'US Cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive'

[Storebought]

From the Telegraph

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.

 --SNIP--

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – 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.

[Now We Are Free]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Knock down really dilapidated areas, try to rehabilitate some.  Convert some newly razed areas into nature preserves or parks and sell the rest of the land, offering incentives to open businesses or build housing there.

If you create lots of parks within a city like that, people will eventually move in.

Overall, with the population growth in the U.S. and the rising price of oil, people will need to cluster together more. 

Also, this will only need to happen in a few select cities like Flint or Detroit where the population loss has been so dramatic.

Of course many cities have much smaller populations than they did 60 years ago, but that is mostly due to the simple fact that fewer people occupy any one house now than they did back then.  The number of housing units in Minneapolis has nearly doubled since 1950, yet the population has fallen from 520,000 to 380,000.

But this brings up the bigger question:  How do we deal with a shrinking population?  Do we just raze the houses of the recently deceased that have no young people to move into, leaving a hodgepodge of houses with communities scattered over large distances with empty lots all over?

Do we try to consolidate people?

Doing nothing will certainly hurt us... just look at the cities mentioned above.

[memphis]

If you want to be all authoritarian about it, moat major cities could use some bulldozing. Not practical, obviously. And to be perfectly honest, I don't want a lot of people in those neighborhoods moving into mine.

[12th Doctor]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

^^^^^

No seriously, I agree.  This is bullsh**t.  Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.

[Willy Woz]

I really wouldn't miss New York if they ever decided to tear it down. However, I think they should destroy suburbs as well and move eveybody back into the country. Believe me, I have always hated big cities.

[Verily]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

^^^^^

No seriously, I agree.  This is bullsh**t.  Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.

This isn't about destroying the city center of Flint. Flint hardly even has a city center. This is about managed decline, removing previously developed areas that are simply abandoned today. That's not an issue in most cities, but cities which have contracted dramatically and no longer serve an economic purpose (and so will not grow again) should be encouraged to do things like this.

Cities die. Most cities don't, but some cities do. Their reasons for existing disappear, and they have to be allowed to contract or disappear along with those reasons. Some major, major cities of the past are entirely gone now. The US is young and has for a long time had a growing economy everywhere in the country. But that's not true any more; the glory days of some US cities are now passed. And we have to help them decline with grace rather than become abandoned cesspools.

[opebo]

I really wouldn't miss New York if they ever decided to tear it down. However, I think they should destroy suburbs as well and move eveybody back into the country. Believe me, I have always hated big cities.

Hah hah!  Thank you Pol Pot!

[12th Doctor]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

^^^^^

No seriously, I agree.  This is bullsh**t.  Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.

This isn't about destroying the city center of Flint. Flint hardly even has a city center. This is about managed decline, removing previously developed areas that are simply abandoned today. That's not an issue in most cities, but cities which have contracted dramatically and no longer serve an economic purpose (and so will not grow again) should be encouraged to do things like this.

Cities die. Most cities don't, but some cities do. Their reasons for existing disappear, and they have to be allowed to contract or disappear along with those reasons. Some major, major cities of the past are entirely gone now. The US is young and has for a long time had a growing economy everywhere in the country. But that's not true any more; the glory days of some US cities are now passed. And we have to help them decline with grace rather than become abandoned cesspools.

Yes, but Flint has considerable suburbs... ask Michael Moore about that.  What they ought to be doing is coming up with ways to attract people back into the central city.  And yes, I am aware of how bad things are in Flint, and the some structures are going to have to go regardless.

However, this is the same mentality that led to mass suburbanization to begin with.  "Tear them down.  They're just slums.  We need space to build another massive single floor office complex, urban mall, and a super highway."

This is about cities having to continually give ground to people in the suburbs who, by in all rights, really shouldn't be living there anyway.  And I am not saying that because I don't like suburbs on some kind of principle.  Government money created the suburbs.  Government money made it so that people could work in the cities without having to live there.  Government money destroyed whole neighborhood and put up housing projects in their places, making the central city an even less attractive place to live.  And now people in the suburbs want to government to fix all the problems that they created for themselves by moving out to suburbia, while they bitch about the cities getting a dime.

It's a joke.

[12th Doctor]

I really wouldn't miss New York if they ever decided to tear it down. However, I think they should destroy suburbs as well and move eveybody back into the country. Believe me, I have always hated big cities.

Hah hah!  Thank you Pol Pot!

When Opebo and I can laugh together you know its a special moment.

[Verily]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

^^^^^

No seriously, I agree.  This is bullsh**t.  Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.

