New Geography

Tag: Detroit

  • The Unrise of the Creative Working Class

    Scarcity leads to creativity out of necessity. That’s the pop culture meme at least. Think “starving artist,” or the survivors in Survivor. The thinking has penetrated the business culture as well. For example, in the shadow of the 2008 recession, Google founder Sergey Brin, in a letter to his shareholders, writes: “I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge.”

    But a recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Ivy League psychologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, states otherwise. Through years of investigative research, the authors found that people operating from a bandwidth of scarcity don’t have the luxury of preemptive thought. Rather, being in survivor mode saps a person’s cognitive reserve.

    “Think about being hungry,” says Shafir in a piece in Pacific Standard. “If you’re hungry, that’s what you think about. You don’t have to strain for years—the minute you’re hungry, that’s where your mind goes.” The mental preoccupation extends to unpaid utility bills, debt, or, more generally, anything that’s life-pressing, he adds. The effect drains resources from a person’s “proactive memory”.

    Think of the absence of scarcity, then, as the freedom to think, visualize, and create. The results of Mullainathan and Shafir’s findings have implications for cities. Specifically, it’s widely theorized that cities must innovate to survive, and it is a city’s creative reservoir—which is dependent on the size of its educated workforce—that will nurture innovation. This is how  a city of soot can evolve into a city of software, not unlike what has occurred in Pittsburgh.

    But what about  Rust Belt cities struggling with high rates of poverty? Over 36 percent of Detroit’s 700,000 plus are below the poverty line. In Cleveland, the poverty rate is 33 percent of nearly 400,000. The national poverty rate is 14 percent.  This is a ridiculous amount of brain capacity consumed by unforgiving reality.  No wonder Detroit inches to get a leg up. The feral dogs, abandoned houses, and creditors looking for money have eaten up the capability to envision. Hence, the collective exasperation, and the bankruptcy death spiral.

    What will save the Clevelands and Detroits? The most prescribed cure is to find a way to attract more educated people. This has led cities across the country to compete for the vaunted “creative class” professional demographic. To urban theorist Richard Florida, to get creative types a city must have “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer or between creativity and its creators.”

    According to Florida, a city needs to know it is on stage,and compete for the attention of a select demographic. In theatre parlance, this is called “capturing the audience experience.”  In urban place-making parlance it is called  “principles of persuasion” that emphasize novelty, contrast, surprise, color, etc.

    Robin_Williams_779552

    In other words, cities must become the collective embodiment of Robin Williams.

    Then, once you get your audience, you just watch them go,  says Florida, as creativity is “a social process.”  Creativity is bred by “the presence of other creative people.”  The scarcity of creativity in a poor city hypothetically gets filled up by the big-bang spontaneity of two creative types talking, neurologically egged on, no doubt, by a festival performer on stilts in a clown suit sauntering before them.

    If this strategy sounds like an overly simplified way to change what ails Detroit and Cleveland, it’s because it is. In fact Florida himself acknowledged this, stating in Atlantic Cities that, “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits [to the poor].”  In fact, because housing costs rise, it  makes the lives of lower- and middle-income people worse.

    But cities keep revitalizing this way because it is a feel-good prescription that is politically palatable. Who hates art, carnivals, drinking, and eating?  Displays of abundance provide the incentive to look the other way. Writes Thomas Sewell, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics”.

    Where does that leave the millions operating on the wrong side of scarcity? Florida’s answer is for cities to somehow convince corporate America to pay their service workers more. While admirable, I doubt Daniel Schwartz, CEO of Burger King, is listening.

    Another option would be refocusing the lens through which modern urban revitalization is viewed. The default setting is to compete for scarcity of the educated elite. Instead, we should alleviate the scarcity from the struggling.  But flipping this script requires cities to give up on the idea that there is some audience that will save them. It is a city’s people who ultimately ruin or save themselves.

    In the meantime, the urban play continues. Cleveland is directing $4 million dollars of its casino windfall profits into the creation of an outdoor chandelier  that will hang at an intersection outside of Playhouse Square, the city’s theater district. The design, evoked by chandeliers inside the Playhouse itself, is intended to blur the line between drama and reality, and will “add glittery outdoor glamour to a district that tends at times to look gray and lifeless,”  according to architecture critic Steven Litt–all the while making the intersection “feel like a giant theater lobby”.

    But the script on Cleveland’s streets is one of hardship, not glittery glamour. Here’s hoping the outdoor chandelier illuminates that scarcity to those walking beneath it.

    This piece was originally published in Belt Magazine.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Lead photo by David Shvartsman.

  • Rust Belt Chic And The Keys To Reviving The Great Lakes

    Over four decades, the Great Lakes states have been the sad sack of American geography. This perception has been reinforced by Detroit’s bankruptcy filing and the descent of Chicago, the region’s poster child for gentrification, toward insolvency.

    Yet despite these problems, the Great Lakes’ future may be far brighter than many think. But this can only be accomplished by doubling down on the essential DNA of the region: engineering, manufacturing, logistics, a reasonable cost of living and bountiful natural resources. This approach builds off what some local urbanists, notably Jim Russell, have dubbed “rust belt chic.”

