US Cities May Have to Shrink to Survive

Flint, MI hosts vast swaths of abandoned properties that may be bulldozed.

The U.S. government is considering replicating a pioneering de-urbanization effort in Flint, one of the poorest U.S. cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians in Flint believe the city must shrink by as much as 40%, concentrating the diminishing population and local services into a more viable area.

Flint is sixty miles north of Detroit and was the original home of General Motors, which once employed 79,000 local people. Today GM employs about 8,000, and unemployment is now approaching 20%. The total population has declined to about 110,000 – almost 50% of what it once was. The exodus – especially of young people – along with the consequent collapse in property prices, has entire sections of the city almost completely abandoned.

After sharing his strategy with Barack Obama during the election campaign, Dan Kildee, – treasurer of Genesee County (which includes Flint) – has now been approached by the U.S. government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learned 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 coffers. Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East, and they include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis. In Detroit there are already plans to split the city into small urban centers separated by countryside.

Mr Kildee, who has lived in Flint almost all his life, says he first had to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that big is good, that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful, while shrinking indicates failure.

The local authority in Flint has restored the city’s formerly deserted center but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas. Mr Kildee estimates that another 3,000 need to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a state law passed a few years ago which allows local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply in order to knock them down or sell them to owners who will occupy them. Kildee says choosing which areas to knock down will be a sensitive issue but many of them are already obvious and no one will be forced to move. According to Kildee, the city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people currently living in neighborhoods it wants to demolish.

Many organizations have been looking at the issue of shrinking cities. Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective program at the University of California, Berkeley, says there is “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America. Richard Register, founder of EcoCity Builders, makes the case that shrinking our cities will be necessary to halt global climate change and wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

Read more: US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
(Telegraph, 6.12.09)