City Shrinkage
The pseudonymous “Henry Clay” writes about the problems of Flint, Michigan where the population has shrunk to just above half its 1965 size, putting large burdens on a city government to provide services to semi-populated areas:
Flint is composed of 75 neighborhoods encompassing 34 square miles. The cost to the city of policing, removing refuse, and maintaining streets and public land in vast and often empty neighborhoods is substantial, siphoning off precious tax revenue that could go toward more productive ends.
No doubt, abandoned neighborhoods in parts of Wilmington, Newark, Detroit, Rochester, Cleveland, New Haven, Hartford, and Baltimore are a similar drain on resources.
He proposes that we need better policies to manage city shrinkage. As far as Flint is concerned, I think that’s correct. We could use some way to move people around, so that the population is re-compacted and the outskirts of the city put to some other use (urban agriculture?) instead of having lots of people live on blocks that are half-full of vacant buildings.
But we should be careful about generalizing this too much. Baltimore is a troubled city in many ways. And its population has shrunk considerably from off its peak. But Baltimore is embedded in a very different geographic context. Maryland is a wealthy state, and the Baltimore metropolitan area has been growing at a decent clip. The city is close to other large cities such as Washington and Philadelphia, and it’s located in the densely populated northeast corridor.
Which is to say that if conditions were better in Baltimore—if the crime rate were lower, or the school system produced better results—that people would probably gladly occupy the vacant space. Plenty of people live near Baltimore and, recession aside, there are plenty of jobs in the general vicinity of Baltimore. Indeed, over the past few years population in Baltimore has already been ticking up. Flint, by contrast, is embedded in a state and a broader region that are plagued with economic problems. It’s very likely that in the short term the whole state of Michigan will be losing population and that many of the state’s jobs will vanish. So even if you did make conditions in Flint better, you probably couldn’t see much in the way of net population growth.
To me, those different circumstances imply very different policies. Flint needs help executing a plan of managed shrinkage to turn it from a city of 200,000 to a city of 100,000 thousand without being full of rotting, vacant structures. Baltimore needs help executing a plan to build better transportation links between Baltimore neighborhoods and the rest of the region, and to improving policing and schools, so as to rebuild its population to something closer to its historical levels.
56 Responses to “City Shrinkage”
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April 25th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Hartford and New Haven do not have significant abandoned areas. In part this is because both are very small geographically.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Also the city limits of Hartford (I don’t know New Haven) define a much smaller chunk of the metro area than cities in other parts of the country. The city of Hartford is only downtown and inner city, excluding even most of the old streetcar suburbs, etc., making the tax base even worse than similar cities with more generously drawn borders.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
very interesting post, matt. I agree with the guy above me.
http://politicsdecoded.com/2009/04/25/torture-its-effect-on-the-media-and-all-of-us/
April 25th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
It’s probably wise for most cities with abandoned or nearly-abandoned neighborhoods to take a long, hard look at buying up and bulldozing those neighborhoods. But as Matt suggests, the next step is going to vary widely depending on the specifics of the situation. Most metro areas in the US are growing, and it makes more sense to focus on replacing rotten neighborhoods with attractive ones, not to replace them with unimproved land that generates no property tax revenues.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
That is, in general, an odd list of places to compare with Flint. Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit are each much bigger cities in metro areas that are bigger still. Flint, meanwhile, is essentially a satellite of one of those areas. It has suburbs, sure, but nothing on the level of what surrounds those bigger cities — off the top of my head, I would guess that Dearborn alone has more people than all of Flint’s suburbs combined. If you contract a big city you’re just going to be left with a ring of empty space between it and the surrounding area; contracting Flint is a much different proposal.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
MR .Yglesias
If Baltimore had a maglev or other highspeed train to Washington DC we could fill up thousands of those vacant houses.If the city brought back the successfull “dollar house” program, where people bought houses for a buck and brought them up to code themselves, we could fill thousands of more houses.
If anyone travels through Baltimore and goes through the now wealthy neighborhood of Federal Hill, please remember that the first “dollar houses” were sold there .
I can give no opinion about Flint or other cities. But i can tell you that the largest and most beautiful houses in Baltimore are often in the most poorest and run down neighborhoods.There is nothing wrong with the houses themselves.
I also feel that although we should rehabilitate these neighborhoods , that does not mean that we should force out the working people in that neighborhood .Too often this happens.Because of this , black people especialy ,are suspicious about renewal plans. And i can not blame them.
The biggest myth going around now is that too many poor people were allowed to buy $500,000 homes.Most people who bought $500,000 homes and are losing them are probably fairly well off and could have afforded a $400,000 home, but overstretched.
My point is that we should help people buy affordable homes in the City of Baltimore .We should also try to attract blue collar jobs into the neighborhoods and improve the schools and public transport system.