    With a population of 58 million, the Lakes region boasts a $2.6 trillion economy equal to that of France and far larger than the West Coast’s. (We define the region geographically as comprising the western ends of New York and Pennsylvania, northeastern Minnesota, and Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.) Despite the growth in auto manufacturing in the South, the Great Lakes region still accounts for the vast majority of jobs in the resurgent industry, now operating at record levels of capacity.

    Since 2007, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have ranked among the top five states for growth in industrial jobs, adding a half million new manufacturing jobs since 2009.

    To build on this progress the region needs to focus on its human assets. This starts with by far the nation’s largest concentration of engineers, some 318,000, which stems from the oft unappreciated fact that manufacturing employs the majority of scientists and engineers in the nation. It also accounts for almost 70% of corporate research and development. This includes disciplines such as mechanical engineering, which according to a recent EMSI study, has enjoyed steady job and income growth over the past 20 years.

    Another critical asset is the concentration of skilled trades, the workers most sought after by employers, according to a recent Manpower survey. To keep this advantage, the area needs to focus on educating its workforce — particularly in neglected inner city neighborhoods — with skill training for jobs that actually exist and are expected to grow. This is already occurring in some states, such as Ohio.

    To be sure, traditional manufacturing jobs, particularly for the unskilled and semi-skilled, likely will never come back in large numbers. But the earnings level for skilled workers will remain well above the national average, and may increase even further as shortages develop.

    Some dismiss such blue-collar strengths as a critical weakness. They suggest that area residents might decamp for places like Silicon Valley where they can find livelihoods cutting hair and providing other personal services for the digerati.

    Of course, no sane Great Lakes leader would endorse this approach in public, but many, instead of embracing “rustbelt chic” prefer to recreate a faux version of America’s left coast. This obsession goes back at least a decade, reaching its most risible level during the time of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Her strategy focused on turning its cities — including Detroit — into “cool” burgs.

    This clearly did little to turn around either already beleaguered state or cities; “cool” did not save Detroit from bankruptcy. Indeed cool represents just one variation in a myriad of Rust Belt elixirs, including casinos, convention centers, “and creative class oriented arts districts. Virtually all the strategies being adopted in Detroit have already been applied in Cleveland, including by the same entrepreneur, Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert, with very little tangible economic benefit.

    Yet despite this history, Detroit — the poster child of public malfeasance — once again is pinning its hopes on luring the “creative class” to Motor City. It starts with the usual stab at subsidizing housing, office and retail around the central core. This is being jump-started by taking Quicken Loans jobs already in the area’s suburbs, meaning little net regional advantage.

    Even more absurd, Michigan taxpayers are being asked to pony up to as much as $440 million for a new stadium in Detroit for the Red Wings hockey team. In contrast to this beneficence, many remaining established, older smaller neighborhood businesses — many of them deeply entrenched in the Rust Belt economy — get stuck with ever higher tax bills and reduced levels of public service.

    To be sure, this approach can succeed in building hipster cordon sanitaire — a miniaturized but utterly derivative urban district — that can be shown to investors and visiting, and usually core-centric, journalists. It also can enrich speculators and those politicians who service them, but represents a marginally effective means of reviving the city, much less the regional, economy.

    Instead of chasing hipsters , Cleveland urban strategist Richey Piiparinen suggests cities such as his rebuild their economies from the ground up, tapping the strong industrial skills, work ethic and resilient culture deeply embedded in the region. Large factories may not return en masse to Cleveland, Detroit or Chicago, but a strong industrial economy and a culture embracing hard work could stir growth in service-related fields as well.

    Geography and location provide other opportunities . The area’s natural resources — the Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water — constitute a profound competitive advantage against drought stricken economies in the Inland West, the southern Great Plains and parts of the Southeast. Water is an essential element in many industrial processes, including fracking, a serious issue in parts of the Rust Belt. Miles of attractive coastline could be used to lure not only factories, but high-tech businesses, tourists and educated professionals who can choose their location.

    The Great Lakes also are a natural conduit for the $250 billion trade with Canada, with its vast resource-based economy and growing population . Instead of funding better bars, art galleries and sports venues, or hoping to attract tourists and conventioneers to traipse to Cleveland in December, what the region really needs, noted a recent Brookings report, is better infrastructure, such as bridges, ports, freight rail and roads.

    Critical too are the region’s strong engineering schools. Of the nation’s top 10, four — Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana — are located in the Rust Belt. The Great Lakes may not be home to the Ivy League, but it remains the nursery of practical applied intelligence.

    Emerging demographic trends could also play a positive role. The millennial generation will soon be approaching the age when they wish to start businesses, get married, have children and buy homes. A good target would be those seeking a single-family home and a reasonable cost of living; both are increasingly difficult to attain in much of the Northeast and coastal California where the cost of housing, even adjusted to income, can be easily two to three times higher.

    Indeed, despite decades of demographic stagnation, the region already boasts higher percentages of people under 15 than the Northwest, the Northeast (including New York) and has about the same percentage of kids as the rapidly growing Southeast. For a new generation, the Great Lakes could emerge as a destination, not a place to avoid.

