Land to spare

Everyone knows Detroit is underpopulated, but the image above sure drives the point home. Detroit's population is rapidly falling below 900,000, but the city has enough land to house three times that many people. Low density has led to widespread abandonment of property to the point where one-third of all city land -- equaling the size of San Francisco -- may now be vacant.

Unfortunately, the vacant land isn't contiguous, so it's not easy to redevelop, and no one has a clear idea what to do with it. When the Free Press asked the mayoral candidates for ideas, none responded. Readers suggested large-scale reforestation or urban farming, as Grace Lee Boggs and others have advocated.. Sustainability experts have recommended focusing on developing seven densely populated urban villages -- Southwest Detroit, Corktown, Downtown, Eastern Market, Woodbridge, Midtown and New Center (see the Power Point). None of these schemes are particularly easy to implement given the actual distribution of vacant lots scattered throughout all the city's neighborhoods, but clearly the city needs a better vision and a real plan to deal with excess property.

We. Need. Transit.

Two great editorials on transit in Sunday's Free Press. The first explains the critical need for a "comprehensive national transportation policy" and the second brings the article closer to home, emphasizing how badly our region needs a major transit success story.

The editorials are part of an excellent, ongoing series in the Free Press "on the nation's glaring lack of an agenda for cities and viable solutions to the problems affecting our most populated regions." Previous editorials discussed the critical importance of cities, the problem of urban poverty, and the need to fight urban crime. The whole series is online at http://www.freep.com/cities.

"Creative class" interview

Metromode has an interview of Richard Florida, the academic behind the "creative class" theory that says the survival of post-industrial cities depends on attracting creative types and highly-educated professionals. I didn't think much of the interview (he speaks in slogans like an advertising executive), but his influence is undeniable. The governor's Cool Cities initiative, for example, cites his work.

Update: As a counterpoint, here's a City Journal article that argues that only low taxes and basic services lead to job growth. An unimaginative and reductive argument, but it surely has some truth as well. Detroit may build a bohemian center amidst present-day decay, but the city cannot attract a flourishing middle class without efficient, effective governance. If taxes are going to be high (as they are in most major cities), they need to be put to very good use.

Talking points

The next time you discuss Detroit, ignore Kwame and cut the nostalgia for Hudson's. Recite this list instead. Model D has listed the sixteen coolest initiatives in the city. This is the future.

Also in this week's issue, eight ways the city is getting greener. Normally I wouldn't promote such pure boosterism, but frankly, in the current political and economic climate (read: bad bad bad), we need it.

Securing our cities

The Free Press has another powerful editorial in favor of a renewed urban agenda at the national level. This time the focus is on five key steps the federal government can take to reduce crime and violence in major cities:

• The next president must increase support for local law enforcement programs that work, especially to those cities that have a plan for collaborative, community-wide crime prevention programs. Such assistance should include innovative new programs, such as a national campaign to ensure all city streets are well lit.

• Second, the president ought to strengthen the federal government's commitment to prisoner re-entry programs that help hundreds of thousands of offenders adjust to their communities. In Michigan and other states, such efforts are reducing crime and recidivism. The Second Chance Act passed by the U.S. Senate earlier this month is a good start.

• Third, the next administration must make gun control legislation a priority, as virtually all big-city mayors and police chiefs have urged. At least, the president and Congress ought to renew the assault weapons ban, establish a national data base for guns and gun owners, and require background checks for gun show purchases.

• Fourth, Washington should encourage local rules that require police officers to live in the cities they serve. It could do so by making only cities with such residency rules eligible for certain grants.

• Finally, the federal government must do more to prevent crime. The good news is that, over the last 15 years, the U.S. Justice Department has started to focus on street violence, as well as white-collar and organized, crime. The best federal programs have partnered with local law enforcement agencies and community-based groups.

Detroit & Berlin

Real Detroit has an ongoing series of dispatches from Berlin, a revived city that can serve as model for Detroit's redevelopment. The first says we need hipsters and density. The second talks about cool uses for empty storefronts.

I don't know much about Berlin, but I agree with the premise of the series: Detroit can learn a lot from other cities. Planners and activists in Detroit should be mining other cities for ideas. What's working in Boston? What about Berlin? Detroit may be unique in the magnitude of its decline, but it is by no means alone. We should be experimenting with any successful model we can find as we work to create our own formula for revitalization.

Hat tip: Detroit Yes! forums.

Upcoming events: food deserts, sustainability

The Skillman Foundation will host "Eliminating Food Deserts in Detroit: A Community Discussion" at UM's Detroit Center (3663 Woodward Ave.) on Monday, March 10, from 5 to 8:30 pm. Speaker Mari Gallagher will discuss her report, "Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Detroit," and other panelists will discuss community efforts to increase access to healthy food in the city.

The Model D Speaker Series will present "Building a Green City: Sustainable Urbanism in Detroit" on Wednesday, March 19, at 5 pm at the Detroit Yacht Club on Belle Isle (1 River Bank Road). Speakers "will discuss the principles of sustainable urbanism, and examine how areas like Detroit's Midtown are actively utilizing the ideas."

Tax suburbs more than cities

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser (whose previous work I criticized) argues that the suburbs should be paying higher taxes for two reasons: 1) suburbanites pollute more and 2) don't contribute as much as city-dwellers to the welfare of the poor.

His point about urban poverty is worth noting. Some urban poverty is cyclical, denying opportunities to generation after generation, and society is to blame for not working to prevent this cycle from continuing. But urban poverty also results from urban success:

Urban poverty does not reflect urban failure, but rather the enduring appeal of cities to the less fortunate. Poor people come to cities because urban areas offer economic opportunity, better social services, and the chance to get by without an automobile.