Urban renewal should not just be about moving blue collar people out ,and rich people in.I was fortunate to buy a house in the neighborhood of Highlandtown 6 years ago when you could get one for $45,000.. I want my property value to increase of course.But not to the point where working people can not afford a house.I have been blessed with a house, and i would not want to deny someone else the chance to buy a home.
I know Mr. Yglesias has in the past warned about how he thinks that too many people owning homes is ineficient.But with all due respect we are people , not machines . And i think that the biggest problem in Baltimore is that too many people do not feel part of a community. Home ownership is a start.
Many people in Baltimore have more skills and time, than money. Someone please bring back the” Dollar House “program.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
When the problem is too much “cow bell” Yglesias advocates more “cow bell”
April 25th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Location is certainly a major factor with Flint. I grew up in Bethlehem, PA, and we hit hard times about the same time as Flint. And by hard times, I mean 25% unemployment. I mean a steel mill that used to employ 80,000 workers shutting down. But Bethlehem is close enough to Philadelphia and New York that it was a plausible exurban community for both. It also has some good schools and universities. Every now and then, I go back there. It’s really amazing how the town has pulled through. You’d never expect that Bethlehem was near ruin two decades ago. But if it were 100 miles west, it would probably be like Flint.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
From my brief experiences in Balto, I was given the impression that landlords had economic incentives (throught tax policies and such) to keep the rowhouses boarded up. Pete’s got it right above: we need to turn these properties into owner-occupieds, or we need to tear them down and build some green/urban farming space. No more vacant/absentee landlords.
In either case, repossession (or the threat thereof) is likely the only way this can be done on an effective scale.
Baltimore needs help executing a plan to build better transportation links between Baltimore neighborhoods and the rest of the region, and to improving policing and schools, so as to rebuild its population to something closer to its historical levels.
Baltimore City needs to merge with Baltimore County. There’s no other way for the city to avoid starvation.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Let’s hope Flint take a close look at St. Louis, which I believe was the first major city to physically downsize by demolishing whole neighborhoods. Years later, the place is still an archipelago, with little clusters of big (sometimes giant) structures separated by miles of emptiness.
I wonder how much thought has been given to letting post-industrial urban wastelands revert to forest, as most would in the Rust Belt. Few American cities have really large forests or wilderness areas; those that exist, such as Central Park in NY or Rock Creek Park in DC, are much-loved — and you’ll notice that surrounding residential properties are high-end.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I wonder how much thought has been given to letting post-industrial urban wastelands revert to forest, as most would in the Rust Belt.
Forget forests. Let’s turn them into local farms and build sustainable food economies.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Mr LAFOOLETTE PROGRESSIVE
I agree with you about bulldozing land and leaving it vacant . If we bulldoze these old houses and build new houses ,the workmanship will not be as good as in the old houses no matter how much they try. it is a cliche but they simply do not make them like that anymore.
I might also might point out that the neighborhoods of Canton and Fells Point were scheduled to be bulldozed in the 1970s to build a highway. if you saw those neighborhoods today you would wonder what they were thinking.
Also ,Baltimore rowhouses are much smaller [ mine is 1200 sq feet] than the houses that are built now . this is why there are many blue collar people in Baltimore who make less than $20,000 a year but still own a home.It is the crime in the neighborhoods and the lack of blue collar jobs as well as the school system that is the problem. Not the buildings themselves .
April 25th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Flint is going to have a population of 100 million inthe near future?????
Or am I misinterpreting “100,000 thousand?”
April 25th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
SCYTHIA
i do not think there are tax incentives for the landlords to keep houses boarded up ,but there are not enough punishments for them doing so ,and not enough incentives for fixing them up.
As for your comment about us merging with baltimore county. As you know we are one of the few cities that is not part of a county.This is one of our main problems because we have no tax base. Most companies in Baltimore are non profits. Johns Hopkins is the biggest example of this. The city makes up for this by taxing the heck out of those who own homes. This discourages home ownership and makes landlords not want to fix up their properties.
April 25th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
One of the things I don’t understand about Michigan is why its people don’t leave. In theory in a country with open labor markets like ours there shouldn’t be big long term disparaties in unemployment from one state to another. Either companies should move in to take advantage of the cheaper labor or people should move away to where the jobs are. We obviously don’t have a perfect market here, but what is the market failure?
April 25th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Check out this story about Youngstown, Ohio (my home town) which has undertaken a shrinkage strategy. It’s not crazy.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/08/real_estate/radical_city_plan/index.htm?cnn=yes
April 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Youngstown, OH was Flint before Flint was Flint and it already has a plan to deal with that former steel city’s downsized reality. In fact, they are sharing “how-to’s” with Flint, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, et al:
http://www.zillow.com/blog/last-one-in-youngstown-ohio-turn-out-the-lights/2008/04/14/
April 25th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Tom in Ma types faster than I do. Way to go!
