Supporting Shrinkage
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Supporting Shrinkage

Better Planning and Decision-Making for Legacy Cities

Michael P. Johnson, Justin B. Hollander, Eliza W. Kinsey, George R. Chichirau, Charla M. Burnett

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eBook - ePub

Supporting Shrinkage

Better Planning and Decision-Making for Legacy Cities

Michael P. Johnson, Justin B. Hollander, Eliza W. Kinsey, George R. Chichirau, Charla M. Burnett

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About This Book

Supporting Shrinkage describes a new approach to citizen-engaged, community-focused planning methods and technologies for cities and regions facing decline, disinvestment, shrinkage, and social and physical distress. The volume evaluates the benefits and costs of a wide range of analytic approaches for designing policy and planning interventions for shrinking cities and distressed communities. These include collaborative planning, social media, civic technology, game design, analytics, decision modeling and decision support, and spatial analysis. The authors present case studies of three US cities addressing shrinkage and decline, with a focus on issues of social justice, democratization of knowledge, and local empowerment. Proposed as a solution is an approach that puts community engagement and empowerment at the center, combined with data and technology innovations. The authors argue that decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative data and analytic methods, implemented through accessible and affordable technologies, and based on notions of social impact and social justice, can enable residents to play a leading role in the positive transformation of shrinking cities and distressed communities.

