Plan B Forum

Cities have emerged, grown, shrunk and sometimes disappeared entirely. Should we care? Is is just a process of natural selection where the places it makes sense to have a large population center change over time as wagons are replaced by canals which are replaced by trains which are replaced by trucks and each change alters the logic of the movement of goods?

Detroit has famously been declining for 50 years.

http://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.c ... ities.html

"Deborah Popper on "Subtracted Cities"
She writes about how shrinking cities can take control of their destinies, while being realistic about what those destinies imply:


Detroit stands as the ultimate expression of industrial depopulation. The Motor City offers traffic-free streets, burned-out skyscrapers, open-prairie neighborhoods, nesting pheasants, an ornate-trashed former railroad station, vast closed factories, and signs urging "Fists, Not Guns." A third of its 139 square miles lie vacant. In the 2010 census it lost a national-record-setting quarter of the people it had at the millennium: a huge dip not just to its people, but to anxious potential private- and public-sector investors.

Is Detroit an epic outlier, a spectacular aberration or is it a fractured finger pointing at a horrific future for other large shrinking cities? Cleveland lost 17 percent of its population in the census, Birmingham 13 percent, Buffalo 11 percent, and the special case of post-Katrina New Orleans 29 percent. The losses in such places and smaller ones like Braddock, Penn.; Cairo, Ill.; or Flint, Mich., go well beyond population. In every recent decade, houses, businesses, jobs, schools, entire neighborhoods -- and hope -- keep getting removed.

The subtractions have occurred without plan, intention or control of any sort and so pose daunting challenges. In contrast, population growth or stability is much more manageable and politically palatable. Subtraction is haphazard, volatile, unexpected, risky. No American city plan, zoning law or environmental regulation anticipates it. In principle, a city can buy a deserted house, store or factory and return it to use. Yet which use? If the city cannot find or decide on one, how long should the property stay idle before the city razes it? How prevalent must abandonment become before it demands systematic neighborhood or citywide solutions instead of lot-by-lot ones?

Subtracted cities can rely on no standard approaches. Such places have struggled for at least two generations, since the peak of the postwar consumer boom. Thousands of neighborhoods in hundreds of cities have lost their grip on the American dream. As a nation, we have little idea how to respond. The frustratingly slow national economic recovery only makes conditions worse by suggesting that they may become permanent. ... (see link) "

yrs,
rubato

Detroit is a city of single family homes therefore it is very susceptible to the blight of population decline.

Most cities are filled with single family homes.

If on the other hand you are talking about single parent families...

Not really Apartments and condos (High rise and otherwise) Are usually much more prevalent.

OK, I think that's gonna be fairly hard to substantiate, but I'll let ya prove I'm wrong...

Check square footage Vs. population

it's yer assertion...

nesting pheasants,

Sounds like time to open a hunting season.

And I don't know about Detriot (never been there) but from starting in Queens through Brooklyn and into Manhattan (aka NY City) there are many multiple family dwellings, be it highrise apartments (co-op city) to three story brownstones where owners are on one or two floors and rent out the rest.

My guess is it depends on where the city is located; many northeast (NYC, Boston, Newark, Philadelphia) cities have large proportion of multifamily dwellings (often converted from dwellings which were previously larger single family homes--e.g. I gew up in a Brooklyn brownstone which was originally a single family but converted to a 3 family with an apartment on each floor), while some larger southern cities (Atlanta and New Orleans, e.g.) have many single family dwellings. I think the same is true for Dallas and Houston, Albequerque, Santa Fe, Phoenix, San Diego, and Las Vegas (not sure about LA, but San Francisco has a number of single family dwellings--of course not a lot of high rise development in California). Maybe someone else can comment about midwestern cities?

I imagine any city that loses over half of its population (from over 1.8 million in 1950 to less than 800,000 in 2010 in the case of Detroit) is going to look "blighted" whether most people live in single-family homes or apartments. Buffalo looks blighted for the same reason (population decline from over 500,000 in 1950 to 260,000 today).

Detroit's problem stems from the decline of the US auto industry and/or it's decentralization.

No jobs,it's time to move.

It doesn't matter if you live in a high rise or a ranch style...

It makes a huge difference in moving on when you have huge areas to provide city services that only have a few residents.

This article is a little dated. It does lend credence to what you say. I notice it was from the free press, so you may have already seen it.

I must say I consider you a well reasoned and intelligent person. I wasn't going to accept yer "I said so" on this, however I'm kinda disappointed that I had to look up the information to prove myself wrong.

I would say as the article pointed out, if Detroit would have been any different than it was/is it might very well never have existed at all...

I'm not always into doing research and turn to It once my power reasoning fails.

A truism in military history is that the most difficult thing to do is to retreat under fire successfully. Based on Detroit and the other examples perhaps it is also true for similar reasons to manage a city undergoing a continual population decline, shrinking revenue base.

I doubt that the prevalence of single-family homes makes a difference either way. It just changes the details. It is easier in some, you can bulldoze empty houses and remove the harms of derelict housing easier than you can bulldoze half-empty apartment houses.

yrs,
rubato

keld feldspar wrote:Detroit's problem stems from the decline of the US auto industry and/or it's decentralization.

No jobs,it's time to move.

It doesn't matter if you live in a high rise or a ranch style...

That pretty much nails it. We had/have the same problem here in Camden, where population has declined about 40% since its peak in the '50s. Close to 15% of what remains of the city's housing units are now vacant (that doesn't count vacant properties that are uninhabitable or have been demolished). There were three major industrial employers (RCA, New York Ship and Campbell's Soup) where virtually everyone worked, and although Campbell's still maintains executive offices in the city, the manufacturing jobs are long gone. Now the three top employers are government, healthcare and education (two state universities have expanded their campuses) but since everyone has cars these days, no one is actually moving back into the city. With a collapsing infrastructure, substandard schools, no supermarkets or any other retail beyond neighborhood bodegas, there is little to lure anyone in as residents. And without a residential base capable of paying property taxes and sustaining public services, the city will continue to deteriorate until it becomes a few blocks of office/institutional buildings surrounded by a ghost town.

you forget about the costs to maintaining services to sparsely populated decentralied areas (Water, sewage, police, snow removal...) not to mention the cost in scale it's far cheaper to close and demolish one apartment buliding than hundres of single family homes not to mention what to do with resultant vacant property.

In Detroit The mayor is trying to get permission to cut off city services to sparsely populated areas where residents refuse relocation. I hope it works.

Can one unincorporate incorporated city bounderies?

Especially if one is paying taxes for services to that municipality...

This can't help?

DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

WWJ Newsradio 950 spoke with the Fund’s Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, who explained exactly what this means.

“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said.

“I don’t really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that’s another question,” Tyler-Ruiz said.

Some of the Detroit suburbs also have high numbers of functionally illiterate: 34 percent in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield.

“For other major urban areas, we are a little bit on the high side… We compare, slightly higher, to Washington D.C.’s urban population, in certain ZIP codes in Washington D.C. and in Cleveland,” she said.

Tyler-Ruiz said only 10 percent of those who can’t read have gotten any help to resolve it.

The report will be used to provide better training for local workers


http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/ ... cant-read/