By Richey Piiparinen
Courtesy of landlordrecords.tumblr.com
Since the 1950s, Cleveland has been steadily losing population. That means most people who were born and grew up here do not remember a time when the city was growing.
There’s a term for this consistent depopulation: shrinking city syndrome. Definitions vary, but according to a widely quoted 2009 Tufts University study, a shrinking city has lost at least 10 percent of its peak population since 1950. Though Cleveland ranks high in the shrinking city roster—it’s the fourth most depopulated city in the nation, having lost 56 percent of its population since 1950s–it’s certainly not alone in its decline. [blocktext align=”left”]If downsizing becomes part of your collective DNA, it’s hard to envision growth. Rust Belt leaders often frame discussions of the future as “How do we dwindle best?”[/blocktext]Fifty-nine cities in the United States are considered “shrinking,” including seven in Ohio. St. Louis has experienced the largest population drop–more than 62 percent since 1950–followed by Detroit and Youngstown. And there are shrinking cities all over the world, from Dubai to Athens to Adelaide.
If downsizing becomes part of your collective DNA, it’s hard to envision growth. Rust Belt leaders often frame discussions of the future as “How do we dwindle best?”
“Decline is a fact of life,” notes Congressman Dan Kildee of Michigan, the political face of shrinking-city policy in the Rust Belt. “Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”
Depopulation presents problems for local officials. A lack of property and income tax receipts is one; so is maintenance, as the houses, roads, and utilities that are not being used require costly upkeep. Without money flowing in, decreasing a city’s footprint becomes a necessary evil.
There’s good logic to remaking a city that avoids past failures, to becoming the best depopulated city you can be. And the notion of “city-as-blank-slate” jazzes urban designer and visionary types.
After years of neglect, many houses do need to be demolished—they are too far gone. But I wonder how much of planned shrinkage is a kind of giving up, or alternatively: a giving in.
In his recent report “Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities,” researcher Alan Mallach laments the Rust Belt’s tendency to be “path dependent”—looking to what has happened in the past to make current and future decisions. For Mallach, history affects the present to the extent that it limits leaders’ ability to see possibility. Rust Belt leaders like Congressman Kildee assume decline. “Those who have never experienced anything but decline may have difficulty even conceptualizing a different reality,” Mallach writes.
Managing decline can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you plan for a shrinking city, you will get one. Take the case of Detroit. [blocktext align=”right”]Affordable housing is one of our competitive advantages over other parts of the country. [/blocktext]Vast stretches of the city have been torn and burned down—in effect, urban “prairie-d.” The city is one-third vacant land. Quicken Loans CEO and self-appointed Detroit re-maker Dan Gilbert desires more planned shrinkage, stating recently he wants to erect a public scoreboard that will chart his plan to bulldoze every single abandoned building in Detroit, some 80,000 structures.
In all, the “demo Detroit” chorus is getting a bit bloodlust-y. “Detroit Survival Depends on Speed of Destruction,” reads a recent Bloomberg News headline.
Naturally, some Detroiters are worried. “Dan Gilbert believes that once you tear them down, development will come,” notes the organization Preservation Detroit. “Why, then, have we been unable to fill our 40 square miles of vacant space–more than the city of Paris–with new construction?”
But the real problem is not the vacant houses; it’s the lack of people. Note the authors of the article “Shrinking Cities: Urban Challenges of Globalization:” “[Demolition] mostly cures symptoms, not causes.”
Rust Belt leaders need to be asking the question: “How can we get people back?” An analysis of emerging trends reveals that our perceived weakness—the housing market–may actually be our strength. Affordable housing is one of our competitive advantages over other parts of the country.
Many of the nation’s largest cities are facing an affordable-housing crisis. If you make 80K in San Francisco—the city’s median income—only 14 percent of the housing stock is within your price range. In New York and L.A., a median income gets you in the door of approximately 25 percent of homes.
Rents are becoming problematic as well. Seattle and Portland experienced some of the largest rent gains in 2012, and local families’ housing costs are skyrocketing beyond regional wages, leading to an increase in homelessness and “doubling up.”
Contrast this with Akron—the nation’s most affordable city—in which 50k gets you in the door of 86 percent of the city’s houses.
The gap between salaries and housing costs could drive jobs and people back to the Rust Belt. It is hard to see New York and the like getting less expensive—and more egalitarian—from here on out. [blocktext align=”left”]Dayton has begun an aggressive immigrant attraction strategy, increasing the city’s foreign-born population by around 10,000 in recent years.[/blocktext]What is more probable is that these cities become two-tiered, housing the very poor and the very rich.
