Should Cities Shrink To Cope With Blight?

Every city has areas with vacant houses. You can call it a sign of the economic times we live in. One in nine houses in the U.S. is unoccupied. Over 1.2 million homes went into foreclosure, according to an estimate by Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow, Alan Mallach. One way to deal with blighted neighborhoods is to shrink them. In Flint, Michigan, Dan Kildee, Genesee County Land Bank Chairman and the county treasurer, is in favor of bulldozing entire neighborhoods, up to 40 percent of the area, and turning them into green spaces. Flint’s population dropped from almost 200,000 in the 1960s to about 120,000 in 2003. A 2007 government study predicts Flint’s population will shrink 10 percent by 2035.

“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,” Kildee said. “Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life. We need to control it instead of letting it control us. There’s a gravitational pull that we’re a part of and it’s toward a smaller city.”

Kildee believes the shrinking cities strategy is “an acknowledgment that we’ve lost half our population.” According to him, Flint’s political leaders need to “acknowledge that maybe we’re just not going to grow. This is a radical experiment in that it’s accepting that it’s okay to be smaller — and to be better.” There is a backlash against shrinking Flint among residents. “Nobody wants to admit that — it’s in part tied up with this American ideology of growth being good,” said Jess Zimbabwe, executive director at the Urban Land Institute Rose Center.

Other U.S. cities are considering implementing the shrinking cities strategy. “Shrinkage is moving from an idea to a fact,” said Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s finally the insight that some cities just don’t have a choice.”

In Pittsburgh, over 100 demolished or vacant lots have been turned into urban farms and community gardens through a program called Green Up Pittsburgh. “It’s one thing to change one corner, but if you can actually create a green corridor and a green pathway throughout the entire neighborhood, the impact is much greater,” said Kim Graziani, the city’s director of neighborhood initiatives.

Shrinking a city is not the only way to deal with urban blight. A once blighted neighborhood in Louisville called Phoenix Hill is now a “model of urban renewal,” as MSNBC put it. Some of the boarded up houses in the neighborhood were renovated. New houses were built. A park and community garden were added to Phoenix Hill. “We were told that you couldn’t build new housing inside the old city of Louisville,” said resident David Brown Kinloch, a renewable energy developer. “We proved that not only could you do it, if you made them affordable … they’d sell right away. And they did.”

5 Comments