You can end up with Las Vegas perhaps. There is certainly a challenge there, and places like Detroit, where a distributed population places an undue burden on services.
Detroit died because US automanufacturing rapidly automated and stagnated at the same time, cutting a huge number of jobs. The city of Detroit had become addicted to the property taxes those jobs brought in, and never adjusted taxes to match the employment levels. People that owned their homes just picked up and left the city.
While Seattle is tech heavy, esp in Cloud Computing, it does have diversification.
Las Vegas with its collection of townships, the two cities (Las Vegas and North Las Vegas), the multiple jurisdictions and overlap of agencies, it isn't "wrong" per-se, it is just inefficient.
While Seattle is tech heavy, esp in Cloud Computing, it does have diversification.