For Release Thursday, June 18, 2009
Citiwire.net
America is in peril of a Demolition Derby, financed by public dollars, striking many of our grand old cities.
Flint, Youngstown, Philadelphia, Buffalo and Detroit are typical of the post-industrial cities in which troubled neighborhoods are experiencing abandonment and foreclosure and public officials are talking of using public funds to demolish whole blocks if not whole neighborhoods.
But is the bulldozer the best solution? One is hard pressed to find a city or even a neighborhood that was ever regenerated through demolition of vacant buildings. Didn’t we learn of the hollow results from the discredited post-World War II urban renewal policies that destroyed — and for decades left bereft — vast tracks of troubled residential structures?
Granted some appealing urban gardens are now sprouting in these cities, where piles of debris might have accumulated. Clearly this is better than rubble-strewn lots.
But vast clearance? The fact is the presence of vacant buildings is nothing new in any of these cities; the condition in today’s recession and industrial collapse is just worse. No citywide benefits ever materialized from mass demolition. And the big-bang projects that have sometimes risen where neighborhoods once stood– stadiums, arenas, convention centers, malls and the like — have not only failed in their promise and cost dearly but provided no fundamental basis for citywide resilience in good times or bad.
Huge projects never live up to expectations; small initiatives always exceed theirs. So why not emulate real success?
Boston, for example, has declared a moratorium on new home construction which certainly makes sense when so many existing solid structures stand empty. At the same time, the city is cleaning streets, fixing pot holes, working with lenders and improving investment conditions. The foreclosure rate has slowed.
But more is possible beyond the critical maintenance of neighborhoods. Where some see hopelessness, other recognize opportunity.
Take Wilkinsburg, Pa., a one-time working class streetcar suburb of Pittsburgh. Abandonment of residential and commercial buildings was unabated. Almost four years ago, the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation acquired and renovated four vacant Edwardian row houses, one apartment house and one commercial building (a former Packard dealership).
The Edwardian houses with five units have since sold, the first sales in the area in years. The apartment house with 27 low-income rental units is under construction. A Housing Resource Center is now going into the renovated car dealership, where people will be trained to do their own work. Using low-income tax credits, this has been a real partnership with the county, a foundation and a bank. Grants have also been given to local churches and non-profit organizations to do additional work.
Importantly, they are going beyond bricks and mortar. As part of a community building effort, Charley Batch of the Steelers has organized a baseball camp for almost 100 youngsters. The tide has turned. Renewal is spreading.
Or look at the once-rich, now beleaguered Buffalo where the mayor can only think of demolishing 5,000 houses in five years with city, state, federal and foundation funding. Think of using the funds for genuine regeneration instead. In one of the most difficult neighborhoods — considered a lost cause by experts — the West Side Community Collaborative is not waiting for government to be creative or playing the blame absentee landlord game.
Instead, this community group is going directly to problem property owners or meeting them in Housing Court to buy the properties cheaply and find local buyers to fix and occupy. Most significantly, they are finding buyers for fixer-uppers at less than $25,000 who could never afford standard market prices. In the process, these new home owners are building equity they never had, equity that then gives them something to borrow on to start a business or fund a child’s college education.
Besides finding buyers, community volunteers are painting over graffiti, cleaning out rubble lots, crowding out drug dealers and prostitutes by strategically working with the police, planting trees, fixing sidewalks, mowing lawns and anything else to show the determination and caring of this extraordinarily diverse community. They only demolish when a building is no longer structurally sound and then they salvage reusable parts.
When they started seven years ago, this long declining Buffalo neighborhood was considered hopeless. Abandonment was accelerating. Now, houses are selling and new people are moving in where only departures were common for years. The strategy is spreading and leaders from other neighborhoods are seeking advice on how to develop a similar strategy.
The number of success stories is endless. Each one is different. But all are initiated by people and community-based organizations who recognize that demolition does not solve social problems. It just moves the problems to another locale. The erase-not-retain policy for both people and buildings is the current, more subtle version of the 1950s slash and burn urban renewal. Demolition is simply planning by default. It doesn’t work.
Roberta Brandes Gratz is a journalist and author of Cities Back From The Edge: New Life for Downtowns and The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way. Her e-mail address is livingcity@aol.com.
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[...] Brandes Gratz, one of the most interesting and innovative thinkers on urban space and planning, weighs in on current discussions about bulldozing cities (this blog discussed it here) at Citiwire. She likens plans to bulldoze large swaths of cities to [...]
Well worth checking for a roundup on the “shrinking cities” debate is this piece by Nate Berg on Planetizen –
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39619
DEMOLITION AND SHRINKING CITIES: TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK
Alan Mallach
Is demolition the answer? No, and no thoughtful person who cares about cities will say that it is. Is it part of the answer? It depends on whether you’re asking the right questions.