This isn't about destroying the city center of Flint. Flint hardly even has a city center. This is about managed decline, removing previously developed areas that are simply abandoned today. That's not an issue in most cities, but cities which have contracted dramatically and no longer serve an economic purpose (and so will not grow again) should be encouraged to do things like this.

Cities die. Most cities don't, but some cities do. Their reasons for existing disappear, and they have to be allowed to contract or disappear along with those reasons. Some major, major cities of the past are entirely gone now. The US is young and has for a long time had a growing economy everywhere in the country. But that's not true any more; the glory days of some US cities are now passed. And we have to help them decline with grace rather than become abandoned cesspools.

Yes, but Flint has considerable suburbs... ask Michael Moore about that.  What they ought to be doing is coming up with ways to attract people back into the central city.  And yes, I am aware of how bad things are in Flint, and the some structures are going to have to go regardless.

However, this is the same mentality that led to mass suburbanization to begin with.  "Tear them down.  They're just slums.  We need space to build another massive single floor office complex, urban mall, and a super highway."

No; if the city disappears, the suburbs disappear, too. There is no place for the suburbs without a central city. You're deliberating misreading this as an anti-urban policy; it's not. It's about reinventing what were once relatively large cities as medium-sized towns. You can't do that with the ruins of a big city sitting around you. Like I said, there is nothing that will attract people back to Flint. Flint no longer has an economic purpose as a city of substantial size, and you can't just create a purpose out of thin air, not when there are hundreds of similarly sized cities that actually have purposes out there attracting the same people Flint would be competing for. Flint has to downsize, and the only way to do that is by bulldozing.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Look, I hate suburban sprawl. But that's not what this about. At all.

Also, I strongly disagree with you about the government destroying cities. It was certainly the case that the Interstate System laid the foundation for suburban sprawl, but that wasn't the intent, and the Interstates have good things going for them, too.

[12th Doctor]

I actually just had a look at the population figures.  Flint seems to have lost about 40% of its population since 1970.  While not insignificant, by a long shot, that is actually not unusual for a city in the industrial Midwest, and is fewer people, percentage wise, than the City of Pittsburgh has lost.  While recovery would be difficult, it would not be impossible.

"Urban Renewal" is bad enough for a city.  If they went through and demolished whole neighborhoods while putting nothing int their place, it would be devastating, and Flint would never recover.  The criminal element in the city would just use the "natural space" to their advantage, as they did when Pittsburgh tore down the Hill District because it was "too run down" and "needed to be opened up".  The only thing scarier than walking a block where you know there is crime is walking the same block if you know no one at all lives there.  Criminals thrive off of that.

This would also only help fuel the car culture of suburbanites, since large open stretches of road mean speeding cars, which is only worse for pedestrians.  Believe it or not, congestion is good for a city, because it creates a positive atmosphere for pedestrians, which helps out in terms of neighborhood formation.  It also means more people just give up and say "lets go back to the city, there are some nice things there anyway" which is happening more and more these days.

[12th Doctor]

Pro-suburb propaganda garbage.

^^^^^

No seriously, I agree.  This is bullsh**t.  Demolishing the central city to cater to the needs of suburbanites really worked wonders the first time.

This isn't about destroying the city center of Flint. Flint hardly even has a city center. This is about managed decline, removing previously developed areas that are simply abandoned today. That's not an issue in most cities, but cities which have contracted dramatically and no longer serve an economic purpose (and so will not grow again) should be encouraged to do things like this.

Cities die. Most cities don't, but some cities do. Their reasons for existing disappear, and they have to be allowed to contract or disappear along with those reasons. Some major, major cities of the past are entirely gone now. The US is young and has for a long time had a growing economy everywhere in the country. But that's not true any more; the glory days of some US cities are now passed. And we have to help them decline with grace rather than become abandoned cesspools.

Yes, but Flint has considerable suburbs... ask Michael Moore about that.  What they ought to be doing is coming up with ways to attract people back into the central city.  And yes, I am aware of how bad things are in Flint, and the some structures are going to have to go regardless.

However, this is the same mentality that led to mass suburbanization to begin with.  "Tear them down.  They're just slums.  We need space to build another massive single floor office complex, urban mall, and a super highway."

No; if the city disappears, the suburbs disappear, too. There is no place for the suburbs without a central city. You're deliberating misreading this as an anti-urban policy; it's not. It's about reinventing what were once relatively large cities as medium-sized towns. You can't do that with the ruins of a big city sitting around you. Like I said, there is nothing that will attract people back to Flint. Flint no longer has an economic purpose as a city of substantial size, and you can't just create a purpose out of thin air, not when there are hundreds of similarly sized cities that actually have purposes out there attracting the same people Flint would be competing for. Flint has to downsize, and the only way to do that is by bulldozing.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Look, I hate suburban sprawl. But that's not what this about. At all.