April 25th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
“One of the things I don’t understand about Michigan is why its people don’t leave.”
It’s not always easy to leave. When local economies crash, so do housing prices. And people get trapped by their houses. When you have $100K in loans on a $20K house, it’s hard to justify selling the house and leaving. Most people will just stick it out and hope that the economy comes back.
April 25th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
“One of the things I don’t understand about Michigan is why its people don’t leave.”
“It’s not always easy to leave.”
True, but a bunch do anyways. Michigan became an industrial giant to begin with by a heck of lot of people leaving the southern US. Not really sure how much the South industrializing has consisted of a mirror image of this original population flow.
In any event, over the last half century there’s been a sustained drain from small towns throughout the country towards the top few dozen megalopolises. I would imagine that a sustained downturn for the entire Michigan economy will similarly result in a considerable number of people eventually departing for other locations.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
over the last half century there’s been a sustained drain from small towns throughout the country towards the top few dozen megalopolises. I would imagine that a sustained downturn for the entire Michigan economy will similarly result in a considerable number of people eventually departing for other locations.
What seems to happen is that some people leave the very depressed places in favor of somewhat-less-depressed places. Over the past 30 years, many very small towns and individual cities have seen population declines, but the overall population of states like Michigan has increased.
Part of it, as seen from the example of Youngstown, OH, is denial: there’s a belief that the return of the “good times” is “just around the corner.”
April 25th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
“I would imagine that a sustained downturn for the entire Michigan economy will similarly result in a considerable number of people eventually departing for other locations.”
I agree. But I think it takes a generation to really take effect. I was in high school when my town hit hard times. The older generation was stuck there because of the financial pressure of their worthless houses. But those of us in high school weren’t so tied down once we finished high school. Many of us left and never came back. Basically, the exodus occurs when the children get old enough to leave.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
There are two thing that needs to be realised .
ONE.
The last time the government bulldozed houses was during the Urban Renewal projects of the 1950s and 60s. The people that used to live in the rowhouses that were bulldozed were put in highrise housing projects. This was seen as an improvement.We all know how that ended. Baltimore has had to blow all of it’s highrises up.
TWO
It is not just empty houses . There are still empty factories and wharehouses in Baltimore.
Yes ,the GM plant is gone and bulldozed. And yes ,the Sparrows Point steel mill will probably never hire as many as it once did [ 50,000 at it's height].
But there can still be good paying blue collar jobs in Baltimore and other cities. Maybe the future lies in transforming some of these abandoned buildings and wharehouses into small family owned workshops .
There is a company called American Alloy Foundry in East Baltimore that was in the Baltimore City Paper recently .They do casting and never went big because the owner liked the craftmanship of the job.The result was that he can make small unique castings that someone might need that would take too long, and be too expensive to ship from China.They do work for industries and factories , so they are not simply a boutique workshop.They also provide jobs .
There also is a factory profiled a year ago in the New York Times called Baltimore Toolworks that makes chisels on the west side of Baltimore. I own and use a couple of their chisels. They are good and affordable.The NYT even has a video about them on their website.Both companies have their own websites as well.
We can never match the wages in China .Never. But we can find ways to compete.I think that there is a future for industry in America ,and that it is in the cities that everone thinks are dying.
We can not simply turn half our city neighborhoods into “cute” and “charming” neighborhoods for the rich .And let the other half rot ,while the working class flee to the suburbs.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I know this may sound stupid.But if anyone reading Matt Yglesias’s blog owns a small workshop or a small busines i would appreciate it if you could write a comment about what it would take for you to invest in a city like Dertroit or Baltimore. Or your reasons why you would not and what should be changed.
I think the small business owners of America should be advising the President about creating jobs. Instead of the wall street types and the owners of big businesses that quite frankly got too fat and innefficient.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Re: We obviously don’t have a perfect market here, but what is the market failure?
Because people don’t like to move. They tend to have homes, places of worship, family members, friends, and memories to which they are attached. And they don’t feel inclined to give those things up just because the globalist neoliberals tell them that Adam Smith says so.
Re: Forget forests. Let’s turn them into local farms and build sustainable food economies.
This is, in fact, being attempted in Flint and to some extent in Detroit (urban gardens have been going for a while, quite successfully, in places like Cuba and increasingly in US cities as well). One potential problem is that soils in urban areas, especially Flint, may be quite degraded and poor for agriculture. I haven’t heard about there being heavy metal contamination in Flint urban gardens, which is good. In principle, though, it’s a great idea, although I’m rather surprised it occurred to people like Yglesias.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Because people don’t like to move. They tend to have homes, places of worship, family members, friends, and memories to which they are attached.
