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From Governing’s
Shrinking Cities Q&A Hunter Morrison Hunter Morrison is the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University. He was also Cleveland's city planner for 20 years--until his wife, Jane Campbell, was elected mayor there in 2001. Morrsion was heavily involved in Youngstown's 2010 planning process. We spoke about why urban planners don't like to talk about shrinking cities, when demolition makes more sense than preservation and Youngstown's lessons for New Orleans. —Christopher Swope
Youngstown has acknowledged through its 2010 plan that it is a smaller place. Why does that matter? I think that to get to the point of saying we're going to be a shrinking city is in itself a significant piece. Part of the problem we have throughout the Great Lakes, which is the slowest growing part of the country, is that every city is looking back to when it used to be 200,000, 500,000, a million--whatever it was at its peak. As Marshall McLuhan put it, they're always looking to the future through the rearview mirror. And what we're saying in Youngstown is, the past is the past. It's time to turn granny's picture to the wall. It's time to move forward as a better place that is sized to today's market and addresses the market of the future. Why are cities so compelled to get back to where they once were? We live in a country where the only acceptable end state is growth. Stability is seen as stagnation. I worked with two Cleveland mayors--and lived with one--at a point in time when Cleveland's population continued to drop. We leveled that off but it's still in decline, and I think the language in a lot of communities is that's bad. We haven't started growing yet. The reality is you may never grow. We're in a very slow-growth region. Then within that, places like Northeast Ohio where there's a heavy concentration of manufacturing are doing worse. And within that, there are the central cities. If you buy the American construct that growth is good and decline is bad, then we're all bad. That's not an end state that this country and these regions and states and cities can tolerate. So it becomes a matter of saying we're not going to be what we once were because our economy is not what it once was. At the American Planning Association we are trying to introduce the notion that we oughta be talking about shrinkage. As a profession planners are very comfortable talking about controlling growth--zoning, subdivision controls, pattern books, New Urbanism and all the sustainable development stuff. What we're not very good at, and what we've not developed a science for, is dealing with decline. So what does it mean to shrink a city intelligently? Saying you're a shrinking city is not saying you're a dying city. Sometimes less is more, as Mies van der Rohe once said. Removing that compulsion to grow and translating it into a more realistic assessment helps you ration very limited funds and not just scatter them about. And it gets people focused on the idea that growth isn't the only thing that matters. Quality matters. Do a few things well rather than do everything all over the place to rebuild what you once were. The fact that you're shrinking means you're not compulsive about putting houses on every parcel. What happened before is tax-credit developers were coming in and buying lots and putting up houses on streets with nothing else on it. It's happening in Cleveland now, where tax-credit housing is going up on streets where we're saying why don't you just deprogram all of that? If you try to rebuild the old neighborhood back to the way it once was you wind up making a whole bunch of mistakes. In parts of Youngstown, where there's large sections of vacant property on land that is hard to drain, what the plan suggests is that's one area where you don't sell off the land. You assemble it and--there are streets with one house on it, where you have water and sewer and electrical and you plow the street when it snows. Those are the streets where the policy ought to be to close it down and perhaps reassemble that property and look at ways in which property that is wet might be converted to formal wetlands. The fact that you're a shrinking means you have more land to work with. And you can create greater value in the land you do keep for redevelopment. But you don't want to have an unrealistic goal of building back to what we once were. We have to be a more attractive right-sized, mid-size city. That means that in those neighborhoods where the market still exists, where the plots and platting patterns are still competitive, then work at it. But also understand that there's large portions of working class cities built very quickly on very tight lots with very inexpensive mill housing that is extremely expensive to rebuild and to make desirable. And some of those properties might be used for something else. Is demolition a wise strategy? Many preservationists would say that cities that are growing again, such as New York and Chicago, are popular in part because they kept some old buildings for people to fix up. You need to take down units that no longer have a market. It's a very unsentimental, hard-nosed approach. Philadelphia and others have done it. It says we can't afford to keep up all the stuff that's never going to get filled up because it's bringing down the stuff we do want to keep. I'm a preservationist too. But not every building is worth saving or can be saved. A simple concrete building that is standing open and vacant and vandalized is not helpful. So to preserve what remains, you have to cull. Sometimes it's better to have a vacant lot. In theory, you may regret it one of these days. But it's been 25 years. And arson and theft and abandonment are tearing down more houses than any act of the city. Does Youngstown have any lessons for cities outside the Great Lakes region?
Look at New Orleans. In a two-week period, New Orleans experienced what Youngstown did over many years--a 50 percent loss of its population. And the city of New Orleans is still not capable of dealing with it. The politics can't deal with it. The institutions can't deal with it. Youngstown had 25 years to adjust, 25 years to mourn, 25 years to cry, 25 years for people to walk away from their property or decide to keep it. The city of New Orleans went through that in a weekend.
We can also teach places such as New Orleans and Biloxi that when you disperse your population to Houston, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, and they get jobs, they ain't coming back. They're not going to fill up the Lower Ninth Ward the way it once was. It just isn't going to happen. When you drive through Oak Hill in Youngstown--that's the Lower Ninth Ward. Or Brier Hill--it was a phenomenal working class Italian neighborhood. The church is there, but nobody lives there. They still have the Brier Hill Festival, they have Brier Hill pizza--they remember Brier Hill. But nobody lives there. That's the Lower Ninth Ward.
Free yourself from what economists call the dead hand of the past and you can then look to the future with some measure of confidence and hope that in fact you can be a good place, an attractive place to live. But you've gotta work back, and that's the lesson of Youngstown and why it may be resonating around the country. Because it does speak to an honest self-assessment and an earnest movement forward. As opposed to always saying, as Marlon Brando said, "I used to be a contenda."
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