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CHAPTER 1
Planning, Technology, and Shrinking Cities
1.1 Introduction: Policy, Planning Context, and Book Goals
Municipal decline or urban shrinkage has been the subject of extensive academic research1 and many recent stories in the popular press.2 In the United States, a relatively large number of cities and regions have experienced increased distress over the past two decades, according to measures relating to population and economic decline, or vacant and abandoned housing. These changes have significantly reduced the quality of life for residents: extreme examples include severely degraded infrastructure in Flint, Michigan, and social unrest in Baltimore, Maryland. Declining urban centers usually fall into two large categories: the “legacy” cities of the postindustrial regions of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest that have dealt with industrial transition and suburban flight for many decades now (Mallach and Brachman 2013), as well as cities in the Sunbelt that have borne the brunt of the post-2008 foreclosure crisis and related abandonment of housing in suburban and suburban-style subdivisions (Hollander 2011). These trends are not limited to the United States: cities in Europe, Asia, and Africa also confront decline and shrinkage (Stohr 2004).
The reverse of the coin is that many other cities have become increasingly attractive over the past decade, as millennials and baby boomers alike recognize the benefits of easily accessible jobs and cultural amenities associated with urban living (Wieckowski 2010; Frey 2014; Nielson 2014). A recent best-selling book by Fallows and Fallows (2018) has made a highly persuasive case for the social and economic value of smaller cities, even in decline. Recent U.S. Census data is relatively ambiguous, although it seems to indicate a moderate resurgence in suburban population growth rates as compared to traditional cores (Frey 2017). It is thus probably best to not oversell any one storyline regarding central city versus suburban growth, and overall trends of urban growth versus decline (even more so in the wake of the 2020 coronavirus crisis).
Community distress is usually a corollary of the dynamic of shrinking cities (Beauregard 2009). To provide an example, the Economic Innovation Group (2018) measures community distress using an index composed of seven equally weighted components:
1.the percentage of the adult population without a high school diploma;
2.the housing vacancy rate;
3.the percentage of adult nonelderly population not currently employed;
4.the poverty rate;
5.the median household income as a percent of the state’s median household income;
6.the percent annual change in the number of jobs; and
7.the percent annual change in the number of business establishments.
By comparing distress measures between 2007 and 2011, the depths of the Great Recession, and 2012 and 2016, an era of sustained economic recovery, the EIG found evidence of migration from distressed zip codes toward more prosperous ones (the bottom and top quintiles according to the Distressed Community Index). For troubled areas, this population shift resulted in a lag in jobs recovery and business creation, higher housing vacancy rates and educational attainment, and a greater proportion of majority-minority communities—in brief, an even more concentrated degree of distress.
Vast and increasing inequality represents another particularly concerning trend in U.S. urban affairs. Studies have documented increasing gaps in income (Institute for Policy Studies 2018a), wealth (Institute for Policy Studies 2018b), household debt (Coibion et al. 2014), access to quality education (Semuels 2016), and life expectancy and other measures of physical, mental, and social well-being (Institute for Policy Studies 2018c; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2016). These gaps, which often cut across race, class, gender, and ethnicity lines, present structural barriers to opportunity for many Americans. In fact, a recent book (Harris and Curtis 2018) on the work of the 1968 Kerner Commission, which warned that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” concluded, rather dispiritingly, that the social problems documented fifty years ago remain prevalent today.
Inequalities of opportunity are highly spatially concentrated, in particular in central city cores, as well as in older suburbs that have seen deindustrialization and large employer decline; very few U.S. cities enjoy both high levels of prosperity and low levels of spatial inequality. When there is some spatial equality, it tends to be at the bottom: shrinking cities tend to be in regions that also score poorly on the Distressed Community Index.
We believe there are opportunities to address municipal decline issues by using tools of planning and policy design that take advantage of recent innovations in data analytics and information technology. In contrast to recent work by one of us (Hollander 2018) that elucidates a research agenda for shrinking cities based on retrospective and exploratory analysis common to applied social sciences, we emphasize here prospective and prescriptive analyses. These are intended to provide stakeholders with specific, evidence-based responses using principles of decision sciences applied to spatial data. These responses are rooted in principles of inclusion, engagement, empowerment, and advocacy with, by, and for localized and traditionally underrepresented communities. Our book describes promising examples of data-driven decision making for shrinking cities and distressed communities, and hints at new applications that can leverage data and technology for greater positive impacts. We argue that decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative data and analytic methods, implemented through accessible and affordable technologies, and based on notions of social impact and social justice, can enable residents to play a leading role in the positive transformation of their distressed communities.
Cities certainly differ according to their ability to rebound from a period of decline; while some may regain population as local housing and labor markets resume growth (sometimes with help from foreclosure response strategies that help stabilize troubled communities), others may require more extensive and coordinated efforts across government, private sector, and nonprofit actors to achieve regeneration. For some cities, “regeneration” may not aim at demographic gains but rather at moderating levels of population decline, new land uses and distributions of existing population, and an acceptance that the city as it evolves may not regain the level of activity and visibility that it had in the past.
The faces of decline, stabilization, and regeneration are quite varied. In Cleveland, researchers explore ways to encourage temporary uses of abandoned buildings and vacant land such as arts programming, recreational events, “pop-up” shops, and community visioning in anticipation of more permanent uses (Schwartz 2014). New Orleans, a city that lost hundreds of thousands of residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, has gained many new residents who tend to be whiter and more affluent than those who left (some of whom are unlikely to ever return); the “Big Easy” wrestles with booming housing markets alongside stagnating flood-ravaged neighborhoods (Sayre 2015). In Detroit, bankruptcy and a politically controversial land use plan that limits investments in certain distressed neighborhoods coexists with recent growth in the downtown core (Bradley 2013; Gallagher 2013; Detroit Future City 2012; Kinney 2016). In Baltimore, recent city-led initiatives (notably “Vacants 2 Value” and “Growing Greener”) have resulted in revitalized antivacancy actions (Thomas 2016), though popular unrest associated with a case of police violence has complicated its fight against blight (Eversley 2016).
In an exploration of gentrification, Evan Moskowitz (2017) argues that investment strategies driven by the needs of elites in government, non-profits, and for-profit companies may indeed result in overall gains in measures of municipal health, but these gains may mask starkly different levels of municipal services and business growth between certain targeted communities, with white and affluent incomers on one side, and low-income and predominantly minority communities on the other. Regeneration is a dynamic that may be broader than community-level gentrification. Many states have economically booming urban centers surrounded by pockets of postindustrial decay: in Massachusetts, Boston is doing better than ever, relying on its leadership position in the fields of higher education, biotechnology, and pharmaceutics, while on the edges of its metropolitan region, older industrial towns like Lawrence, New Bedford, and Fall River face significant barriers to economic opportunity (Frank 2016a). The median household income for Massachusetts in 2014 was $67,846: but this measure masks wide variations in income (Rocheleau 2015). Boston’s suburbs, comprising about a quarter of the state, generally have a median household income of over $100,000, going as high as $201,200 for Weston, while similar figures for Lawrence, New Bedford, and Fall River were $34,496, $36,813, and $33,763, respectively (Rocheleau 2015). The large disparities in such measures of economic health between towns that are thirty to sixty miles away from each other make the notion of a single “region” only a geographic label; its communities represent different socioeconomic universes.
Such patterns recur in many other states across the country. In Ohio, Columbus is booming, while Cleveland, Toledo, and Youngstown are among the nation’s fastest shrinking cities. In Illinois, Chicago is gaining population, while Rockford and Decatur continue to lose population; New York City is as wealthy as ever, while upstate New York is struggling to offer jobs, and its population is slowly drifting away. States often have a center that has gained from the transformations of the past two decades, to the detriment of many of their other towns. There are, however, exceptions: Michigan’s largest city, Detroit, has lost even more people than its other struggling communities, such as Flint and Dearborn (United States Census Bureau 2015a). Amazon’s recent competition among cities to host its second headquarters (“HQ2”; see Kopp 2018) was expected to result in a high-profile industrial siting generating tremendous growth in housing, ancillary businesses, education, and infrastructure in or near a city center. Indeed, the recent choice of Crystal City, in Virginia’s Arlington County as the site of HQ2 (Banister 2020) is expected to generate 25,000 jobs in exchange for $573 million in public incentives. But without concerted regional planning, intraregional inequalities may persist or even increase.
Urban shrinkage in its many dimensions cannot be dissociated from the process of globalization and the arrival of the “innovation” economy, resulting in investments shifted at ever-accelerating speed away from spaces seen as marginal for the information society. Urban shrinkage may also be associated with changes in migration patterns resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, trends associated with shrinkage need not automatically translate into decline: the resilience of various territories can be mitigated or exacerbated by many different urban, social, and economic policies a...

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