Well, no one would live in Michigan except for the native tribes in the first place if it weren’t for people being willing to pick up and move. I think people need to reconnect with their immigrant/fronteirman roots when it comes to what to do about michigan.
I’m rather surprised it occurred to people like Yglesias.
“Cosmopolitan hipsters” are big on local, sustainable agriculture, you know.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
HECTOR
Regaerding your comment about why people often do not move.
I completly agree and could not have said it better.Many commenters mean well when they talk about bulldozing neighborhoods.
They must realise though , that it is not just houses that will be destoyed, but friendships , family ties and peoples dreams of the future and memories of the past.
Baltimore has over 30,000 vacant houses. But they are spread out so that while some blocks are vacant , most are half or one third vacant. When i moved on my block there were 6 or 7 vacant houses ,one of which is now owned by two psychologists.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Regarding comment # 27
I am pleased to say that all of the houses on my block are now occupied and that almost 3/4 s have homeowners.We also no longer have any drug dealers .We had a homicide the first year i was there. now people sit outside and relax.
Neighborhoods CAN change for the better
April 25th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
15
I expect people don’t leave because of frictional costs such as (as others have pointed out) the fact that you can’t easily take your house with you.
Why businesses don’t move in is a little more complicated. There are also frictional costs. And I suspect the political environment in declining areas tends to become unfavorable to business creating a viscous cycle.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
creating a viscous cycle.
I know this was a mistake, but it’s a good metaphor for the slow-moving gears of politics and regulations being resistant adjusting to the new economic environment.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
pete’s #23 comment reminds me of somewhat of this, one of a number of small workshops open in the old Waialua sugar mill. (although it’s out in the sticks, not in the central city)
pete’s #24 comment reminds me of the obviously fictional, but based on some underlying truth, time when Cutty first tried to open his boxing gym.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Re: My point is that we should help people buy affordable homes in the City of Baltimore .We should also try to attract blue collar jobs into the neighborhoods and improve the schools and public transport system.
Something also needs to be done about the commercial real estate in Baltimore if you want to revive the neighborhoods. I live in the semi-gentrified “Pigtown” just west of the stadiums. Many of the rowhouses have been beautifully rehabbed (albeit with pricey rents afterward– ours is exorbitant), but the business strip along Washington Blvd looks like a war zone. This can be done successfully; it’s a big part of the success of Federal Hill and Fells Point.
Re: One of the things I don’t understand about Michigan is why its people don’t leave.
Married (or partnered) people have to deal with the fact that one spouse may still be working, and at a job that pays well and which they like. That makes it hard to pull up stakes and move– especially in these times when such a move could leave both people with uncertain prospects.
Re: Baltimore has had to blow all of it’s highrises up.
On the near west side along MLK Blvd (where I am told neighborhoods were destroyed in the ‘68 riots) they actually did a good job building new town houses designed to match the older, surviving rowhouses.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Again and again, I see the same presuppositions about urban decline and renewal opportunity. While the secondary effects are quite clear and correct: Crime and bad schools drive away people and make investment difficult and mires communities to misery, but the primary factors alawys go unadressed or glossed over – as they do here.
We know from a long body of literature and serious investigatory work that there are essentially two prime, interconnected variables responsible for the creation and maintenance of destabalized urban environments: segregation/isolation and joblessness.
However, we more often here of the secondary consequences (schools, crime etc.) as prime movers because of (1) they are easier politically and (2) the generally poor nature of the urbanist discourse.
While we effectively know the aformentioned variables are primary (see Massey and Denton, William Julius Wilson and others), we rarely discuss them in any meaningful context.
At this site, I think pete from baltimore’s initial post gets it best. Rather than reinstituting “urban renewal” in its current form via HOPE VI and other population transfer mechanisms, there needs to be a redevelopment of urban labor markets and a less obtuse form of desegregating neighborhoods.
This would require an emphasis on not simply attracting wealthy people to the city to disposess its current occupants, but rather create a more balanced, living wage driven service sector.
Meanwhile, desegregating neigborhoods is a bit trickier. Too often we have seen the confluence of good (reducing segregation) and negative intentions (real state speculation and expropriation) driving this debate. The right course would be the maintenance of most communities as they exist, a stronger affordable housing environment, flexible options for families (enabling a right to remain or opportunity to leave) and a commitment by the government to rectify a mess it created without doing greater harm.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
After the young leave, there’s stagnation for about a generation. Then the immobile old people start dying and that’s when the real emptying begins.
