Editing Ghost town (section)

=== Economic decline ===
[[File:Abandoned farmhouse, overgrown.jpg|thumb|right|As farms [[Intensive farming|industrialize]], smaller farms are no longer economically viable, leading to rural decay.]]

Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a [[boomtown]] (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse).   A [[gold rush]] often brought intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted.

Boomtowns can often decrease in size as quickly as they grew.  Sometimes, all, or nearly all, of the population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town.  The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis.  Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary [[company town]] to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process.

In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former [[mining town]]s on [[U.S. Route 66]] suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like [[Oatman, Arizona]], onto a more direct path.  Mine and [[pulp mill]] closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: [[Ocean Falls]], which closed in 1973 after the [[pulp mill]] was decommissioned; [[Kitsault]], whose [[molybdenum]] mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and [[Cassiar, British Columbia|Cassiar]], whose [[asbestos]] mine operated from 1952 to 1992.

In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to [[Collingwood, Queensland]], in [[Outback]] Australia when nearby [[Winton, Queensland|Winton]] outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of [[Queensland]], and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year.  More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards [[fly-in fly-out]] arrangements over building a [[company town]], in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted.<ref name="aso">{{cite encyclopedia |last1=Peace |first1=Adrian |date=2015 |title=Australia, Sociocultural Overviews: Australian Settler Society |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868120227 |encyclopedia=International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences |edition=Second |pages=239–244 |doi=10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12022-7 |isbn=9780080970875 |access-date=21 October 2022}}</ref>

The Middle East has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as [[Ctesiphon]].

The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of [[real-estate bubble]]s (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris.  This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.<!---Clarification added to reflect the reality that all forms of real estate can be used by speculators as investments. And, real-estate people are always eager to make money. The end result of this assemblage of activities might not always be a formal ghost town, but it can come close to it. Incidentally, one example of a ghost down in non-remote location is an abandoned subdivision that can be found near Davis–Monthan Air Force Base in California.--->