America's Shrinking Cities
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-28/americas-shrinking-cities
New census results show Detroit has lost twenty-five percent of its population over the last decade. It's one of many cities adjusting to fewer residents. Diane and her guests discuss the reasons for the loss in population and the transitioning options for America's shrinking cities.
Guests
Dante Chinni
Director of the Jefferson Institute's Patchwork Nation project and online correspondent for the PBS NewsHour; author of "Our Patchwork Nation."
Justin Hollander
assistant professor of Urban Planning at Tufts University in Massachusetts, author of "Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation and Urban Planning in the American Sunbelt."
Terry Schwarz
director of Kent State University's Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and CUDC's Shrinking Cities Institute.
Robert Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau
![Image of Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cgtS58eIL._SL75_.jpg "Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America")
Comments
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The significance of this hollowing out phenomenon is much greater when combined with the reverse African-American migration to the South, the failure to renew infrastructure, the failure to build mass transportation, the failure to overhaul energy production, the failure of the United States to manage it's food production rationally, the failure to make public education accessible and relevant, and the failure to provide humanely apportioned employment at a living wage. You can point to the City as an institution but any substantive analysis reveals that corporate capitalism has failed for the majority of our citizens even as our government has been hijacked by oligarchical financial scammers.
Grocery prices and gas prices are rising unacknowledged by government statistics at a time when most American families are in debt up to their necks and indulging in creative credit.
Nothing has changed from before the Great Meltdown of 2008 except that the next tsunami of fraud will be bigger under a government even less inclined to protect the typical citizen.
Famine is creeping up on us. China cannot feed itself even after massive soybean imports from the Western Hemisphere. The riots in North Africa and the Middle East are food riots to a greater extent than admitted in our main stream media. And like oil, the corn, soybeans and rice are not ours just because they are grown on corporate farms within US borders. The canned food from China and the produce from South America will certainly not be ours. When you are hungry the sadists in power will blame you for "making the wrong choices", not purchasing enough education products and not networking with victorious profiteering oligarchs. We have let the civic commons slip away in the same sense as in the 18th century Enclosure Movement. Empty northern cities have few possibilities for gainful employment because we were taught to value private ownership above community sustainability.
Could you ask Ms. Schwarz: Is Akron, OH a rebuttal to the idea that relatively educated and innovative cities will always do better in the long term regardless of local industries?
The decline of Detroit is due in no small part to the pervasive corruption of the previous administrations. Remaking itself under a non corrupt government has only just begun - however, it will also require hard cost cutting measures by governments and citizens will have to accept these measures and make concerted individual efforts to improve cities on their own. There are no more hand outs available - time for people to make changes for themselves. It may be the best thing that has happened to us.
I grew up in Michigan. I went to college in Detroit in the early 80's. It was common to hear the sound of gunshots at any hour of the day. My roommate was held up at gunpoint in the school parking lot. My boyfriend's apartment was burglarized twice in one year. Fortunately my friends weren't harmed.
I wanted to give Detroit a chance but I never felt safe living there and couldn't wait to leave the area as soon as I graduated. And I did leave.
I grew up in Michigan. I went to college in Detroit in the early 80's. It was common to hear the sound of gunshots at any hour of the day. My roommate was held up at gunpoint in the school parking lot. My boyfriend's apartment was burglarized twice in one year. Fortunately my friends weren't harmed.
I wanted to give Detroit a chance but I never felt safe living there and couldn't wait to leave the area as soon as I graduated. And I did leave.
I think some of your guest are speaking hypothetically about Detroit’s de-population. While there ARE still 700,000 people in Detroit, it was a city that once held 1.8 million in the 1950s.
Building on what a previous commenter said, if 40 of the city’s 140 square miles are vacant, that VACANT portion alone is about the size of San Francisco or Boston! Remember—all that vacant land used to have homes and neighborhoods, which have been destroyed and later leveled in the past 30 years.
An interesting exercise for your listeners would be to “visit” Detroit via Google Maps or Google earth. Zoom into some of those pastoral looking areas mere blocks from downtown and you seen the patchword of the neighborhoods that used to exist—grown over sidewalks and driveway cuts for houses that are no longer there.
I don’t have the answer either, but any city faced with that kind of attrition and all it entails _must_ take on the task of addressing what that means to the remaining population and should be encourage to engineer change, even if its hard or uncomfortable.