    This requires the region becoming more attractive to newcomers, whether from abroad or within the country. As urban analyst Aaron Renn suggests, the Great Lakes has to become more culturally open to outsiders and immigrants. Cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit were once magnets for immigrants from Europe and people coming from America’s rural hinterlands, notably the south.

    Restoring appeal to outsiders does not mean denying the region’s proud past, and throwing away its historic assets, but instead focusing on its core values. For many reasons — geography, weather, history — the region cannot remake itself into California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor. Instead the Great Lakes can best restore its legacy as an aspirational region by focusing on the very real things that constitute its historic DNA.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Great Lakes map by BigStock.

  • Root Causes of Detroit’s Decline Should Not Go Ignored

    Recently Detroit, under orders from a state-appointed emergency manager, became the largest U.S. city to go bankrupt. This stirred predictable media speculation about why the city, which at 1.8 million was once America’s 5th-largest, declined in the first place. Much of the coverage simply listed Detroit’s longtime problems rather than explaining their causes. For example a Huffington Post article asserted that it was because of “racial strife,” the loss of “good-paying [sic] assembly line jobs,” and a population who fled “to pursue new dreams in the suburbs.” Paul Krugman, who has increasingly become America’s dean of misguided thinking, downplayed the city’s pension obligations, instead blaming “job sprawl” and “market forces.” The implication is that Detroit’s problem just arose organically from structural economic changes, and within decades somehow produced a city of abandoned homes and unlit streets.

    But a closer look suggests that Detroit’s problems, which include 16% unemployment, 36% poverty, and 60% population decline, were self-inflicted by a half-century of government excess. Thomas Sowell nicknamed this excessiveness the “Detroit Pattern”, and defined it as the city’s habit for “increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions.” These three problems have proven as instrumental to decline as the “Big Three” automakers once were to Detroit’s rise. Analyzing their background, and potential for reform, could expedite the city’s turnaround.

    The foremost measure would be addressing taxes. Currently Detroit has one of America’s largest tax burdens for major cities, offering notoriously bad services in return (police response times average 58 minutes, and 40% of streetlights do not work). Its property tax rates are the nation’s highest, exceeding 4% for some buildings. This has caused particular disinvestment in the city’s large stock of abandoned homes, some of which sell for below $1000, but are avoided since they get assessed at far above their actual worth, leaving owners with inflated tabs.

    Detroit could also help its cause with a business climate that better encouraged entrepreneurship. For decades it has done the opposite, championing a growth policy that mirrored the city’s overly-centralized private sector. It has gambled—with tax breaks, subsidies, and extensive eminent domain—on stadiums, casinos, office towers, factories, and a downtown monorail, only to find that these didn’t produce nearly the anticipated benefits. Meanwhile it has squelched small businesses, which are generally better at creating jobs, with a cobweb of protectionist regulations—on food trucks, taxis, movie theaters, and so on. This was summarized in economist Dean Stansel’s recent “economic freedom” study, which ranked the regulatory and tax climates of U.S. metro areas. In a field of 384, Detroit placed 345th.

    These regulations have emanated from Detroit’s vast, union-controlled public bureaucracy. Recent debate about this bureaucracy has focused on retirement benefits, which apologists note are far less generous than in other big cities. But this does not detract from the sheer number of retirees, which at 20,000 are nearly twice Detroit’s existing public workforce, and account for obligations of potentially half the city’s $18 billion debt.

    Less discussed is the way unions protect existing workers also, by stifling needed service reforms. When a philanthropist offered $200 million in 1999 to open the city’s first charter school, which would require changes to state law, the Detroit Federation of Teachers organized a work stoppage to protest in Lansing, ultimately causing withdraw of the donation. Various other city unions (which total 47) have resisted reduction or privatization of water utilities, trash-pickup, street lighting, and transportation. This is despite the city having proven wildly incompetent at providing these services itself, a point made recently in the Wall Street Journal by a former transportation chief. He claimed that unionization of the 1,400-employee DDOT had ensured worker protections for rampant absenteeism and poor performance, thus creating a climate in which 20% of scheduled buses did not arrive. Similar protections from firings and layoffs existed in other city departments, he wrote, perhaps explaining why Detroit, at over 10,000 workers, remains one of the most overstaffed big cities in America, while managing to do so little with them.

    Of course many would argue that Detroit’s post-World War II racial conflicts were the real reasons for decline. More plausible is that these conflicts were inflamed by that era’s top-down government policies, which became all the worse when enforced by seemingly prejudiced officials. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s white mayors steamrolled roadways through functioning black neighborhoods like Black Bottom, and housed the displaced in dangerous, high-rise government projects. Funding for this and other “urban renewal” came from federal programs like President Johnson’s Model Cities, and using Detroit as a flagship, was meant to modernize aging urban communities. But the programs instead fragmented them, including a Detroit black population that, according to Sowell, then had 3.4% unemployment and “the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country.” For them this “renewal” created a housing shortage, and along with discrimination and police brutality, inspired riots in 1967.

