When I was a child, my family visited the Calico ghost town in the California desert. A half century after the silver mines closed, Walter Knott (founder of Knott’s Berry Farm) purchased the town, restored the buildings, and operated it as an amusement park.

Venice reminds me of Calico. It was once a vibrant city, the center of commerce, a bridge between Europe and Asia. Now the city’s only economic purpose is to show tourists what once was.

Venice thrived for hundreds of years, when the Mediterranean was the link between East and West. Then the Portuguese found a route around Africa. Spain found great riches in the new world. The Dutch and English sent ships around the globe. Having a safe port in the Adriatic Sea didn’t count for much in the new era.

Venice’s story has played out for millennia. More recently, logging communities in my Oregon have shrunk to a fraction of their former populations. Detroit is struggling. Once-thriving Midwestern farm towns are now crossroads with shuttered general stores.

When economic change helps a city grow, we celebrate its success and shudder at its congestion and need for new infrastructure.

When economic change removes a city’s reason for existence, the business and political leaders try to bring the city back. Did Venetian civic leaders consider building a convention center? Did they imagine that tearing down slums to subsidize new buildings would end the conditions that created the slums? Did they try to attract the new hot industry, the 18th century equivalent of biotech?

There comes a time to accept that change is happening. Some ghost towns have magnificent art and architecture that are worthy of preservation, as is the case with Venice. Other ghost towns should be preserved as examples of their type, as with Calico. A few others can find new lives, such as the former mining town Jerome, Arizona, which has become an art colony. Most other ghost towns, though, must be left behind.

This is sad for those who live there, have family ties, and don’t want to move. Sad though it may be, there is little to be done about economic change except to make the best of the big forces at work.