There’s a North-South gradient of this between the Appalachians and Rockies. The mobile young leave for the nearby cities, with bias southward. There are small towns being abandoned in North Dakota, small towns in Kansas pretty much just old people on Social Security and falling into poverty. Michigan is in real population decline and so is Ohio, and practically all of northern Appalachia (from northern New Hampshire and the Adirondacks to roughly the Potomac in West Virginia) is thinning out or will be doing so soon.
The Northeast Corridor is still holding constant in population, shedding its population growth southward to Virginia and the Carolinas (net). There is still population growth west of the northern Rockies and the length of the Rockies.
As a larger trend, it seems that the country is going from an equilibrium 70/30 population split of people living in the (relative) metro areas to those that are rural/small town to a much greater ratio. My estimation is 90/10. That’s what is already forming in Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California and spreading. It seems correlated with economic transition from the agrarian/industrial-centered mix that settled in in the 1950s to the post-industrial kind.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
JonF regarding comment 32
I am familiar with Pigtown and have worked on many houses there, and you are right about the shopping strip. Pigtown is exctly the neighborhood i think of when people ask why some neighborhoods are bad, and what can be done. It is a great location and has many things going for it.
But it just can not seem to change quick enough. This is not an insult to Pigtown .It is a nice neighborhood and would be great if the crime and prostitution disappeared. The same could be said about Highlandtown where i live. Many people have asked me why i think Pigtown is having so much trouble transforming itself.Other than the crime problem i can not give a good answer.
I hate to say this ,but many cities like Baltimore do not have a whole lot to lose.They should somehow get ownership of these buildings and sell them cheap or rent them cheap.
When i said that we should pay attention to abandoned factories ,as well as rowhouses , i should have included retail as well.That really is vital. They not only provide services, they are very likely to hire locally . And are often willing to take a chance on someone who is a good worker but may lack education.The small mom and pop companies that i have worked for have ALWAYS paid more than the big ones .
GOOD LUCK IN PIGTOWN
AND THANK YOU FOR NOT CALLING IT “WASHINGTON VILLAGE”
and for the record i do not live in ” Patterson Park Neighborhood” i live in HIGHLANDTOWN
changing the names won’t make them better .
Hard work will.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Well, no one would live in Michigan except for the native tribes in the first place
Your poor comprehension you have of the world as it exist is stunning. However, even more loathesome is your sneering enmity for poeple stuck in decaying environments.
I think you previously chided me as rude on this here site – a behavior I assure you is likely intentional. But the vulgarity of your sentiments – dressed up with ornamental sophistication – are much more troubling.
My guess is you are not very with poor or working class people and their enviroments, and I venture to guess you are strikingly uninformed about ghettoized city inhabitants.
One can only guess who the native tribes for which you speak.
Maybe they are the negroes of Detroit and Flint? Or are they the putrid “white trash” of deindustrialization? Aint it bout time some one took the trash and the blacks out?
I mean, can’t they just move to the sunbelt and get a job in the tech sector?
But pray tell who the “natives” might be? Inquirying minds…
April 25th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Chicago was part of the “urban blight” cycle back 30 and 40 years ago, but was big enough that it was still a nexus of communications, which included a first rate transit system. The “gentrification” movement has been spreading from downtown out into the west side for twenty years and more.
If you have commute regularly into the loop, you get to watch the healing process, like stop motion photography, from the windows of your train on the CTA elevated lines. Rowhouses, hotels, lofts, factories, and office buildings, all being refurbished and resold, block by block, year by year.
It takes money and good planning, but it can be done.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
pray tell who the “natives” might be?
The Ojibwa and the Potawatomi. Everyone else in Michigan got there because their ancestors over the last 200 years saw that opportunities where they were living weren’t that great, so they picked up and moved. It’s not simply inertia– it’s an ingrained believe that good times are “around the corner” and a hope that another manufacturer is going to step into town and save everyone. Meanwhile, their ancestors didn’t wait around expecting things to get better where they were living: they saw that things were good in Michigan, so they left where they were living and went elsewhere.
I sometimes thing that our attitude towards immigration is similar to how the Chinese handled their food issues at one time. At one point, China actually produced enough food to feed its entire population. However, the expense of shipping food in northern China to southern China was cost-prohibitive compared to simply importing food directly to the south from abroad. We seem to have decided, as a country, that we can’t expect the internal migration of labor, so we make up for the frictional costs of internal human movement by depending on immigration to fill in the gaps in the labor market.
I think you previously chided me as rude on this here site
Probably not. I’m at peace with my own incivlity and that of everyone else’s here on this site. I might have said you were uninformed though.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
i am curiouse to how other countries are dealing with the deindustrialisation of their cities.Too often MR. YGLESIAS ‘ S posts tend to suggest that Europe is perfect and that we are not as good.
I do not suggest that he believes that. Merly that this is the tone and theme of many of his posts.