    These riots killed dozens, injured nearly 1,200, and along with the ones inspired by Martin Luther King’s assassination, immediately spurred a mass white exodus. This cemented the demographic changes needed for both the 1973 election of Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, and subsequent policies that instead targeted the city’s whites. A paper by economist Edward Glaeser argues that this was done intentionally by Young as a way to further drive political rivals to the suburbs, and increase the share of his poor black voting base. He did this, writes Glaeser, by cutting off services in white neighborhoods, imposing onerous taxes, and displacing thousands of Polish households for a GM factory in the Poletown neighborhood. This led to further white exodus and diminishment of the tax base.

    All these are examples of rampant abuses, under both black and white leadership, that have resulted because of Detroit’s notorious governing “pattern.” But one silver lining of its bankruptcy is the opportunity for structural change. This could occur by channeling the urban reforms—from charter schools, to defined-contribution pensions, to looser permitting, to plain-old lower taxes—that have helped other U.S. cities the last two decades. If these reforms can thrive in the Motor City than they probably can anywhere, turning it at the very least back into a functioning city, and at best into a reemerging economic star.

    Scott Beyer is traveling the nation to write a book about revitalizing U.S. cities. His blog, Big City Sparkplug, features the latest in urban news. Originally from Charlottesville, VA, he is now living in different cities month-to-month to write new chapters.

    Photo by Kate Sumbler.

  • What Detroit Has Really Taught America

    Nothing. Seriously. Not a damn thing.

    Oh, the occasion is being used to opine on our state of affairs, but nothing is structurally taking shape in America to prevent the next Detroit from occurring. In fact, Detroit is occurring every day inside most of us. We are all getting bankrupt in so many little ways.

    America is in a precarious position. Our economy is based on consumption. Our consumption is based on our livelihood. Our livelihood is based on our employment, and in our jobless “recovery”, there just aren’t many decent jobs. With technological advances, it is likely to get worse. Writes columnist Bill McClellan in the St. Louis Dispatch:

    [T]he day is coming when trucks will drive themselves. People in the trucking industry say it is inevitable. Within a decade or so, truck drivers will be obsolete. There are currently 5.7 million truck drivers.

    McLellan continues, discussing an email he received from a reader:

    Pat B. is a conservative businessman. He wrote, “Regarding the truck drivers, I think the bigger issue is how society is going to deal with nonproductive people vs. productive people. Automation will allow ‘productive’ people to be much, much more productive than the ‘nonproductive’ people. Theoretically, a very small segment of the population could produce almost everything. How will we deal with this?”

    Good question. Currently, Detroit is ground zero of it. So much busted there, so many poor, so many with blue- and white-collar skills in the new no-collar economy. Do we let the city die on the vine? Au revoir Rust Belt?

    Well, a consensus is becoming clear. We need to “First World” Detroit. Get it and other post-industrial cities on the right path.

    Enter New York.

    Courtesy of Smithsonian

    In the late 1970′s, New York City was in trouble: the threat of bankruptcy, and the Bronx was on fire, literally, with broadcaster Howard Cosell famously being attributed to saying “There it is ladies and gentleman, The Bronx is burning” as cameras panned to a fire in an abandoned elementary school during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. Put simply, the 1970’s NYC was not unlike the modern day Detroit—insolvent fiscally, aesthetically, and, in many respects, sociologically. “Broken youth stumbling into the home of broken age,” wrote Frank Rose in the Village Voice.

    But with crisis comes opportunity, particularly for those who can afford to be opportunistic. Specifically, in the book by Paul Harvey entitled The Brief History of Neoliberalism, the crossroads of NYC’s late-70’s fiscal crisis gets center stage. Here, the groundwork for the city’s co-optation had been laid for some time, with the 1960’s urban crisis increasing municipal desperation. Financial institutions smelled blood, and they saw occasion. What happened dictates urban redevelopment to this day. Writes Harvey (h/t Cleveland Frowns):

    At first financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but in 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget.

    Harvey states that the new budget strategy amounted to “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government”, one that would subsequently de-emphasize social and physical infrastructure for the priority of a “good business climate”. Harvey continues:

    But the New York investment bankers did not walk away from the city. They seized the opportunity to restructure it in ways that suited their agenda…This meant using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business…coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises…[T]he investment bankers reconstructed the city economy around financial activities, ancillary services such as legal services and the media…and diversified consumerism (with gentrification and neighborhood ‘restoration’ playing a prominent and profitable role). City government was more and more construed as entrepreneurial rather than a social democratic or even managerial entity.

    Fast forward to now and you can see how this framework has made modern day New York. A billionaire mayor. Impressive wealth accumulation. Lower crime. Gentrifying areas that are spreading into many parts of the city. The scene in the Bronx:

    The South Bronx is on the upswing and this new project proves it,” said Kathy Zamechansky, President of KZA Realty Group. “A gleaming new building is just what this area needs to add life and vitality to a neighborhood…

    All good, right?

    Not exactly. Commoditizing public welfare has come with very personal costs. Particularly, New York City’s economic sphere epitomizes the worsening two-tier system in America, with one study finding that “three of the four most [income] segregated metropolitan areas [in the country] are in the New York City region”. In the city itself, the income disparity rates from subway stop to subway stop are at Namibian levels. “Get off at Chambers St., and you’re averaging $205,192,” writes Fishbowl NY. “Hop off at Kingsbridge Rd., and you’re at $18,610”.

