a couple days ago. The word for the idea is “simulpocalypse.” It’s the idea that we have a growing number of post-apocalyptic-like locations, areas, regions, and even groups of people, while most of society continues on with normal life. Both are happening simultaneously.

Yes, to some degree, there have always been abandoned buildings, ghost towns from previous eras, and run down places. But over the past few decades the number of these places has grown dramatically. I have some thoughts and insights into why this is happening. I’ve been writing on these issues for years in my various blogs, looking for both answers and solutions.

This insight, the word “simulpocalypse,” got me looking into the whole genre of post-apocalyptic stories, novels, movies, TV shows, and video games. These stories go back to the earliest human history we have, with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh flood story going back 4,000 years, and the similar story of Noah and the flood in the Bible, written sometime later. Mary Shelley, who created the science fiction genre with her novel Frankenstein, later wrote a novel called The Last Man, published in 1826. So she gets the nod for creating the post-apocalyptic genre in “modern” writing, as well as inventing sci-fi.

In just digging into this idea for a couple of days, I’ve found all kinds of interesting ideas and themes around these related subjects. So I’m going to dig into them deeper. More on the whole idea of the post-apocalyptic idea, and our modern ruins and struggling groups of people, coming here in my Substack. Stay tuned.

There are no paid links in this post.

Simulpocalypse Series- Post #2- “The age of many modern ruins”