I think we can learn a lot from European countries . Not by idolising them and putting them on a pedastal .But by recogniseing that they have some of the same problems that we do. It would be intersting to see what solutions they are trying. And whether they work ,and whether they could be used over here. Britain and much of eastern and centeral Europe especially have faced massive deindustrialisation.
Obvulously Britain has not solved it’s urban problems and i am sure that they are not quite as bad as ours. But it would be interesting to find out what they are trying to do, and/or what mistakes they may have made .
I think us and Europe would get along a lot better if we stopped alternating between demoniseing and worshipping each other. We should realise that it is in all of our interests if we can revive our economies.and that many of our problems are similar.
We should also realise thatwhile we have more in common with Europe and Canada, we could learn something from how the Asians and the africans and the South Americans are dealing with their economic and urban problems as well.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
regarding my own comment39
i hope i have not diverted this conversation to “which is better , America or Europe? ” . That was not my intention I simply feel that if anyone knows anything about deindustrialisation of urban areas it would be somewhere like Sheffield or Birmingham in the UK.They might be able to teach us something about urban renewal.
For those who may feel my comments may seem anti-European ,i apoligise.But i actually like Europe a lot and consider myself a ” card carrying” Europhile and Anglophile.
I just like the real Europe , warts and all . Not the idealised version.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
It’s odd to see Baltimore mentioned as a shrinking city near Philadelphia. Philadelphia has actually dropped below half of it’s peak population. I don’t think Baltimore has.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
It’s odd to see Baltimore mentioned as a shrinking city near Philadelphia. Philadelphia has actually dropped below half of it’s peak population. I don’t think Baltimore has.
Philly hasn’t lost nearly that many– we’re down from just over 2 million in 1950 to just under 1.5 million now. Baltimore’s actually lost a bit more of their population, proportionally– down from 950,000 to just short of 650,000.
They also have silly accents.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
You apparently don’t understand a great many things, including how to use google.
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090402/METRO/904020403/Leaving+Michigan+Behind++Eight-year+population+exodus+staggers+state
They ARE leaving!
April 25th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Once upon a time, cities in America grew. To accommodate the changes that came with growth, cities commissioned “master plans”. Shrinking cities like Flint haven’t bothered with a master plan in at least 40 years. Perhaps Flint is a lesson in bad planning? If they had come to terms with declining population and planned accordingly, they could have better managed the emptiness.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
One final thing to consider about Flint is that while the city of Flint lost about half of its population, the metro area has continuously grown. Genessee county has never lost population, only the city of Flint. It is remarkably like Detroit in that sense. It is poor and black, and surrounded by affluent white suburbs (Michael Moore grew up in the white suburb of Davison, not Flint as he likes to claim).
April 25th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
I don’t know about the Potawatomi, but according to their own traditions the Ojibwe had originally lived out east. Remember that both the Potawatomi and the Ojibwe were semi-nomadic, so neither of them were likely to have been in the area for more than a few hundred years.
Why do people stay in Michigan? Well, for one thing the decline of the auto industry has occurred in fits and starts. When my mother died in 2000, some of her husband’s nephews had just graduated from high school and gotten jobs for one of the Big Three. I can’t imagine that’s gone well. Flint has been hit harder than most places, though.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I am curious as to why none of the stimulus money went to urban renewal .The small amount that did go to construction ,mainly went to highways. An even smaller percentage went to public transport.
I know that we need highways . But the whole purpose was to provide jobs. When you drive by a highway construction job look around.How many workers do you see?
When People hear the words ” highway consruction” , they seem to think that it will be like in the 1930s WPA projects with guys swinging picks.Highway work is NOT labor intensive these days.
To demo the interior of a small rowhouse in baltimore, on the other hand , takes a crew of 5 or 6 guys roughly 4 or 5 days. That is if you want a good thorough job done.That is just for the demo which is the quickest part of the renovation. To renovate even a small rowhouse, is very labor intensive and usally takes a couple of months .
There are between 20,000 and 30,000 vacant houses in Baltimore alone, depending on whose figures you use.I am sure Detroit has more than we do.There are probably over a million nation wide.Couldn’t we have tried to rebuild a few of them?
I do not expect the government to renovate every empty house or factory and storefront in America.I think that they should focus on “Dollar House ” programs and tax breaks.
But if they really wanted to do “SHOVEL READY ” jobs.Why do road jobs which require very little manual labor . The highway jobs are also very far from where low income people without cars live . So that they can not reach the job site.All road construction companies that i know of, will not hire you unless you own a car.
Rebuilding our cities is very labor intensive.They also could be started tommorow. LITERALLY TOMMOROW!! In Baltimore the city owns 1/3 of all vacant housing.
Excuse me for being blunt. I am not anti- union ,but i can not help noticing that most of the construction money went to jobs which used a lot of union guys.