While teaching five years ago as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan's graduate architecture school, our studio looked, as many do, at Detroit and the overriding provocative question of "what can we do with Detroit?' As a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, I found Detroit to be shocking in its absence - of people - probably the largest "ghost town" I had or will ever see.
I've come to think of Detroit, over the years, as America's "NEWEST FRONTIER." The possibilities there are endless; especially in comparison to a small city where rent costs and taxes are astronomically high. Here, the possibility of opening a new small business is nearly impossible due to the extreme costs associated as well as the non-existance of available space. In Detroit, these possibilities are available.
Detroit will become much more attractive to small businesses when a few really provocative schools open so that the population can actually be attracted to a city. This will happen when a city such as Detroit can add a few great schools so a family can have faith that their children can be educated in a proper and hopefully an advant-garde manner and they as parents can take the risk of moving and operating in a city such as Detroit.
Moving from the suburbs to the city core appeals to more than just young folks. I'm 60 and contemplating my retirement lifestyle choices. Living where I can walk to nearby stores, entertainment, and restaurants apeals to me. The Cedar-Fairmount neighborhood in Cleveland is an example that appeals to me.
I used to live in Detroit metro and was living there during the Kwame Kilpatrick era. I was hopeful for turnaround when he was first elected. But over the next 8 yrs saw how hopelessly short-sighted the city council was in addition to Kwame's mismanagement. How do you turn around Detroit with a city council that seems to think blight and violence is the norm across the nation. They don't know any difference and just perpetuate the same problems over and over.
I have lived in 3 countries on three different continents, and the only country that makes it difficult to get from Point A to Point B is the USA! One couold argue that this is purely due to its large size; but in this day and Age of Technology, high speed trains and low emission busses that's a pure excuse.
And about Detroit, I couldn't wait to get out of there, the mass transportation system is hilarious, even Kenya has a better public transportation system than Detroit! Look at Grand Rapids and then Look At Detroit. There are lessons to be learnt.
I grew up in Michigan and had the good fortune to study many of these issues at James Madison College (Michigan State University). One thing that is not readily understood is the amount of control the automakers had on all aspects of public policy. For instance, sprawl. During the show, it was mentioned that other cities like Philadelphia had built a subway system/light rail system that they could now use to their advantage. The Big Three had absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in helping develop such a system in Detroit. On this issue, the unions agreed. When both the automakers and the unions agreed on something, it wouldn't matter what anyone else had to say. Politicians on both the local and state level were primarily interested in doing their bidding.
What the automakers approved of were HIGHWAYS, and Michigan prided itself on having the "best" highways in the country. Highways encouraged the car culture, which encouraged car ownership. Not to mention the fact that building highways provided lots of opportunity for graft and corruption, which only increased the popularity of it all.
Right now the Mayor of Detroit is tearing down abandoned houses in mile-wide swaths. Good beginning. It would be a GREAT chance to install that subway that was discussed, don't you think? If you wait until those areas are repopulated, it will cost much more and be much more difficult to achieve. The heart of downtown Detroit is still vibrant.
North Canton, Ohio -- once the home of the world's best-known vacuum cleaner -- is one of those prototypical one-industry towns experiencing major, ongoing distress in the absence of the company that made it what it was.
When I was growing up, people were proud to work for The Hoover Company, which paid its employees well and invested itself deeply in the community. They clamored to move into North Canton because of the fine school system, where my mother taught for 30 years. Many of us -- myself included -- went to top-flight colleges and universities because of the grounding we got there. Not everyone was well-to-do; but homes were tidy, and morale was high.
Since The Hoover Company pulled out several years ago, North Canton has become a bleak shadow of its former self. High school classmates who remained in the area were forced into early retirement -- with or without the benefits they expected. There are once-unheard-of check cashing establishments, and empty storefronts up and down Main Street. Prices on the homes our parents built have gone through the floorboards. One of the town's most prominent churches serves a free dinner once a week. Most telling of all, nobody in my family lives there now.
My grandfather -- who worked for Hoover for 50 years -- would cry bitter tears if he could see what had happened to the place he knew and loved. In the present economy, it's difficult to see how it can reinvent itself.
the demise of Detroit has been romanticised. Check out a photo essay by Time magazine - esp photo number 7, in the Remains of Detroit piece
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1864272_1810106,00.html
and the volume by Marchand and Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit
http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850982,00.html
for an example.
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