Affordable Housing Institute : US

Yesterday we saw that Youngstown, Ohio, whose population now is half what it was forty years ago, has made an enormous break with its past.

More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.

 

It’s for the greater good

 

Choosing to cull wasn’t easy.  First, Youngstown tried everything else:

 

For a while, Youngstown, with its population at just over 80,000, hoped to return to its boomtown roots, when 165,000 residents called it home.

 

“We long pursued a policy of growth,” said the city’s energetic young mayor [Jay Williams].  “We went after all these things that would make Youngstown a city of 150,000 again.”

 

Jay Williams, not clinging to the past

 

There were some harebrained schemes.

 

“A blimp factory was going to put the city back on the map,” Williams said.

 

Powered by political promises?

 

“That represents a whole lot of the promises made and broken. They sound ridiculous now. President Clinton promised a defense facility employing 5,000. We were waiting for a savior.”

 

When I’m elected, I’ll do all the things I’ve promised – honest!

 

For a brief period, the city also relied on nostalgia:

 

Growth never came, and that makes for some strange city streetscapes today. There are few occupied homes and unkempt woodlands have taken over. There’s at least one 10-acre farm and many other large fields.

 

Today, a new spirit seems to have taken hold. Phil Kidd started the Web site Defend Youngstown, and said he hears from tons of former residents who would like to return.

 

“They call and email from all over the United States with suggestions on how to help,” he said.

 

They call with suggestions … but they don’t move back, do they?  Memory is romantic; economics is practical.

 

Now, in a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings, tearing up blighted streets and converting entire blocks into open green spaces.

 

From derelict to green?

 

Remarkably enough, occasionally we find land that is worth more vacant than with the current structure on it.  The euphemism is ‘remediation,’ and while it is normally applied to hazardous materials in the soil, it can also reflect the cost of removing an incredibly well-built but economically obsolescent and hence empty structure.

 

Yet it’s extraordinarily disturbing:

 

“I’m very nervous to have all that space,” said Elsa Higby, the founder of Grow Youngstown, which promotes produce gardening and farmers markets.

 

So embedded is expansion into the American psyche that even though this group’s goal is managed shrinkage, it has cleverly inverted the meaning of ‘grow’, from people to crops.

 

How did they get the people to move? 

 

 

When a particular house needs to go somewhere to die, the solution, as with so many things, is to offer choice and money:

 

When only one or two occupied homes remain, the city offers incentives - up to $50,000 in grants - for those home owners to move, so that the entire area can be razed. The city will save by cutting back on services like garbage pick-ups and street lighting in deserted areas.

 

Would $50,000 get you to move?

 

As with many hard-choice innovations, the observant political herd is waiting for a maverick to take a chance. 

 

“We’re one of the first cities of significant size in the United States to embrace shrinkage,” said Williams.

 

When the maverick is not vilified but applauded, the others mosey on over to take a look. 

 

But now, Youngstown’s infrastructure-paring strategy may yet become a model for other Rust-Belt cities that must recreate themselves after years of decline.

 

Already, delegations from smaller, post-industrial cities like Flint, Mich.; Wheeling, W.Va.; and Dayton, Ohio, have come to Youngstown to study the plan.

 

Wheeling’s peak was in its past, too

 

Like Youngstown, all these cities are in America’s industrial heartland, all of them suffering with legacy industrial buildings and declining population.

 

They have found that in Youngstown, cutting the Gordian Knot by thinking the unthinkable – an American city that not only isn’t growing, it’s managing its reduction! – is actually liberating.  As the Youngstown 2010 site puts as its first principle:

 

Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city.
The dramatic collapse of the steel industry led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and a precipitous decline in population. Having lost more than half its population and almost its entire industrial base in the last 30 years, the city is now left with an oversized urban structure. (It has been described as a size 40 man wearing a size 60 suit.)

 

Maybe you need to take in your boundaries

 

There are too many abandoned properties and too many underutilized sites. Many difficult choices will have to be made as Youngstown recreates itself as a sustainable mid-sized city. A strategic program is required to rationalize and consolidate the urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner.

 

The psychological principle is that shrinking is not failure; shrinking is adaptation.

 

Ideally, all this energy surrounding Youngstown 2010 will help turn the city around. It does have a lot going for it, including Youngstown State University, which attracts creative-class types like artists and writers and other intellectuals, as well as museums and an excellent public library.

 

Richard Florida’s done a wonderful job of promoting the thesis that ‘creative types’ are the fertilizing yeast that turn middle-class hops into spirited knowledge workers.  Though his thesis is unproven, what’s far less uncertain is the valuable role played by universities.  They bring in young people (cheap, mobile, risk-taking labor), and they are platforms for innovation (reducing the cost of being wrong and increasing the chance of stumbling on something right).

 

Youngstown State: more students, more ideas, more jobs

 

Similarly, clearing away rubbled lots and replacing them with green space makes the remaining property more attractive as a site to build a new vision:

 

The cheap residential and commercial real estate can be a draw. Start-up companies thrive on low overhead, and employees can easily find housing just minutes from work.

 

3,300 square feet for under $100,000: North Heights in Youngstown

 

At the very least, the 2010 plan has changed residents’ perspective, said Hunter Morrison. “It’s getting us to think about where we’re going into the future, rather than where we’ve been in the past.” 

 

Part of transitioning is letting go of the old self.  Youngstown had an old self predicated on a municipal revenue model that will not return..

 

When a tree has dead limbs, you cut them down lest they jeopardize the trunk.  By plowing under its no-longer-sustainable neighborhoods, Youngstown is making a move to bring its civic economics back in balance, and creating a pruned city that can once again grow.

 

To save the city’s living parts, we had to destroy its dead parts

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