The blog will be a little quiet today since I'm going offsite for an interview this afternoon but before I leave I wanted to share this article that I found on Governing.com's blog, The 13th Floor.
The article profiles Youngstown, Ohio, which has lost over half of its residents since the early 1970s. While most cities in this situation have fought tooth and nail to figure out ways to bring population levels back to their peaks, Youngstown has actually decided that size really doesn't matter.
"We’re on our way to accepting some obvious things about what the city is and isn’t going to be,” says Jay Williams, Youngstown’s 35-year-old mayor. “It was unrealistic to think we’ll be a 100,000 person city. But why not be an attractive city of 80,000 or 85,000 that offers a quality of life that competes with other cities across the state and across the country?”
Youngstown, with a pretty large stockpile of abandoned buildings and property, has decided that rather than thinking of ways to redevelop these areas for the influx of people who may will never come, they would "de-develop" them and essentially return them to the land. That includes removing infrastructure such as roads and utilities to create more green and open space. It becomes a win-win-win. The city has fewer streets to maintain, blighted buildings are removed, and more open space is created.
(As an interesting aside, 13th Floor also has a post featuring a book about what would happen if this Youngstown tactic were taken to the extreme - if all of our infrastructure were "returned to the land.")
I'm not suggesting that Philadelphia can't rebound and start to grow again. I'm not even suggesting that this city can't claw it's way back into the top 5. It is, however, instructive to know that there are viable alternatives if we ever figure out that our city, which is still has some holdover infrastructure and buildings from a time when we had 2.1 million people, is comfortable with 1.4 million.
Comments (2)
philly could use more parks
Posted by Anonymous | June 21, 2007 8:59 PM
I think the migration away from rural or once-industrialized areas back to cities and, especially, the suburbs or exurbs is fascinating...there are so many towns I know of in the South that have basically dried up. It's a little eerie. Youngstown isn't in that situation, but it's in something that's larger in scale, and headed in the same direction.
PS: Can't think Youngstown without thinking about Bruce.
Posted by Wendy | June 21, 2007 11:27 PM