http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html
Quote
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.
The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.
Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.
Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.
Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.
In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.
"The real question is not whether these cities shrink â€" we're all shrinking â€" but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."
Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.
"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.
Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.
The exodus â€" particularly of young people â€" coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.
In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel â€" named after William Durant, GM's founder â€" is a symbol of the city's decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint's decline began.
Regarded as a model city in the motor industry's boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.
But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl â€" Flint covers 34 square miles.
He said: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."
But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.
If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.
Flint's recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.
They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.
The local authority has restored the city's attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.
Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.
Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.
Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.
The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.
"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.
Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".
Out West, where nothing ever rots or rusts, whole towns were abandoned when the ore ran out or the railroad went through another town. We call them "ghost towns". There's nothing unAmerican about pulling out and going somewhere else to make a living. It's what we have been doing since the beginning.
Stick build, wooden American houses weren't built to last much more than 100 years at best anyway. Tear them down and let the woods take over again.
These places aren't shrinking their suburbs. Their suburbs are as fine as a suburb can be. They are talking about demolishing struggling urban neighborhoods to better facilitate growth in other ones. Locally, this strategy would be like demolishing everything in East Jax, Brentwood and Durkeeville and moving their residents to Downtown, Springfield and LaVilla to densify those neighborhoods. In the meantime, places like the Southside and Argyle would not be affected.
There are merits in such a plan but its also full of negatives. It will be interesting to see what the true results will be once it is actually implemented in one of those Rust Belt cities. At this point, I know Youngstown has tried it but the residents asked to leave have been hesitant to leave their neighborhoods and history behind.
Here is a link to the discussion on this topic that took place last year:
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,2016.0.html
QuoteThe incredible shrinking city
Youngstown, Ohio has long been on the decline and now is being hit by the foreclosure crisis. Its answer: Razing abandoned buildings and tearing up streets.
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNNMoney.com) -- Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.
Now, in a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings and tearing up blighted streets, converting entire blocks into open green spaces. More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.
Under the initiative, dubbed Plan 2010, city officials are also monitoring thinly-populated blocks. When only one or two occupied homes remain, the city offers incentives - up to $50,000 in grants - for those home owners to move, so that the entire area can be razed. The city will save by cutting back on services like garbage pick-ups and street lighting in deserted areas.
full article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/08/real_estate/radical_city_plan/index.htm
A follow up to the strategy in Youngstown.....
QuoteYou can't pay them enough to leave
A plan in Youngstown aims to move residents out of the city's most deserted areas. The hitch: Home owners won't budge - even for $50,000.
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNNMoney.com) -- When the city of Youngstown, Ohio, proposed incentives to move people out of declining neighborhoods, it sounded like a good idea - in theory.
The city hoped to lure holdouts living on nearly empty blocks and relocate them to more lively areas, as part of its plan to remake itself in the wake of the steel industry's departure and the foreclosure crisis. It's already cleared some lots for things like playgrounds.
Now Youngstown wants to close entire streets and bulldoze abandoned properties so it can shut down city services like street lighting, police patrols and garbage pick-ups that it can no longer afford to maintain.
To do this on a large scale, the city needs to get about 100 residents to relocate. Each is eligible for $50,000 in incentives - plenty, in this town, to buy a new home and move. The hitch: Youngstowners don't seem to want to leave their homes, no matter how blighted or abandoned the neighborhood may be.
"I'm East Side born and East Side bred and when I die, I'll be East Side dead," said Rufus Hudson, a director of work force development at Youngstown State University. "We love our side of town. The same people who watched me grow are watching my children grow."
full article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/15/real_estate/Youngstown_plan_roadblock/index.htm?postversion=2008042411
(http://i.l.cnn.net/money/2008/04/15/real_estate/Youngstown_plan_roadblock/lc_youngstown1_new.03.jpg)
Occupied homes sit side-by-side with vacant houses in the once wealthy Wick Park neighborhood.