Also, I strongly disagree with you about the government destroying cities. It was certainly the case that the Interstate System laid the foundation for suburban sprawl, but that wasn't the intent, and the Interstates have good things going for them, too.

I addressed your other points in my other post, but:

#1 If you already agree that sprawl is disgusting then name one good aspect about the interstate highway system that was not already being achieved by other means, such as trains, street cars, etc.

#2 I can name a huge list of things that the Federal government did to destroy the cities.  First, the FHA was created for the explicit purpose of "uncrowding" the cities.  After the war, they gave out an artificially cheap, government subsidized loan to almost anyone who wanted one, and then created videos promoting suburbia as this wonderful haven, compared to the dingy and crime riding cities, thus promoting an image of urban life as something negative.  Of course, they never cracked down on the practice of "Red Lining" which all but completely assured that they only people left in the cities would be poor, and probably colored (that definition at the time applying to a large variety of people, some of who we would now consider White).

Then came the interstates, which hadn't started out as something really intended to expand sprawl and depopulate the cities, but that was the effect, and through the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's the interstates were expanded around the cities in loops and access lines, specifically intended to further facilitate urban exodus.

Then came "Urban Renewal"... also known to those who were at the blunt end of it as Negro Removal.  The federal government funded projects the tore down thriving neighborhoods in order to make way for more highways, more more "civic improvements" which were mostly targeted to try to bring people who had left for the burbs back into the cities to do something more than just work.  Of course, it was an utter failure, because the department stores and neighborhoods they tore down were, for many, the primary reason for coming back.  The "urban malls" that were built all over places like Pittsburgh were no better than the suburban malls, and usually attracted more crime than customers.

The people who were being relocated weren't moved into new, functioning neighborhoods, but instead cheaply built housing projects that were created for the sole purpose of building enclaves where all the poverty would be in one place, stacked upon more poverty.

The only effect this all had was to make the cities more unpleasant.  More crime ridden.  More black.  More financially strapped.  And more beholden to the federal government for help.

Repeat....

And all of this was funded by the government, every step of the way.

[12th Doctor]

A perfect example of one of these said "civic improvements" is the soon to be mercifully torn down "Mellon Arena" which was originally called the "Pittsburgh Civic Center".  First off, the whole thing was a joke, in and of itself, because the original purpose for the center was to serve as a theater for opera... I kid you not.

But when they originally built it, knocking down some 200 structures in the process and displacing almost 10,000 people, mostly black, with this one act alone (there was way more to come for The Hill), they claimed that the point was to create this great civic acropolis for the city, that would draw people in and give them a reason to come Downtown and meet in this great community experience.  So... to facilitate this, they devastated the surrounding neighborhood, in the process, disconnecting Downtown from the rest of the city, surrounded the entire thing with superhighways, making downtown no longer accessible by the traditional streets (either to drive, take public transit, or walk), and most easily accessible for those who didn't live in the city at all, and topped all that off by surrounding the thing with parking lots, totally isolating it from anything else.

Brilliant.

[12th Doctor]

I guess I never directly addressed your point...

Was it the government intention to destroy the cities.  No, I don't believe so.  I think that many had the best intentions in mind when they endorsed policies to depopulate the cities, thinking it would never go that far.  I think alot of people had good intentions in mind when they leveled neighborhoods they though to be slums in an effort to keep people having to come back to the cities.  I even believe that many of them probably had good intentions when they built the new highrises, in the hopes of making cities a good place for poor people to live.

But I also have to wonder what in the Hell these people were thinking, that made them believe that any of this would come out well, and I have wonder at the motives of many others.

And it is undeniable that while the government did not intentionally go out to undermine urban areas, they played a very active goal in the acceleration of that end.

[Padfoot]

I actually think this is a good policy as long as anyone still living or operating a business in the "to be razed" area is given a reasonable opportunity to move somewhere else in the city.  Youngstown, Ohio is another example of a city implementing this policy and thus far it seems to be working pretty well for them.  The city saves money on utilities, road maintenance, and other expenses while simultaneously removing large swaths of blighted and/or abandoned properties.  This isn't about demolishing individual buildings one by one.  Its about tearing down large areas of the outer reaches of the city and relocating the few remaining people and business in that area closer to the city core.  Essentially they're just creating large unofficial nature parks along the city's outer borders.