    Income Disparity New York

    There is cost to personal freedom as well, with Mayor Bloomberg’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics ruled as a violation to the constitutional rights of minorities. The increase in police stops have been significant since Bloomberg took office, going from 160,851 in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011. In a 195-page response just released, the federal judge wrote: “No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life”.

    Heck, there’s even consternation from the city’s creative types. Specifically, New York’s legacy of nurturing the next generation of thought is being homogenized by the fact that elites talking to elites creates for shitty cultural capital. Writes Gawker’s Hamiliton Nolan on how the influx of money is turning the city into “a game of urban Candy Crush”, “Everything is an orgy of destruction! Who’s hip now? Nobody!” Echoes creative class troubadour Lena Dunham:

    It’s news to no one that the middle class and up-and-coming talent struggle in this city. As a result, New York is seeing an exodus of its creative population. As Dunham says, “If they struggle for too long, they’re leaving New York for Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and in some cases, even Tampa. We can’t have our generation’s Patti Smith moving to Tampa. That’s going to seriously f*ck our shit up.

    But the bridge had been crossed. Not simply for the reasons Dunham fingers, but because New York City is the head of a teetering set of bones. Writes eminent economic scholar Joseph Stiglitz in a recent essay entitled “The Wrong Lesson from Detroit’s Bankruptcy”:

    Rather than deal purposefully with this changing economic landscape with useful policies encouraging the growth of other industries, our government spent decades papering over the growing weaknesses by allowing the financial sector to run amok, creating “growth” based on bubbles. We didn’t just let the market run its course. We made an active choice to embrace short-term profits and large-scale inefficiency.

    America does have an urban renewal program, but it is aimed more at restoring buildings and gentrification than at maintaining and restoring communities, and even at that, it is languishing.

    Which brings us back to Detroit. Consider it America’s “Back to the Future” moment. There is municipal bankruptcy. There is fiscal management being taken away from an elected government. There are financial institutions wreaking havoc on the middle class via a collective Alfred E. Neuman-like exasperation. There is the subsidy environment going full bore in the midst of economic trauma, with the Governor of Michigan giving the okay to Detroit billionaire Mitch Ilitch on his $650 million dollar publicly-subsidized hockey arena one day after signing off on the country’s largest city bankruptcy filing. And then there’s the gentrification-as-economic-development silver bullet, with real estate developer Dan Gilbert buying up downtown properties for the price of a song and then using the spatial grease of placemaking to fill his square feet with the rise of the creative class. “Stand up and gentrify: 7 days in Detroit” reads a series running in the The Windsor Star.


    “It was a face that didn’t have a care in the world, except mischief.” Quote from Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman.

    Taken together, the framework of Detroit’s progression is to simply go forth into who we are as a country—a group of people on a collision course with the inevitable failings of economic disparity, or more generally: a nation without good jobs.

    Should Detroiters be worried?

    Maybe. Reads the New York Observer: “Bloomberg Warns the Next Mayor Could Follow Detroit Into Bankruptcy”.

    Back to the future indeed.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Lead photo courtesy of Vice.

  • Humiliating Detroit

    As I’ve noted before, Detroit is all too frequently just a blank screen onto which people project their own personal bogeymen. So liberals see in Detroit racism gone wild, America’s comeuppance for its love affair with the automobile, and corporate greed. Conservatives see the ultimate end result of unions and where liberalism will take the US as a whole if it isn’t stopped.

    There’s a bit of truth in all of these. The left would have us believe that having Democrats in charge of the city for so long had nothing to do with where it is today. But they reality is, they’ve got to own their piece of blame. Detroit certainly hasn’t been a bastion of conservative policy, that’s for sure.

    On the other hand, Republicans should be aware that Detroit’s decline has been ongoing for quite a while, and there were definitely some mayors with R’s by their name who were in on the game. And economic forces shaped Detroit far more than they’d like to admit.

    But ultimately what we see today is the left furiously spinning about Detroit (for example, see the book “Detroit: A Biography”) and the right trying to use it as a poster child for everything they hate. Yet on the right I can’t help but observe a particularly mean streak in the commentary, one that’s positively gleeful about Detroit’s demise. It’s as if, not content with letting the results speak for themselves about what happened under Democratic rule, the right seems determined to humiliate Detroit, reveling in its pain. It’s schadenfreude on steroids.

    Let me highlight this. First Kurt Schlichter says that “Conservatives Should Point and Laugh As Detroit Dies.”

    The agonizing death of Detroit is cause for celebration. It’s the first of the liberal-run big cities and states to fall, and we should welcome its collapse with glee.

    Yeah, liberals, eventually you do run out of other people’s money.

    The blue state model is a terminal disease, and Detroit is its poster child. Only this is one telethon where we should pledge that we won’t pay a single dime to keep the progressive party going a single minute longer.

    Detroit represents the epitome of the blue state, Democrat machine liberalism that Barack Obama represents. Well, not one damn cent for Barry’s Kids.

    Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel. John Fund at the National Review is nowhere near vicious, but he does paint a target on Detroit’s art, basically arguing that the city should be forced to sell off its assets to satisfy creditors:

    What no one wants to do, apparently, is sell the city’s assets. The city has largely unused parks and waterfront property that could be opened to economic development. The Detroit Historical Museum has a collection of 62 vehicles, including an 1870 Phaeton carriage and John Dodge’s 1919 coupe, that is worth millions. But the biggest sacred cow is the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), one of the nation’s oldest and most valuable art museums. It has pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Rembrandt. The Institute also owns William Randolph Hearst’s armor collection and the original puppet from the children’s TV show Howdy Doody.

    The Detroit Free Press asked New York and Michigan art dealers to evaluate just a few of the 60,000 items in the Institute’s collection. The experts said the 38 pieces they looked over would fetch a minimum of $2.5 billion on the market, with each of several pieces worth $100 million or more. That would go a long way toward relieving the city’s long-term debt burden of $17 billion.

    Let me get this straight. Instead of Detroit being $17 billion in debt, let’s sell off everything left that makes Detroit viable and end up still $14.5 billion in debt and still bankrupt. (Though only a few items were evaluated, they were clearly the handful of most valuable ones. Howdy Doody ain’t Van Gogh). Oh, yeah, that will help – if your definition of help is bailing out banks who loaned money to a city everyone has known is a basket case for many, many years. If those banks expected the art to be sold, they should have made the city pledge it as collateral.

    Fund is right that Detroit does need to make tough choices about assets. I’ve made that argument myself. But the goal should be to create at a minimum a sustainably functional government and ensure the bankruptcy of the city of Detroit doesn’t undermine the broader region and state. Selling off secondary assets (and yes, Howdy Doody may be a good candidate) is worth pursuing if there’s cost/benefit. But saying that Detroit should sell off its regional cultural crown jewels is little more than an attempt to inflict counter-productive penance, to force humiliation upon the city. And it would also be completely unlike say a corporate Chapter 11 restructuring, which is designed to produce a viable firm on the other end and thus the most valuable assets are often retained.

    Of course, Detroit’s own residents make it easy to act this way. A group of protestors referred to the bankruptcy filing as a “declaration of war,” saying that outsiders aren’t entitled to any say or even get the money back they loaned the the city, saying instead “the banks owe us.”

    Still, have some compassion. It’s understandable Detroit’s residents are in pain and lashing out. Clearly they have tough medicine they haven’t reconciled themselves to taking. But there are better ways to respond to it. Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute took a more moderate path, suggesting that while a plain reading of Michigan’s constitution suggests it wouldn’t protect pensions in bankruptcy, there’s still reason to give pensioners some preferential treatment (thought not being made 100% whole, saying:

    Does this mean that retired city workers should take the same haircut as municipal bond holders? I really don’t think so. Anyone loaning money to the city of Detroit was knowingly taking the risk that the city might not repay; that’s why bonds issued by Detroit paid a higher yield than Treasury securities, which are assumed to be riskless. As with any risk investment, sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.

    City employees, on the other hand, exchanged services today — along with employee contributions to their pension plan — for benefits to be delivered in the future. Sure, employees should consider the financial stability of their employer in its ability to deliver what is promised, but city employees seem to be a qualitatively different group than municipal bond holders.

    This seems more rational type analysis and isn’t rooted in mean-spiritedness.

    Though eager to point out how Democratic policies and corrupt Democratic politicians helped propel Detroit headlong in bankruptcy (which is certainly a valid political claim to make), having a vengeful streak only shows Republicans behaving in a ways that’s as hard hearted as Democrats say they are.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile.

  • Detroit Bankruptcy: Missing the Point

    Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman tells us that “sprawl killed Detroit” in his The New York Times column.
    The evidence is characterized as “job sprawl” – that a smaller share of metropolitan area jobs are located within 10 miles of downtown Detroit than in the same radius from downtown Pittsburgh (see Note on Decentralization and “Job Sprawl”). It is suggested that this kept the city of Pittsburgh out of bankruptcy.

    Not so. The subject is not urban form; it is rather financial management that was not up to par. State intervention may have been the only thing that saved the city of Pittsburgh from sharing Detroit’s fate.

    Detroit and Pittsburgh: Birds of a Financial Feather

    The city of Pittsburgh had been teetering on bankruptcy for some time. In 2004, the city’s financial affairs were placed under Act 47 administration (the Financially Distressed Municipalities Act“) by the state of Pennsylvania. One of Act 47’s purposes is to assist municipalities in avoiding bankruptcy. A 2004 state ordered recovery plan summarized the situation:

    The City of Pittsburgh, already in fiscal distress, now stands on the precipice of full-blown crisis. In August 2003, the City laid off 446 employees, including nearly 100 police officers. City recreation centers and public swimming pools were closed, and services from police mounted patrol to salt boxes were eliminated. In October and November 2003, the City’s credit ratings were downgraded repeatedly, leaving Pittsburgh as the nation’s only major city to hold below-investment-grade “junk bond” ratings. With the City’s most recent independent audit questioning the City’s ability to continue as a going concern, a looming cash shortfall now threatens pension payments and payroll later this year. (emphasis added)

    The good news is that Act 47 has worked so well that the city could soon be released from state control. It may have helped that all of this was overseen by former Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, whose tough administration saved another abysmally-managed municipality when he was mayor of Philadelphia more than a decade before.