Cities shouldn't be punished for this by paying higher taxes to care for the poor. Providing social services is a universal responsibility and the suburbs should share the burden.

Hat tip: Greg Mankiw.

Reflections on NYC

New York City was great: the diversity, the neighborhoods, the transit, the culture. But I also left with hope for Detroit. We can have what New York has in miniature: a thriving downtown, hip urban neighborhoods, immigrant enclaves. But we also have one great advantage that city lacks: space! Detroit has a chance to rethink and rebuild itself to a degree unparalleled in the world because it has both urban infrastructure built for millions and open land in every corner.

Will urban living kill the suburbs?

I doubt it, but the the Atlantic seems to thinks so:

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

Hat tip: Metromode

The nation needs an urban policy

The time has come to declare a new war on urban poverty. The Free Press makes the case in an ongoing series:

Presidents define what's important for the nation. A president who would visit a poor central-city neighborhood, or talk about the problems of the people who live there, would end a 40-year silence and, once again, focus the nation's attention and political will on ending poverty. With private sector support, a fraction of the $10 billion a month the United States spends in Iraq would go a long way toward reducing poverty at home.

Urban ghettos, segregated by class and race, have helped create a so-called underclass that undercuts the nation's economic progress and tears its social fabric. Bringing disenfranchised people into the economic mainstream is the right, and smart, thing to do. Cities offer the best opportunity to do that.

The rise of the young professional

Model D highlights the many new young professionals groups working to connect and engage the next generation of leadership in Detroit. These include

• Leadership Next (sponsored by the United Way)
  
• Detroit Synergy
• Fusion (sponsored by the Detroit Regional Chamber)
  
• Detroit Young Professionals
• and Open City

In fact, there may be too many new groups. According to Crain's Detroit, many have had to reschedule events to avoid conflicting with each other.

A reformer in Newark

There's a great profile of Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, in the Feb. 4th edition of the New Yorker. Unfortunately, only a synopsis is available online, but the conservative City Journal covered similar ground in a profile of Cory Booker from Spring 2007.

Booker is not a conventional Newark politician. Young, black, Ivy-league educated, and raised in the suburbs, he is fighting to reduce crime, overturn the corrupt political establishment, and bring in outside investment to transform the city. He "considers himself as part of a new paradigm of 'people who are trying to make their governments engines of economic opportunity and judge them not by how many jobs they can provide but by how much wealth they can create and how efficiently they can deliver services within their own city.'"

His efforts have engendered fierce resistant, both for his politics and his background. In his first bid for mayor, the incumbent accused him of not being authentically black, saying, “You have to learn how to be African-American, and we don’t have time to train you.” He has been attacked for appointing outsiders, many of whom are white, to his administration, and many in the city oppose his policy positions, including support for school vouchers.

His experience is thought-provoking, especially in the context of Detroit, which itself so badly needs enlightened leadership. Booker's heart certainly seems to be in the right place, reflecting the perspective of a new generation of idealists who hope to reform and revitalize Rust Belt cities through pragmatic policy that transcends traditional divisions pitting white against black and city against suburb. But ultimately intentions count for naught. The real test is whether his administration can successfully reduce crime and bring jobs to the city.

The creative class in the Rust Belt

Two finds from today's Metromode:

• The News talks about Detroit's burgeoning hipster image, citing Cafe D'Mongos' success at attracting the "creative class."

• This week's guest blogger at Metromode is Sarah Szurpicki of Great Lakes Urban Exchange (GLUE). GLUE is "an online networking and journalism effort to build regional identity and share information among young urban leaders from cities around the Great Lakes region." There's not too much on their website yet, but my interest is piqued and their principles are sound: urbanism, regionalism, storytelling, and building networks.
  

Can rust belt cities revitalize?

Edward Glaeser, a prominent Harvard economist, argues no. His article, "Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?", outlines the rise and fall of Buffalo, a declining city that holds much in common with Detroit. In his view, Buffalo will never regain its past glory, and federal policies aimed at saving the city as a geographic place are destined to fail. "The best scenario," he concludes, "would be for Buffalo to become a much smaller but more vibrant community—shrinking to greatness, in effect. Far better that outcome than wasting yet more effort and resources on the foolish project of restoring the City of Light’s past glory."

His assessment is the same with regard to Detroit. He speaks of the city in a New York Times Magazine profile:

"I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit," he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. "There are no reasons why it can't, and shouldn't, decline," Glaeser says. "And I would say that for many other cities. There's no reason not to let decline go forward." The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. "Places decline and places grow. We shouldn't stand in the way of that."

His insensitivity is shocking: "There's no reason not to let decline go forward." The decline of Midwestern cities is not benign. That decline has meant suffering, poverty, and environmental degradation. While I agree with him that people matter more than places, places matter too. We cannot build cities today only to abandon them tomorrow. The costs, human and environmental, are too great.

Downtowns for everyone

The suburbs, too, desire revitalized downtowns. The News looks at Clawson's efforts to improve its downtown at the intersection of 14 Mile and Main, and Crain's Detroit looks at a plan to create a "downtown" Southfield where none currently exists.

I post these as a reminder that despite the dreams of urban planners, Detroit already is and will remain a sprawling region. The city of Detroit may revitalize itself, but the suburbs will not magically retrench back within its borders. But sprawl is not a lost cause. The visionary nonprofit Michigan Suburbs Alliance has much to say about what can be done for the inner-ring suburbs and the region as a whole to make the best of an un-ideal planning situation.