Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

A town is a business that sells quality of life and competes with other towns to attract real estate tax payers.  It spends its revenue on infrastructure that enhances quality of life and enables it to attract more workers and real estate tax payers.  Some towns are so attractive, relative to their rural competition, that they attract millions of newcomers without even trying, and these towns become megacities by growing vast economically rational but unplanned spontaneous communities called slums, where the housing demand has overrun the infrastructure capacity – and the problem of fixing slums’ overrun capacity is, I believe, the greatest demographic challenge of the 21st century, the century of cities.

 

Because towns compete, some lose.  This is less of a problem when a region or nation’s population is rising, because even losing market share (like Galveston did after the 1900 hurricane and Old New Orleans had been doing even before hurricane Katrina) can be absorbed in people terms through population growth.

 

A setback for the employment base?

 

When it cannot – when the town’s population falls and falls, despite all efforts – the town is economically ill.  That in turn makes it unattractive to its residents, and it keeps losing them.  Then its over-extended infrastructure becomes a millstone (pun) around its neck, dragging down the municipal budget and diluting its ability to serve any of its citizens well.

 

Some infrastructure is no longer functional

 

Such is the fate of Youngstown, Ohio, a town with too many houses, as revealed in this story from CNN Money:

 

The last holdout: Two minutes from Youngstown’s downtown sit empty lots and abandoned houses where families of mill workers once thrived.

 

Youngstown, Ohio, has long been on the decline and now is being hit by the foreclosure crisis. Its answer: Razing abandoned buildings and tearing up streets.

 

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (CNNMoney.com) — Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.

 

Like many cities in America’s Midwest – and Britain’s Midlands – Youngstown boomed on manufacturing, its proximity to the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway representing an enormous competitive advantage:

 

“When I grew up in the 1950s, the city was at its peak,” said Father Ed Noga, who heads St. Patrick’s on Youngstown’s South Side. “There were kids everywhere and everyone converged on downtown. You went to eat, to shop and to go to the movies.”

 

Fast-forward fifty years, as jobs migrate.

 

Today, downtown is positively sleepy and even somewhat derelict.  Residents have to drive out of town to shop for clothes or housewares.

 

In cities that have made the shift from manufacturing to information, downtown exists to create a higher concentration of people within a few minutes’ walk (sideways or up-and-down) of face-to-face contact.  For information-oriented downtowns to flourish, they need people there twenty-four hours a day: which means both working (daylight), living (night-time), and socializing (evening). 

 

When Youngstown was hopping: the 1930’s

 

For that, in the modern world you need verticality – buildings that go up. 

 

Density, in other words, isn’t an urban problem, it’s an urban solution. 

 

Youngstown at night – that was then

 

Lack of density is the problem.

 

When you have homes isolated amidst rubble-strewn lots, service costs greatly outweigh tax benefits.  In fact, the costs rise – as New New Orleans is finding out – because your best defenders are the home’s owners.  Vacant houses must be defended by patrols, and you cannot patrol every street all the time.

 

Although dwindling demand hits the most marginal neighborhoods first (subprime risk!), no neighborhood is immune:

 

Even wealthy neighborhoods, like the North Side historic district, where mill owners and upper management once congregated, have eyesores.

 

 

On one corner, there sits a beautifully maintained seven-bedroom Tudor, yet down a side street, a wood-framed colonial is boarded up. Next door, an empty Victorian sits moldering, the wood of its window frames scorched. Lines of old hedges mark lot boundaries where once-proud homes stood.

 

In addition to reducing demand for infrastructure (saving the city money), returning land to greenery also creates a more pleasant environment, especially for kids. 

 

Recycling Youngstown: Empty houses, once magnets for drugs and prostitution, have been reclaimed as playgrounds.

 

As I discussed in the two posts regarding the Ultimate Future City – the Caves of Steel and the Naked Sun – we all want more elbow room, yet our cities succeed when we have a little less.  Call that the density paradox.

 

When the jobs go, the people follow.  When the people are gone, the houses must go.  Yet houses are built to endure.  They stay behind, and wither.

 

“Abandoned houses here are like rainfall in the spring,” said Mayor Jay Williams, “That has gone on for decades.”

 

In declining-population cities, recessions bring foreclosures like autumn chills bring falling leaves. 

 

And while foreclosures have long been a scourge in this city, they have recently skyrocketed along with the rest of the country, up 178% in February from a year ago.

 

The foreclosures, though, are merely the visible manifestation.  The cause was job flight:

 

Youngstown used to be the nation’s third-largest steel producer; its mill workers earned among the highest factory wages in America. Demand for their services was strong.

 

Coaling station, Youngstown Sheet and Tube

 

“You could graduate from high school one day and start work in the mills the next,” said Noga.

 

William Gropper, Strike and Youngstown Sheet and Tube, 1916

 

That changed on Sept. 19, 1977 - Black Monday - when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly closed its doors.

 

“Five thousand people showed up for work one day and were turned away,” said Phil Kidd, Downtown Director of Events and Special Projects for the city.

 

“The city lost its heart and soul,” said Mayor Williams.

 

Within years, all the mills vanished. Noga recalls seeing idled workers watching as one of the oldest blast furnaces in the valley was dynamited. “I saw these hard men, shot-and-a-beer guys, standing there crying,” he said.

 

Grown men cried when the blast furnace was dynamited

 

The advantages to tearing down empty houses are numerous. 

 

Tearing down the Youngstown textile mill

 

Empty houses attract clandestine occupancy, and can become houses of crime.  The results are all too visible:

 

Some dead-end streets are already uninhabited and torn up, their outlets blocked with concrete barriers. Many roads are pitted and potholed; drivers have to slalom slowly through or face axle-busting jolts. Lonely water hydrants look woefully out of place sitting on the sides of rural-looking roads.

 

Since houses don’t unbuild themselves, they must be unbuilt. 

 

It’s better if you disappear

 

But finding the political commitment to reach that conclusion wasn’t easy –

 

It’s an odd way to pioneer. “The American narrative always includes growth,” said Hunter Morrison, Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University, which works closely with the city on plan 2010’s implementation. “No one wants to talk about shrinkage. That’s too threatening to politicians, civic boosters and Chambers of Commerce.”

 

“That’s a hard choice to make”

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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