If we look at Detroit, for example, we see a city which contains 40 square miles of vacant land and, by recent estimates, anything from 35,000 to over 50,000 vacant buildings. Buffalo, a much smaller place, may have 15,000 to 25,000 vacant buildings. These cities, and their counterparts – Flint, Youngstown, and others – have large areas where scattered occupied houses sit amidst prairies of vacant land and gaping, often fire-blackened empty houses. Many of the people in these houses are elderly homeowners, trapped by their poverty and by the reality that their house has, quite literally, no value. There are eight census tracts in Buffalo – where nearly 16,000 people lived in 2000 – where not a single home purchase mortgage was made in 2007.
This is not the total story. These cities have many vital, thriving neighborhoods, and many more where the fabric of the neighborhood is still strong but frayed, and the area is struggling against the forces of decline. Many of these neighborhoods, like Buffalo’s West Side, have dedicated citizens and organizations like the West Side Community Collaborative, who are fighting to hold their ground and reclaim their community. Sadly, as the foreclosure crisis and the recession deepen, it looks like more such neighborhoods are losing than gaining ground.
To understand what’s happening in these cities, we have to look beyond the individual neighborhoods, though, and look at the big picture. This is the reality check. The reality is that these cities are continuing to lose population and jobs, and are likely to continue down that path for some time to come. After all is said and done, even while recognizing the damage done by predatory lenders and greedy flippers, the fundamental reason Cleveland, Buffalo and their counterparts have tens of thousands of vacant houses is that the city and the region are not generating enough demand to keep them occupied. This is a long-term trend, and one that is unlikely to reverse itself in the next five or ten years, or even longer. The massive steel mills and automobile assembly lines that supported their historic populations are gone. Detroit will never have 1.8 million people again, nor will Buffalo have 600,000. If and when their populations stabilize, these cities are likely to contain little more than one-third their peak population.
Some people might argue that accepting the reality of population loss and low demand constitutes giving up on these cities. The opposite is true. If Buffalo, Flint and other like cities are to have a chance to come back as healthier, although smaller, cities, they are going to have to make some very difficult decisions. They will have to acknowledge what is already reality – that parts of these cities have gone past the point of no return, where they can no longer be saved by the actions of individuals and community groups, because they are no longer neighborhoods in any but a historical sense. At the same time, they must also recognize that many other areas in these cities still have the physical and social fabric that makes them viable urban neighborhoods, but which could easily go the way of the devastated areas elsewhere in the city unless they can assemble enough energy and resources to counter the economic pressures working against them. Those economic pressures are real and powerful. In contrast to Boston or New York, where even the most distressed neighborhood has a shot at the future by building on the strength of the regional economy, the weakness of the regional economy in Buffalo or Cleveland – particularly today – can drag down even a healthy neighborhood.
So what does this mean in terms of demolition? It means that demolition, instead of an end in itself, needs to become part of a strategy that acknowledges that viable but threatened neighborhoods need to be supported, and areas that have gone past the point of no return need to be recognized as such. In areas like the West Side Collaborative’s target area, an area with a strong urban fabric and historic houses abutting some of Buffalo’s prime neighborhoods, demolition should be a last resort, used only if a house is dilapidated beyond salvation.
In other areas, where scattered houses sit on blocks already largely abandoned, demolition becomes a way to make possible the greening of these areas. In most cases, this is not a matter of clearing entire sections of a city, and above all, nobody is talking about forcing any family to leave their home against their will. Some cleared areas will be small areas that could be used for community gardens, parks or greenways; others may be larger areas, and may end up becoming forests and even, perhaps, urban agriculture on a commercial scale. The work being done by Terry Schwartz and her colleagues at Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative shows how sensitive, thoughtful treatment of vacant properties, from individual lots through multiple blocks, can have a positive effect on a block, a neighborhood or an entire city.
Contrary to what some may believe, these ideas are not anti-urban, and is not aimed at “thinning out” urban neighborhoods and destroying the qualities that give them their value and distinction. It is that thinning out that is exactly what is going on today in city after city, not through public action, but through the status quo. Population loss and abandonment are inexorably destroying the urban fabric of one neighborhood after another, save for the handful with the capacity and leadership to bring them back from the brink. Without focused, targeted public action to direct resources to these neighborhoods, and support their efforts, far too many will be lost.
Unless America’s shrinking cities can rebuild the fabric of their viable neighborhoods – keeping their urban qualities intact – they will have little hope of revival. If they are to do that; they must recognize reality, and accept that a smaller population needs a smaller city, with far fewer houses than it once had, when it housed a population more than double today’s population. It is time we acknowledge this, put nostalgia and wishful thinking aside, and get on with the job.