I am happy for them.But the stimilus construction money will do nothing to help the unemployed sheetrocker in Detroit.
Nor will it help an guy who is a construction labor in West Baltimore and can only manage to work 1 or 2 days a week as a day laborer.These are not only the guys that need money,but will also spend it at the grocery store as soon as they get it.
I voted for Obama and I think he has done some good things so far . I also do not want to judge him too early in his administration.But i must say that he missed a great oppertunity to help rebuild our cities.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:58 am
“I am curious as to why none of the stimulus money went to urban renewal”
Pete, you know East Coast urban issues better than anyone. So I’ll just assume you’re being facetious. But for those less experienced in urban reality, I’ll say it like it is: Because it might go to black people. I used to live in a black neighborhood, and I know exactly how money is spent in cities. If you’re in a white neighborhood, your sidewalks were built within the last twenty years and are getting redone now. If you’re in a black neighborhood, your sidewalks are eighty years old and aren’t up for repairs for another fifty years. I’ve lived in both, and the distinction is obvious. Except for one thing. When white boys like me start moving into town, suddenly government funds start flowing. And then the blacks and Mexicans can’t afford their homes. It’s a subtle form of ethnic cleansing, but it’s fully supported by our government. And I benefited because I’m white. I won’t apologize for being white, but I have no right to extra benefits for my skin color.
April 26th, 2009 at 8:36 am
MR FOSTERT
I agree with the point that you made.Too often the leadership of cities make a point of provideing good city services in some of the wealthier white neighborhoods and settling for handing out a few patronage jobs here and there in the poorer black neighborhoods.This happens even when the leadership is black.
I still think much of the stimilus construction money was used to pay off the unions.I am not anti- union, but i do not think most people realise that construction unions are different than ones that represent grocery store workers for instance.The construction unions restrict the amount of people that can join the union [most regular unions want MORE members].This is because there are only so many “union only ” federal contracts to go around.
I wanted to avoid talking of race MR FOSTERT ,but yes, the average construction laborer from west Baltimore is black and will not benifet from the stimilus.And yes too many people in this coumtry do not realise that we are all in this together.
I live in an eastern city.But it is not good for me,or anyone if the small towns in the midwest suffer.Their fate is tied to my own.
I still am shocked by how many people still think that most of the stimilus money will go to construction . They think that it will be like the 1930’s with the CCC and the WPA.
They even use terms like “shovel ready”.Most of my liberal friends swear that right now , guys are swinging picks and shovels and building roads by hand.These are intelligent educated people mind you.I think Obama might even beleive it.
As i said , road constructioon is NOT labor intensive. Rebuilding our cities is VERY LABOR INTENSIVE. But we have more than enough spare laborers.
Most of the stimilus mony went towards tax cuts, the financial sector and universities.
Unfourtantly it is a lot like when the republicans spend on defence. A lot of money going to high profile weapons systems, but very little going to the basics like body armour.
I like Obama but i think he is hesitant to act directly.He talks of spending money on ” THE DEVELOPMENT ” of highspeed rail ,instead of just building the damn thing.
I realise i am not well educated . But i learned in construction that if you want something done, do it ! If you need dirt moved from point A to point B ,use a front loader. If you do not have one , use a wheelbarrow. No wheelbarrow? Then move it by hand! I had to dig a sighnpost hole with a rock once because the boss had no shovel!It got done.
There is nothing stopping us from rebuilding our country except political willpower
April 26th, 2009 at 10:51 am
@Townleybaum: “They also have silly accents.”
Takes one to know one, hon!
I dated a girl from South Jersey in college and the first thing I ever said to her was “Where in Baltimore are you from?” She sounded like a Dundalk girl, except cute and with teeth.
As for Baltimore itself, it is indeed quite different from Flint in that it is a major city along the Northeast Corridor. In fact, I think that mass transit, particular high-speed rail stopping at Penn Station, would be a major boon to Baltimore. The area around Penn Station is already beginning to gentrify, which is a good thing overall. I agree with Pete that it would be bad if every neighborhood became yuppified, but every city needs a tax base. There’s always going to be rich and poor, and that’s what makes Baltimore so great. I also think that the small size of Pete’s rowhouse (and mine) means that Baltimore will always have room for working-class people.
How to get them back? Well, yes, drugs, crime and schools. Anyone who’s watched The Wire knows that. But it’s a Catch-22: The only way to fix drugs, crime and schools is to get solid working people to live in the City again. And to get people living in the City again…you get the drift.
I am for grassroots (not top-down) urban renewal. The dollar house program is such an obviously great idea that it’s no wonder our idiotic government won’t do it again. We need more and BETTER mass transit, to reduce the current dominance of the car on our landscape. And finally, reduce the property tax to the level of Baltimore County’s. Those things alone won’t fix the city, but they ARE prerequisites to fixing the city.