For those crying about how this only encourages sprawl I invite you to take a look at an aerial map of Genesee County.  There are still vast tracts of rural landscape surrounding Flint.   There isn't a massive ring of suburban sprawl surrounding this city.  Plus the county's population as a whole is on the decline so its not as if the people are moving out of Flint and into neighboring cities and towns.

What the leaders of Flint have realized is that people are leaving because the jobs are gone and they aren't coming back in the foreseeable future.  So rather than taking a huge risk with money they don't have trying to lure the jobs and people back, they're simply accepting for the time being that their city is becoming smaller.  And with that smaller city in mind, they've begun tearing down sections of the city that have been mostly abandoned.  I really don't see what the harm is here.

[opebo]

This would not actually be a bad idea if they would raze the buildings while the people were still in them.

Its funny, that's the same thing I say about the Hamptons, Palm Beach, etc...

[Ban my account ffs!]

I have to say I agree with Soulty on this and he makes good points.  We already tried razing large parts of cities back in the 60s and 70s and even 80s in some places and it was devastating.

Like I said in my previous post, you need to really look at it on a case by case basis.  If, for example, there is a neighborhood that is largely abandoned that already abuts a natural area, then by all means, tear it down and expand the natural area.

If we invest in our declining cities by expanding police presence while also expanding public transit (especially rail transit... having tracks in the ground really has a way of attracting business compared to a bus, which could always change routes and move to a different street) and using tax incentives and other programs to attract businesses while focusing on mixed income housing developments, it will make the city vibrant again.

Older cities that do this stuff are doing a lot better than those that don't.

The reason I oppose just random razing of vast parts of cities, is because it is just another attempt at doing what we tried to do 50 years ago.  We razed vast portions of our central cities to put in surface parking for all the cars that were driving in from the suburbs.  The 'burbs became desolate during the working day, and at 5pm, the central business districts were deserted.  Freeways were dug through, dissecting neighborhoods and leading to socioeconomic isolation, which eventually led to higher crime.

Many cities started creating incentives and helping fund entertainment venues and mixed income housing in their downtown areas to make the central city vibrant again.  From there, they can branch out into the older neighborhoods around the central part of the city and work their way out.  The inner suburbs can also work with the central city to redevelop older areas.  This creates a viable, attractive, and desirable place to live.

Since the U.S. still has natural population growth, it doesn't take away from somewhere else, but it just slows the massive sprawl going on further and further out.  You are re-densifying cities so to say.

[12th Doctor]

BTW... this article quotes the Brookings Institute Study.  I have read that study, and it actually recommends the exact opposite of what they suggest, it suggests.  No surprise coming from the British media, since it doesn't require things like, what do you call them?  Sources.

The study talked about the rampant increase of urban footprint vs the downsize of population is what this study laments.  In otherwords, it is opposing sprawl, not advocating bulldozing sections of the Central City.

I had to read this study for a report I did in a class last semester.  Surprised I didn't notice this until something about it appeared in the Post-Gazette the other day.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09174/979180-28.stm

[Ban my account ffs!]

I think we could more easily redevelop abandoned areas of cities and dismantle the outer exurbs, and make the neighborhoods desirable by having dense housing with large public green spaces.

With denser development, city services are much more efficient since you ahve fewer miles of streets to pave for more people and mass transit becomes a lot more viable.

Let the exurbs turn back into natural habitat or farmland.

[12th Doctor]

I think we could more easily redevelop abandoned areas of cities and dismantle the outer exurbs, and make the neighborhoods desirable by having dense housing with large public green spaces.

With denser development, city services are much more efficient since you ahve fewer miles of streets to pave for more people and mass transit becomes a lot more viable.

Let the exurbs turn back into natural habitat or farmland.

I always get a good laugh when people in the suburbs/rural areas complain that we spend too much (or anything at all) on public transit funding.  After all, its an expense they will never get anything out of (which itself isn't true, but....).  Nevermind that the amount of money spent on maintaining the vast string of highly expensive roads that are required to maintain suburbia.

[12th Doctor]

Or the vast amount of money that we spend granting tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies, and then crafting a foreign policy that is heavily based around protecting our oil interests.

[ilikeverin]

Soulty, I don't think Flint's project is about tearing out entire sections of the city; the planners seem to be going on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood, street-to-street basis.  There are entire streets in the city that are abandoned except for a house or two (and that house or two has a family that might not necessarily want to live there ).

Anyway, this is definitely a good idea for Flint.