Is Flint a Model for Shrinking American Cities?

For a country that prides itself on big growth, we sure do love knocking things down.  (There's a great scene in Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land detailing the crowds that gather to watch the "festivities" of a building being demolished.)  But does demolition sometimes make sense?  When a city's economic and population base has shrunk so severely that the place needs to be reinvented from the bottoms up, does demolishing whole neighborhoods help that process?

Flint, Michigan believes it does, and is poised to become a model for other declining cities that can no longer support large, scarcely inhabited, tracts of land.

Back in January, I wrote about Detroit and shrinking cities and the political realities involved in admitting that sometimes a city is healthier if it's smaller and denser.  Detroit has been demolishing homes and neighborhoods since 1970.  A Mayoral-appointed rebuilding commission proposed doing the same thing to New Orleans post-Katrina: that is, returning whole neighborhoods to nature.  As Genessee County treasurer Dan Kildee, who is leading the scaling back of Flint, puts it:

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Kildee has knocked down 1,000 homes already, and says another 3,000 should be demolished.  This includes in more affluent, outlying areas, where the city is attempting to buy out homeowners.  The demolition is part of an economic development policy push to restore the city's center and shift towards an economy focused on health and education, two sectors not easily outsourced.

Generally, I applaud an elected official who's willing to make some tough calls in the face of a harsh political and economic reality.  This approach may prevent Flint from going bankrupt.  But there's a couple of risky issues here to keep in mind:

1.  Who decides what neighborhoods should be demolished and how do neighborhoods that lack political power protect themselves from top-down decision-makers?  Are poorer and/or communities of color disproportionately targeted and why?

2.  Does this model necessarily work for other declining cities and what local knowledge is involved in determining that?  I.e., is Kildee and The Brookings Institution deciding what cities are ripe for demolition, as the article implies, or are local elected officials and residents from Baltimore or Pittsburgh leading the charge for their own communities?

3.  What safeguards are in place to ensure this approach is utilitized only in circumstances that make sense and not adopted wholesale by cities that don't need it, or adopted willy-nilly as an excuse to raize unpopular neighborhoods or buildings (e.g., like public housing demolition has swept across the nation)?

4.  What are our plans, if any, for these restored natural environments?  Conservation land?  Urban agriculture?  Public parks or privatized lots?  Community land trusts?

5.  Will political leaders have the strength to stand up to homeowner pressure to keep their homes in deserted, outlying areas?  Will they shift the cost of utilities and trash pickup to these resistant homeowners?  If no one is "forced to move," what responsibility for municipal upkeep falls on those hold-outs?

Finally, FWIW, I saw Kildee speak at a housing conference earlier this year.  The guy is hilarious, a Flint lifer, and seems committed to his city and its future.  Here's hoping he and others in his shoes have cities' and their residents' best interests at heart - informed, in no small part, by residents themselves.

(Abandoned building in Flint, MI; photo by Librarian Avenger)