If you live in or hail from the Midwest you have a more acute understanding of the term "urban decay" than any other Americans. You know what grainy Kodachrome movies of Flint, Buffalo, Gary, Dayton, Fort Wayne, or Harrisburg looked like in the 1950s compared to the post-industrial, vacant, demilitarized no man's lands they are today. You know how every single harebrained government, academic, or think tank "revitalization" plan from the 1970s and 1980s was test-cased somewhere in the region (almost inevitably St. Louis or East St. Louis). You've seen the Sarajevo-like relics of American experimentation with Soviet panelak housing such as Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green, and the Robert Taylor Homes. The suburbs in which you probably grew up talked of nothing but explosive population growth for the past several decades while as a society we have waffled along the thin line between trying to save our rotting urban cores or abandon them to fate and poor (usually black) people.
Robert Taylor Homes – Poverty Containment Unit #14b
The depths to which many urban areas sunk in the 1970s and 1980s – most glaringly Detroit, New York City, and St. Louis, but certainly others as well – cannot be overstated.
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It spawned an entire genre of white revenge/vigilantism films like Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and Robocop. It led many well-meaning reformers to throw up their hands and many ignorant policymakers to wonder what the hell was happening. It caused many Americans to wonder, apparently with straight faces and no hint of irony, why the idea of vertically stacking 100,000 dirt-poor, jobless people on a 4 square mile footprint in areas devoid of civic, educational, or economic/employment opportunities was not working. And huge numbers of urbanites just packed up and fled.
After, for example, the Robert Taylor homes experienced 28 murders in a single 48 hour period it became kind of hard to defend the status quo. Cities began quietly demolishing their concrete and rebar prisons. The game of "Who can offer potential employers the biggest tax break handjob?" began in earnest (which is effectively government job and income subsidy, but we don't call it that because we believe only in the majesty of the unfettered free market). Crackpot renewal and beautification schemes, usually involving red brick, bunting and lame "attractions", petered out. Reality began to sink in. Some cities modestly recovered or are beginning the long, slow climb towards recovery.
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Others have just said "fuck it" and abandoned all hope of recreating their halcyon days.
Take Youngstown, for example. They've given up on trying to return to their heyday as the third largest steel producing city in the nation.
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Instead, they're literally destroying vast swaths of the city – abandoned housing, potholed streets, and vacant commercial spaces. Urban renewal with bulldozers. They plan to lure back some industry (my money's on "casino" or "state prison") with a novel pitch: This place has been abandoned. Cheap land and desperate job-seekers abound. We are so poor that we're willing to bend over and take it with no lube. You can literally do as you please. If this sounds familiar, it's essentially the argument that Bangladesh makes to get Reebok factories.
So it has come to this, I guess.
It makes some sense – when 50% of the population has fled in a few decades there is no logic to maintaining city infrastructure where it is no longer needed – but goddamn is it depressing. The decay represents a complex, contentious mix of socio-political-economic forces. We can't figure out how to fix it (or even begin fixing it) so we're dismantling cities and hoping to start fresh. I wonder how long it will take some Cato Institute urban planner to recognize the efficiency of leveling urban rot with fuel-air explosives instead of bulldozers. Maybe the folks of Youngstown could return to work making bombs.
Misterben says:
Suburbanization is to blame for a lot of what you describe. Thanks to suburbanization, there's really no reason for a lot of (what used to be) cities to exist. The demographics just aren't there; the only people still living in those cities are the people who couldn't leave.
As oil prices skyrocket over the next couple decades, and it suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive to live in the remote suburbs, people are going to have to move back into the cities – to re-populate the old urban areas – because it will become necessary to live much closer to things.
Of course, we'll probably fight a couple futile wars for oil before we come to terms with this, but we'll get there eventually.
Until then, the one thing that seems to be making a difference in places like Baltimore and Pittsburgh is encouraging local entrepreneurship. I'm no free marketeer, but results are results: it turns out that government support to local people who want to start small businesses pays off big-time in both the short and long run. Local people running their own businesses care about things like blight, crime, and other quality of life issues – problems that are almost impossible for municipal government to solve on its own, but that lots of local neighborhood businesses can have a powerful effect on.
There are many ways for cities to make this happen, but the easiest is simply for city government to set up programs whereby they co-sign for small business loans. Better still is to partner with state universities to provide coaching to aspiring small business owners.
Everything comes from employment, and the best kind of employment is locally-owned employment.
BK says:
Misterben – I think it may be a bit oversimplistic to say that one set of factors – suburbanization – is to blame for the plight of many midwestern cities. Let's not forget about globalization and the move of industry away from US cities and into SE Asia and South America.
It is also overly simplistic to think that one answer – entreprenuership – will make much of a difference.
I work in downtown Milwaukee for a health care and social service agency with 90% of our 3000 clients and patients living under 300% of the FPL (whatever the hell that means).
Having jobs may get them a paycheck, but it's not going to change much. Too many needs – health care, education, public safety and personal responsibility – don't come from earning a paycheck. Hell, drug dealers have jobs and earn money.
Frankly, white suburban folks need to stop trying to solve the problems of the inner-city (read people of color). Civic , religious and community leaders in the inner-city need to start producing out-come based solutions to the problems of health care, education, public safety, and infrastrucutre disparities and begin implenting them.