(http://i.l.cnn.net/money/2008/04/15/real_estate/Youngstown_plan_roadblock/marie_rodriguez.03.jpg)
South Side resident Marie Rodriguez says she won't leave her block.
I was just in Flint not too long ago to drop a Detroit family member off at the airport. The DT is anything but restored. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera on that side trip. In any event, the outlying areas mentioned in the article aren't suburbs. In the Midwest, most suburbs are located outside of the core city limits. These cities are taking out former vibrant urban core neighborhoods in an effort to strengthen the DT core. I think its too early to deem it a success or failure at this point. However, its a strategy worth following to see what the results really are five to ten years down the road.
It could be. I'm in Huntsville now but I'll look into it when I get back to town tomorrow night.
This was on digg this morning:
http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/06/19/bulldoze-the-burbs/
This is kind of sad, but these are becoming desperate times. Thinning of the pack.
The big boo boo here would seem to be when were the burbs, the burbs? If one moved to San Marco (OKLAHOMA) in 1920, then THAT was the burbs. San Jose? St. Nicholas? Just a few pre depression years later, Arlington? Post WWII boom times. World Golf Village, Nocatee, todays burbs. So which ones are most likely to be rotting from the inside out? Me thinks this will run headon into a massive citizen revolt at a not too distant date.
When the government can do for Youngstown, or Philadelphia, or even Jacksonville, what Katrina did for New Orleans, all hell is going to break loose.
OCKLAWAHA
Quote from: thelakelander on June 13, 2009, 04:27:07 PM
These places aren't shrinking their suburbs. Their suburbs are as fine as a suburb can be. They are talking about demolishing struggling urban neighborhoods to better facilitate growth in other ones. Locally, this strategy would be like demolishing everything in East Jax, Brentwood and Durkeeville and moving their residents to Downtown, Springfield and LaVilla to densify those neighborhoods. In the meantime, places like the Southside and Argyle would not be affected.
There are merits in such a plan but its also full of negatives. It will be interesting to see what the true results will be once it is actually implemented in one of those Rust Belt cities. At this point, I know Youngstown has tried it but the residents asked to leave have been hesitant to leave their neighborhoods and history behind.
Here is an update on the Youngstown 2010 plan. I'll be in Youngstown on July 14th to gather images for a future Metro Jacksonville "Learning From" article.
QuoteA Rust Belt city tries to shrink its way to success
Mark Peyko has spent his whole life in the Rust Belt â€" a childhood in Youngstown, Ohio, and six years as a newspaperman outside Detroit. He had seen firsthand what census after census had suggested: Residents were fleeing by the thousands. Slowly, the region’s cities were dying.
Yet nothing had prepared him for the announcement that city leaders in his hometown made seven years ago: Youngstown would no longer dream of a return to its heyday, when steel mills thronged the banks of the Mahoning River and 170,000 residents crowded its city limits.
Instead, it dreamed only of survival, and to do this, Youngstown would not grow, but shrink â€" shuttering swaths of the city through demolition and consolidation on a massive scale.
The announcement was the beginning of Youngstown 2010, a bold plan for a new mode of urban sustainability. With only 80,000 residents left in the city, Youngstown leaders hoped to redirect limited resources to parts of town that they felt had viable futures. Residents would be offered incentives to move into parts of town not yet overrun by vacant properties, reorganizing the city around the university and a long-neglected urban core. A new Youngstown, smaller but more vibrant, would grow amid the shell of the old, which would either be demolished or ignored.
But Youngstown 2010 is faltering. Recession is challenging its plan. The city has little money to demolish vacant buildings; no one has taken the $50,000 incentive to move.
A handful of other Rust Belt cities from Flint, Mich., to Buffalo, N.Y., have considered similar plans. Youngstown’s experience underscores the difficulties of urban engineering on such a massive scale, as the promise of renewal collides with the sacrifices needed to make it work.
full article: http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/05/29/a-rust-belt-city-tries-to-shrink-its-way-to-success/