http://www. nytimes.com/2013/11/12/us/blighte-cities-prefer-razing-to-rebuilding.html?_r=0
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Blighted Baltimore
npr.org |
Hello Everyone:
As American cities across the Northeast and Midwest struggling to regain their footing, a new and somewhat disturbing trend has emerged, cities such as Baltimore, Maryland preferring demolition to rebuilding blighted areas. I say disturbing because each demolished home represents another loss in the affordable housing stock. It light of the fact that urban homelessness is expected to rise in the coming year, this trend is, indeed, very disturbing. However, as Timothy Williams reports in his article "Blighted Cities Prefer Razing to Rebuilding," for the
New York Times, cities such as Baltimore and Detroit have lost chunks of their populations and have turned to bulldozing whole city blocks as their key to salvation. Why is this happening? Despite the well-publicized love by young professionals of once struggling parts of New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, for many cities, demolition has become a form of creative urban planning.
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Blighted neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio
blogs.cleveland.com |
"It is not the house itself that has value, it is the land the house stands on," says Sandra Pianalto, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. "This led us to the counterintuitive concept that the best policy to stabilize neighborhoods may not always be rehabilitation. It may be demolition." Yours truly agrees because it's not always possible or practical to rehabilitate a building. By the same token, it may not be not be cost-effective to take down a building. Large-scale demolition is well-known in Detroit, but it is also going on Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and other cities at a cost of more than $250 million. Civic officials are tearing down ten of thousands of abandoned buildings, most are habitable, in an effort to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight, and increase environmental sustainability.
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Abandoned neighborhood in Detroit
agnostica.com |
A recent Brookings Institute study reported that between 2000 and 2010 the number of vacant housing units increased by 4.5 million (44%). In addition, a report by the University of California, Berkeley determined that in the past fifteen years, 130 cities, most with relatively small populations, have dissolved themselves, more than half the total ever documented in the United States. These grim findings are, partly, the result of how ongoing challenges former manufacturing centers, such as Detroit and Cleveland, have fundamentally altered the discipline of urban planning which has traditionally been based on growth and expansion. Presently, it's about divestment patterns that determine which depopulated neighborhoods are worth saving and what should be taken down. Other determinants includes economic activity, transportation options, infrastructure, population density, where the residents might be best relocated. Another solution dealing with vacant land is returning abandoned urban areas to forests and meadows. Relocating residents is always problematic because people establish roots in a community. Sometimes these roots go back decades and asking people to sever long-times ties with a community is like asking someone to cut off a limb.
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Blighted neighborhood in Buffalo, NY
buffalo.ynn.com |
"It's like a whole new field," says Margaret DDDewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of MIchigan, who helped plan a land bank in Detroit to oversee the city's vacant properties. In total, more than half of country's twenty largest cities lost at least one-third of their populations. Since 2000, a number of cities: Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Buffalo, have lost 10% of their population; Cleveland lost more than 17% of its population. Detroit, which recently had its bankruptcy approved in federal court, heighten depopulation anxieties in other postindustrial cities.
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Demolishing a blighted neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio
wlwt.com |
"In the past, cities would look at buildings individually, determine there was a problem, tear them down and quickly find another use for the land," says Justin B. Hollander urban planning professor at Tufts University. "Now they're looking at the DNA of the city and saying, 'There are just too many structures for the population we have.'" Case in point, Cleveland, whose population shrunk by 80,000 people during the last ten years to 395,000, spent $50 million in the past six years to raze houses, which cost $10,000 to demolish, when compared to the $270,000 it cost annually to maintain. As I've previously said, sometimes it's more cost-effective to take a building than maintain it.
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Demolished building in Pittsburgh, PA
dailybail.com |
Since 2000, some Cleveland neighborhoods in have lost up to two-thirds of their residents. the up side of all this doom and gloom is that some of the vacant lots are home to more than 200 community gardens and farms, zones for urban farms that allow people to keep
real pigs,
real sheep, and
real goats. This reminds of a former neighbor that used to keep chickens in the back yard. I kept thinking those chickens would look better on a plate. Don't hate me, please. I digress. A vineyard has even been planted. Two miles northwest of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, which has at least 6,000 vacant lots, is an uninhabited deciduous forest where there once was a sprawling 74-acre housing development before the city razed it because too few people lived there. Another sort of silver lining is the city of Philadelphia, which has 40,000 abandoned lots, has promoted the benefits of low-density living by allowing people in mostly vacant neighborhoods to spread out to the next lot. The city has been looking at a plan to sell $500 leases to urban farmers. One example, Greensgrow farm, which was built on a former Superfund site, sold $1 million in produce in 2012. Urban farms have potential as a solution to the hunger issue currently plaguing our cities by growing produce for sale at farmer's markets or through co-operatives.
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Blight in St. Louis, Missouri
theatlanticcities.com |
Back in Baltimore, the city has begun to turn over vacant lots to hobby farmers. For example, Boone Street Farm, hemmed in by abandoned row houses on a slender eighth of an acre, is finishing its third growing season of tomatoes, spinach, sweet potatoes, and other produce in the Midway neighborhood. The crops are sold to restaurants, farmer's markets, and delivers $10 boxes of crops weekly to members of its community supported agricultural program. (Yeah!) However, as Baltimore continues to bulldoze thousands of vacant houses, the city and other cities in similar situations, continue to seek new people.
"I'm trying to grow the city, not get smaller," says Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in reference to the idea that the city could get by with a population of 500,000-600,000 people. "I"m not the first to say that a city that's not growing is dying," continued Mayor Rawlings-Blake. The Mayor has a goal of attracting 10,000 new families to the city in the next years and is reaching out to immigrants, the gay and lesbian communities (Maryland does allow same gender marriage), and Orthodox Jews who might be interested in buying newly refurbished three-story row houses that the city is selling for as low as $100,000. Personally speaking, I've visited the city a few times and never understood why it hasn't caught on like it should've. It has a lot to offer in terms of social, economic, and cultural institutions. The cost of living isn't as high as other parts of Mid-Atlantic region. It's a rather nice city for families and singles.
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Youngstown, Ohio
city-data.com |
Youngstown, Ohio is one city that taking an different approach to dealing with the fact that urban population shrinkage does not mean the other problems go away. Once a bustling steel-town, Youngstown had a onetime population of 170,000, now down to 66,000 and is seeking to head off total collapse by tearing down thousands of abandoned houses, 3,000 thus far and averaging ten per week. However, while the city had planned on a stable population of about 80,000, more than 1,000 people move away each year, leaving behind an additional 130 vacant homes in addition to the 22,000 empty properties and structures. Four thousands of these homes are in perilous conditions but demolition costs $9,000 and the city has yet to decide whether or not to close the nearly abandoned neighborhoods to try to save money. "It's almost anti-American to say our city is shrinking," says Heather McMahon, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, a Youngstown community group. "But if we're going to survive as a city and not go bankrupt like Detroit...we're going to have to figure out something," adds Ms. McMahon.
Just what something is needs to take a multi-pronged approach: attracting new business, government investment, community activism, and so forth. Also, that something has to be tailored to the city. Just because a plan works in Baltimore doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work in Youngstown. Each city is different and has different needs. In the meantime, a solution still needs to be found.
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