I could go on, but instead I would encourage you to google (I hate that phrase) former Milwaukee City Aldermann McGee and draw your own conclusions. If this is the sort of person elected to represent a community, what does that say about how the community thinks of itself? Change needs to happen from within…
BK says:
Oh, and by the way – great post, Ed.
JDryden says:
Wow–just think: Youngstown actually misses the Mafia. Maybe with a little synergy, they could bring back the Mob and the myriad of business interests and service industries that they bring with them…
Batocchio says:
An important dynamic not written on enough. Some places there are jobs, but not affordable housing or public transportation. And in this case, there's housing – very old housing – but no jobs.
boilerman10 says:
In Syracuse, NY, the decline of the once thriving industrial engine has devastated the city. It is 60% black and the whites are an aging group already used to integrated community living.
In the burbs like Liverpool, North Syracuse, Cicero and the like the population is getting older and the younger people are moving away leaving many homes for sale, and the area stagnant in growth terms.
They just closed the Kennedy Square complex but it's a "so what" situation. the poverty is still there.
So, unless a young person has a steady job with a solid local company, a trade skill, or has the temperment and reliability to hold a railroad job there is little for that young person to do as the great companies like Allied Chem, GM, Carrier, GE and the like have left the area. It's sad.
I can see Youngstown's point. Many burb townships here are raising assessments at 8% a year, but the wages and bennies are not going up 8% and already talk of local tax revolts are in the air.
I think american business screwed up, and that screw up has hurt each and every one of us.
Ed says:
Syracuse, which I visited when looking at colleges in the late 1990s, is indeed depressing as shit. One gets the feeling that being there is like wandering around a theme park or monument to better times and how badly things can go south.
Michael says:
I live in Birmingham, Alabama. (I'm not from here, I just live here now). Downtown Birmingham isn't quite as bad as what you describe in the Midwest – but certain aspects of it exist. When you drive around downtown there are literally dozens of empty buildings. It is kind of jarring to think of cities just bulldozing themselves under. It's economics, it's the victim of larger forces, its killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and it sucks.
When I moved here in 2002, four of the top 50 banks in the country were based here and 99% of branches in Alabama were for Alabama-based banks. After the first hometown bank (SouthTrust) was acquired, the CEO of AmSouth came out to say this was bad for the city. He said that the banks had a responsibility to the city of Birmingham. Eventually he merged his bank with the bank across the street, Regions, in order to guarantee that at least one huge bank would remain based here. The other big Birmingham bank (Compass) sold itself to a European bank – a nice compromise. It's now the US headquarters for a top ten global company. But these CEOs felt a responsibility not just to the shareholders, but to the employees, and to the multitude of people whose livelihood depended on the banks' business. That's not typically what happens in corporate America. There was some civic responsibility, and a consideration of more than one stakeholder.
Downtown Birmingham is slowly seeing some revitalization. Lots of new condos and restaurants, mostly. I think it's driven by two things. First, there's a reversal of the white-flight which drove growth in the suburbs. Traffic in and out of Birmingham is becoming more congested so people are moving back in-town, not just down-town but other "urban" neighborhoods like Forest Park, Avondale, and Southside. Second, I think people are coming to Birmingham from other, larger, cities for a better quality of life, but they also want to retain some of the urban amenities, sidewalk culture, lifestyle, that they enjoyed elsewhere.
I've lived in Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Atlanta, Durham, and here. I think Birmingham is the best-kept secret in the South. I don't know if this is my forever place, but I'm really happy here now. But that's getting a little off subject.
Misterben says:
BK,
Of course suburbanization isn't entirely to blame for the degradation of America's cities. There are a great many possible factors, including globalization as you suggest; I was merely pointing out one of the more significant ones. Prior to the late 1940s in America, your choice was pretty much: city or town? The rise of the suburb gave people a third option, and it quickly became the only option developers cared about. Remember that the suburbs didn't just happen; the demand was manipulated and stoked by developers over the post-war decades. And as people and development dollars left the city and the town for the suburb, our modern world emerged. I encourage you to watch Andres Duany's lecture on New Urbanism, which you can find in about 9 parts on YouTube.
And of course entrepreneurship by itself won't fix everything. Cities need functioning governments and thriving civil societies to be healthy; that's part of why, no matter how much new business investment comes to Detroit (and there is some), the city will be dysfunctional – its civil society is meager and its government is, frankly, goofy. But a city that hinges its future on groveling for outside investment is at the mercy of that investor, who could at any time do to that city what GM did to Flint. Part of the advantage of encouraging local business development by local entrepreneurs is that when local people start businesses, they tend to stick around. The point I was trying to get across, and I wish I had used these words in my original post, is that entrepreneurship seems to serve as a seed for further improvement.
I understand what you're getting at in your comment about suburban whites trying to fix the inner city, but that's not what I'm talking about at all. We ALL need to give a damn about our cities. Too many folks have been vacationing from reality in the suburbs for too long. In the not too distant future, the suburbs will become untenable, and all those people are going to need the cities and towns again. The sooner we stop wasting our development money on the suburban fantasyland, the better.
Jamesholder says:
People make a getto. Buildings do not make a getto. Lazy low life people are the problem. An old house does not mean dirty, not painted, and trash all around. The people make the scum happen becaise the people are scum.