Attracting the middle class to the Rust Belt means envisioning a future that is “path-creating” rather than path-dependent. In path creation, our relationship with the future—or the extent to which as a region we discuss and strategize possibilities—affects our relationship with the past. We don’t use history as our only guide.
In Dayton, Mayor Gary Leitzell is using a path-creating strategy. Rather than give in to the idea of inevitable decline, he sees that the city’s surplus of vacancy fills a need. Dayton has begun an aggressive immigrant attraction strategy, increasing the city’s foreign-born population by around 10,000 in recent years.
“What many people are doing is coming, buying vacant houses and fixing them up because housing is very affordable in Dayton,” notes Francisco Peláez Diaz, a local leader. This is not a survival strategy based on the “speed of destruction.”
Courtesy of American Ahiskan Turkish Society-Dayton
It is a new era. The shrinking city vs. global city model is breaking down. The Rust Belt can make its own way. But it has to strategize a future beyond the doggedness of its ghosts.
Richey Piiparinen is a Senior Writer for Belt.
These sentences gave me whiplash right at my monitor this Monday morning:
“If you make 80K in San Francisco–the city’s median income—only 14 percent of the housing stock is within your price range. In New York and L.A., a median income gets you in the door of approximately 25 percent of homes.”
I want to see that statistic — % of housing accessible @ median local income — published for every city/metro in the world.
Here you go. http://trends.truliablog.com/2013/10/middle-class/
When I look at that report it tells me if I make 40K I can afford a house priced at 200K? In your dreams. That would mean all my income goes to the house per year. The reality is they (Trulia) is being way too generous. The % of housing accessibility is FAR lower than that. @ 6% it is 1200 a month or 14,400 (just for the mortgage) for a 30 year loan. Per year. And we’re talking 40K median (gross) not net. So, add some taxes. I.E. State/Local/Sales/SS/MC/FED you’re looking at about 10K give or take. so 30K net paying 15K in just the mortgage leaving you 15K left over to spend on food, electrical, cable, car payments, student loans, water, garbage, sewage, home repairs, clothes, health insurance, car insurance, gas, etc etc and “saving for retirement” in your lockbox of a 401K or ROTH. You can’t afford a house like that. Maybe _half_ that price.
Here’s the thing: the Great Cleveland Exodus is both exaggerated and self-inflicted. The population hasn’t so much left as it has shifted and sprawled. The population of Greater Cleveland (as in, the Metropolitan Statistical Area), peaked in the 1970 census at 3,098,516. As of 2010, it was 2,881,937, and was estimated in 2012 at 2,866,186. That’s a 7.5% decrease. Shrinking? Sure, no doubt. But not even 10%. We’ve just sprawled so much that it’s killing us. We’re destroying our urban tax base by doubling down on suburbanism–what’s been dubbed by Charles Marohn the “Growth Ponzi Scheme.” And now we’re paying for it.
But a 7.5% decline in an environment where the US population has increased 53% since 1970, not only puts the MSA’s shrinkage in stark relief, but makes the city’s decline that much more pronounced.
Yes, Greater Cleveland is sprawling, though not that much differently than other American cities, both those that are thriving and those that are not. Instead of blaming those that moved further out for being short sighted (or worse) – why are we not addressing the quality of life issues that made (and continue to make for many) suburban life so appealing?
I didn’t blame those that moved out. It’s interesting–perhaps telling–that you’ve chosen to read it that way. I’m blaming subsidizing non-productive development patterns, supported systemically. What is described here: http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ Those development patterns are exactly what creates the fiscal inability to address those very same quality of life issues.
Successful American cities are not sprawling–they’re growing. There’s a difference. See below.
The most successful cities in the world have high outmigration rates and sprawl. See NYC. See Chicago. Why you don’t hear about NYC’s suburbia or Chicago’s suburbia “problem” is because the inner city neighborhoods are consistently attracting in-migrants, thus avoiding the shrinking city problems and mindset that goes with urban core decay and abandonment. Though huge swaths of Chicago are resembling a shrinking city more and more by the day.
NYC and Chicago are growing, not sprawling. There’s a difference. Chicago is consistently building up in Streeterville, the Gold Coast, and elsewhere. It’s not ever-expanding while not gaining population.
I don’t understand this seemingly newfound obsession with creating vacant lots all over town. Drive down Euclid Avenue from E. 55th Street to University Circle, and you’ll find vacant lots all over the place. This is a much more offensive eyesore than old, delapidated buildings, and makes parts of the city look completely abandoned.
They actually need to blow up or implode a lot of those buildings and turn them into vacant lots. No one works in those buildings. They’re literally empty.