    Not everyone, however, is willing to grant that Pittsburgh has solved all its problems. Democratic candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, recently urged Harrisburg to not release the city from Act 47 control. According to Peduto, “the city is not out of the financial woods,” and “we’re still in the middle of it, and in fact we have an opportunity in the next five years to build a sustainable budget for at least a decade.” Given the strong Democratic majority in the city, Peduto will probably be the next mayor.

    The Key: Strong Management

    In Detroit’s case, the state dithered for years, jumping in only when it was too late. Maybe the “tough love” of a Michigan-style Act 47 could have saved Detroit.

    Meanwhile, best of luck to the Detroit bankruptcy court and Pittsburgh’s next mayor. Both were dealt a bad hand by predecessors who said yes to spending interests too often, to the detriment of residents and taxpayers.

    ——–

    Note on Decentralization and “Job Sprawl”

    The dispersed American metropolitan area has performed better than its mono-centric (downtown oriented) urban form of the past. American metropolitan areas are the most affluent in the world, and they are also the most decentralized. Decentralization of employment facilitates mobility, as economists Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson found 15 years ago. Work trip travel times are shorter and traffic congestion is less intense in US metropolitan areas than in similar sized metropolitan areas in Western Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia. At the same time, metropolitan areas around the world are themselves becoming more decentralized. The bottom line is that better mobility facilitates greater economic growth, which also reduces poverty.

    Comparing the “job sprawl” of Detroit and Pittsburgh not only misses the point; it also glosses over differences that render any comparison virtually meaningless.

    Detroit is Larger: The Detroit metropolitan area has nearly 60 percent more jobs than the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Other things being equal, this would mean that Detroit would cover more area than Pittsburgh. As a result, even if the employment densities were equal, a smaller percentage of the jobs would be within 10 miles of downtown Detroit and within 10 miles of downtown Pittsburgh.

    Nearly Half of Detroit’s 10 Mile Radius is in Canada and a Lake:But other things are not equal. Approximately 40 percent of the area within 10 miles of downtown Detroit is in Canada or in Lake St. Clair. Canadian jobs are appropriately excluded from the Detroit “job sprawl” numbers developed by the Brookings Institution (Figure), and no 10 mile radius comparison can thus be made to Pittsburgh.  None of the 10 mile radius from downtown Pittsburgh is in Canada and none of it is in a large lake.

    See Also: Peter Gordon’s Blog: Detroit

  • The Diminishing Returns of Large Cities: Population Growth Myths

    One of the big myths of the twentieth century is that large American cities are necessary and inevitable. Yet in reality growth has been dispersing to suburbs and smaller cities for the last two decades. As the decline of Detroit, once the country’s fourth largest city, reveals in all too harsh terms, being bigger is not always better.

    Yet the big city myth remains virtually unchallenged. A biased print media and a subsidized academic cartel are constantly singing the praises of big city life (as opposed to suburban or rural life). While American cities exhibited strong population growth in the early part of the twentieth century, recent Census numbers show America’s mega cities are growing below the national growth rate. According to the 2010 Census, San Antonio was the only city with a population of over 1 million people that grew above the national growth rate of 9.7%.   

    Years ago, scholar Milton Kotler wrote an important but much forgotten book on local government. Kotler showed what was behind the amazing growth numbers of the some big cities:

    Statistics show New York’s population increase from 1890-1900 to have been 2,096,370. This seems amazing, except that most of the increase came about with the annexation of Brooklyn, population 1,166,582. In short, its population grew at a rate far less than the increase by annexation.

    Municipalities are creations of the state legislature. In many cities, the boundaries changed to expand the power of cities along with their political class and related business rent-seekers. While some would argue about New York city’s population numbers, which has recovered from their lows, few would question Detroit’s long-term decline. As Detroit takes center stage line, the entire municipal bond market is about to take notice. Much is at stake here.

    Not only the economic foundation of a large American city but the concept that a creditor will get back its principal back.  The Detroit Free Press explains:

    Borrowing for Michigan cities could get more expensive in the future, if Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr’s restructuring plan is accepted by creditors and Chapter 9 bankruptcy is avoided, some bond experts caution.

    That’s because Orr’s plan would set a major precedent by treating all unsecured debt the same way — instead of giving a better payout or greater deference to general obligation bonds, sold for generations as safer investments backed by a city’s taxing authority.

    In Detroit, both the lack of checks and balances, and the maintenance of an engaged, informed public undermined the city’s fiscal health. Many Detroit citizens voted with their feet by exiting the corrupt system. With the middle class of all races deserting, the city of Detroit was ripe for looting of the taxpayers.

