Shrinking a city

Faced with an ever-decreasing population and budget shortfalls, the city of Flint, Michigan is considering physically shrinking itself:

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

While the idea of actively demolishing blighted, sparsely-populated neighborhoods and consolidating the city's population into areas deemed to be viable might sound like a drastic response to urban decay, if the costs of doing so are less than the costs of continuing to maintain streets and utilities and providing police, fire and waste removal services to these moribund neighborhoods full of abandoned buildings that attract criminals and vermin, then there's logic to it. While we normally think about city planning being about accomodating growth, "planned shrinkage" is simply the process done in reverse:

Planned shrinkage became a workable concept in Michigan a few years ago, when the state changed its laws regarding properties foreclosed for delinquent taxes. Before, these buildings and land tended to become mired in legal limbo, contributing to blight. Now they quickly become the domain of county land banks, giving communities a powerful tool for change.

Indianapolis and Little Rock, Ark., have recently set up land banks, and other cities are in the process of doing so. “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.”

There are certainly a host of issues involved in the process of shrinkage: eminent domain versus property rights, the extent to which people can be compelled to leave neighborhoods slated for elimination, how the decision as to which communities survive and which are demolished is to be made, what happens when historically-significant or hazardous waste sites are found in neighborhoods slated for destruction, and so on. It doesn't sound like it would be an easy process.

But as continual changes to America's economy and demography take their toll on older manufacturing cities like Flint (and, notably, its larger cousin Detroit, where unemployment is now 20% and the median price of a house is now a paltry $5,800), these places are going to have to come to grips with the reality that citywide regeneration or revitalization will never occur and that their population will continue to decline. These cities need to address not how they grow but rather how they become smaller; the process of liquidating defunct neighborhoods and returning the land on which they sit to nature (or perhaps turning them into farmland) seems like a solution that could provide the most economic, environmental and emotional benefit:

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” Kildee said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”