The Solution To Urban Blight And Abandoned Homes: A Caterpillar
Filed Under: "Long Overdue: Bulldozers Coming To A Shrinking City Near You"
Well, it's about freaking time. De-leveraging hits municipalities in the form of razing blighted neighborhoods and returning the land to nature. This makes a lot of sense. Mayors will love it because it provides jobs, removes rotting infrastrucute, decreases demand for services (smaller cities mean fewer roads), and its free, courtesy of Washington. And the folks at Caterpillar have to be doing a celebratory line dance.
From Jersey City to Los Angeles we have needed to clean up abandoned neighborhoods and their self-reinforcing decay for decades. This is an excellent use of stimulus funding. Let's hope it happens in all 50 cities as planned. I rip the administration all the time so let me reiterate: well done, team Obama. Extremely smart decision.
From the UK Telegraph:
The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.
Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt 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 fortunes.
Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.
In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.
"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."
Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.
"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.
Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.
The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.
In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM's founder – is a symbol of the city's decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint's decline began.
Read the whole thing HERE.
Jun 13, 2009 at 11:58 PM
Reader Comments (2)
Apparently it is going to be stimulus money. It would be better still if the states and localities did it for themselves.
The trick will be in controlling the price. Corrupt officials at every level will be seeking ways to steal portions of the funding and route contracts to friends. That drastically drives up the costs.
It also delays the programs since one of the ways to divert money is to appoint friends and supporters to well paid seats on boards and commissions to study and review these matters; and study them quite slowly as long as the funding comes in.