Bottom line: we need investment and jobs. Not top-down renewal schemes, as propagated by the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC).
April 26th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Great post, Matt. You’re exactly right. Michigan, much like GM, is only going to be a going concern with a sustainable future by becoming smaller.
I’d say that the other area this idea apples, besides Michigan, is the rest belt up upstate New York. Buffalo is never going to be as big as it once was.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Re: We need more and BETTER mass transit, to reduce the current dominance of the car on our landscape.
Transit in Baltimore is absymal. There are lots of buses, a light rail line notorious for breakdowns and delays, and a subway that apparently goes no where useful. And NIMBY is alive and well: plans to build an east-west light rail line (whiuch would go useful places) are being opposed by the good burgers of West Baltimore event though they would be among its major beneficiaries.
Re: I’d say that the other area this idea apples, besides Michigan, is the rest belt up upstate New York.
The whole of the Great Lakes region is a mess, with only Chicago standing out as an exception. From Syracuse south to Pittsburgh, north to Michigan and west to Milwaukee it’s become the basketcase of the nation. The odd thing is that in the 90s the region was doing well– and Michigan at least was diversifying. For a short few years SE Michigan was one of the hottest tech centers in the country, and I worked with people who had been advised to move there because IT jobs were plentiful while (unlike Silicon Valley) the cost of living was reasonable. I have never understood why none of this came back after the 2001 recession. It’s as if it never had existed at all.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
A lot of people don’t realize that the “urban renewal” schemes of the 50s and 60s were not actually urban renewal. They were rackets, run by local businessmen and politician acting as criminal gangs.
The purpose of these criminal rackets was to seize land for businesses and freeways, destroying the houses of the poor and locking the poor up in highrise ‘prisons’. Wherever the history of the “urban renewal” has been closely inspected, the same things happened. The poor neighborhoods were marked out for future “industrial parks” and freeways. The houses of the poor were condemned, and in some cities like Boston, simply taken with no compensation at all.
Don’t think a few scholarly studies by university professors demonstrate good intentions. In Seattle, the University of Washington marked out the land they wanted for their ‘West Campus’, a thriving and prosperous neighborhood, and then drew up an “urban renewal” proposal which the city approved. Then they moved everyone out of the neighborhood, knocked down all the buildings, and for the next twenty years used the land for University parking lots. A federal judge who later reviewed the case in court said it was the biggest crime he’d ever seen.
Naturally this criminal behavior created a huge amount of bitterness among poor people still locked up in the cities by the de facto segregation of the suburbs- and not even able to buy homes in the cities because of redlining by lenders and insurance companies.
Today it is common to blame urban renewal for projects like Cabrini=Greene in Chicago, but that wasn’t urban renewal, that was “urban renewal”- there’s a BIG difference.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Regarding comment # 50 by CHRIS
There have been many discussions on this blog about why more people do not live in the city.I think that this is the first time someone mentioned property taxs[if someone else mentioned it ,i apoligise for not noticeing].
This is defintly one of the main issues driving people out of the cities.MR.CHRIS . i also agree that we need a tax base, but i think that too often ,a business that employs people will be pulled down so that a condo building can be built [ like the grain silo at Locust Point].
TAX revenue should be a means, not an end.
I think that you are absolutly right with your comments MR CHRIS , as is JonF [especialy about the NIMBY attitude, JonF mentioned].
I would also say, that when i say that i do not want Baltimore yuppified, i do not mean that it should not have a friendly enviroment for Proffesionals and upper middle class people .
I work construction ,but while i do not want the blue collar people driven out of my neighborhood.I also enjoy the company of my neighbors who have upper middle class incomes.It would be pretty boring if everybody was blue collar . of
I hate all sorts of snobbery ,and that includes inverse snobbery .If i hated everyone who made more money than me i ‘d be pretty damn lonely.
Thats why i like Baltimore . It ’s a town where not only can a ditch digger have a beer with a guy who makes $200,000 a year . And the ditch digger might even buy the wealthier guy a beer. Karl Marx would hate us , if he was alive today.But to hell with “Class Warfare” .
This is not just a matter of a neighborhood being diverse just for the sake of being diverse.It also makes sense economicly. I paid an accountant who lives in the neighborhood to do my taxes. Meanwhile if someone does a home improvement project in the neighborhood ,they know where to find me.it is mutally benificial.
This is how neighborhoods should be. Instead of useing strangers in the yellow pages ,people should interact economicly with their neighbors and keep the money in the community.
Neighborhoods should be living organisms , not just a collection of houses.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:50 am
My mistake. I read 2.07 million as 2.70 million.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I’m right with ya, Pete!