    In conclusion, it’s time for the informed public to realize many of our big cities are expensive, corrupt, and not redeemable. The Michigan Legislature should cut Detroit down to size. Perhaps they should consider de-annexation. It’s better to have Detroit become ten smaller municipalities. Of course there would be major political resistance for those who have made big money from Detroit’s decline. But without de-annexation, Detroit seems likely to remain on the brink of insolvency for a long-term since its political boundaries are too large for responsive governance and the crafting of unique solutions to its problems.

  • Detroit, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

    Thou wouldst fain destroy the temple! If thou be Jesus, Son of the Father, now from the Cross descend thou, that we behold it and believe on thee when we behold it. If thou art King over Israel, save thyself then!

    God, My Father, why has thou forsaken me? All those who were my friends, all have now forsaken me. And he that hate me do now prevail against me, and he whom I cherished, he hath betrayed me.

    Lyric excerpts from the Fifth and Fourth and Words, respectively, of the Seven Last Words of Christ orchestral work by Joseph Haydn.

    I’m pissed.

    Ever since the announcement late Thursday that the City of Detroit was indeed going to file for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection, the Internet has been overflowing with commentary on the matter. The commentary has come from all places and taken on by all comers – from the political left and right; from hard news and general interest sources. And all usually with the same scripted and lazy tripe about how Detroit reached its nadir:

    • Single-minded dependence on a collapsing auto industry doomed Detroit.
    • An inability to diversify economically doomed Detroit.
    • Public mismanagement and political corruption doomed Detroit.
    • An inability to effectively deal with its racial matters doomed Detroit.
    • The dramatic and total loss of its tax base doomed Detroit.

    That’s it, people, they seem to reason. The Motor City’s fall from grace is as simple as that. You do the things Detroit did, and you get what Detroit got. You defer decisions just as Detroit did, and you too will suffer the consequences. The speed with which the various articles on Detroit came out proved to me that many writers anticipated the announcement with at least a twinge of glee.

    As I’ve written before, Detroit’s narrative serves everyone else as the nation’s whipping boy, and that came through in the last couple of days:

    You can find Detroit in Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Philadelphia. You can find it in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus and Louisville. You can find it in Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas and Phoenix. You can even find it in Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. And yes, you can definitely find it in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. You can find elements of the Detroit Dystopia Meme™ in every major city in the country. Yet Detroit is the only one that owns it and shoulders the burden for all of them.

    But let’s leave that aside. I’m pissed because no one seems to acknowledge the central reason Detroit is filing for bankruptcy now. It has endured abandonment – white flight abandonment – on an absolutely epic scale. Before there was auto industry collapse, before there was a lack of economic diversity, before there was mismanagement and corruption, there was abandonment. People skirt and dance around the issue when they talk about the loss of Detroit’s tax base. What Detroit lost was its white people. The chart above illustrates how Detroit’s unique experience when compared to similar cities.

    Detroit is what happens when the city is abandoned. And frankly, there is a part of me that views those that abandoned Detroit with the same anger reserved for hit-and-run drivers – they were the cause of the accident, they left the scene of the crime, and they left behind others to clean up the mess and deal with the pain. What’s worse, so many observers seem to want to implicate those left behind – in Detroit’s case a large African-American majority community – for not cleaning up the mess or easing the pain. Their inflicted pain which they’ve made ours.

    White abandonment of Detroit did not start with the 1973 election of Coleman Young as mayor, or even the 1967 riots, yet those two events accelerated the process. And indeed, Detroit had a very unique set of circumstances that caused it to veer down a troubled path. The very first piece featured in my blog was about the land use and governing decisions that were made more than one hundred years ago in Detroit that literally set the city’s decline in stone. I identified eight key factors:

    • Poor neighborhood identification, or more broadly a poorly developed civic consciousness.
    • A housing stock of poor quality, cheap and disposable, particularly outside of the city’s traditional core.
    • A poorly developed and maintained public realm.
    • A downtown that was allowed to become weak.
    • Freeway expansion.
    • Lack of or loss of a viable transit network.
    • A local government organization type that lacked accountability at the resident/customer level.
    • An industrial landscape that was allowed to constrain the city’s core.

    Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic wrote perhaps one of the best recent articles I saw on Detroit when he acknowledged that even a half-century ago, journalists were predicting a dire future for the D. Take this quote Conor found from The Reporter, published October 31, 1957:

    The auto industry created modern Detroit simply as its dormitory and workshop, attracted polyglot millions to it, used it, and now threatens to abandon it. Civic consciousness played little part in the lives of the masses of Irish, German, Poles and Italians who flocked to Detroit in search of a Ford or Dodge or Packard pay check, and who settled there in islands of their own – any more than it played a part in the managements of Ford or Dodge or Packard themselves, or in the crowd of Negroes who also descended upon the city during the boom years of the Second World War… Indeed, it is remarkable that any sense of civic responsibility at all should have been generated in so rootless and transient a community.

    What can a city do when it finds its patron industry and its middle class moving out, leaving it a relic of extremes?… But urban deterioration offers at least one advantage. Once a city core has become as run-down as Detroit’s you can start to rebuild fairly cheaply.

    Yes, that is from 1957.

    The chart at the top of this article was done for an article I did more than a year ago, looking at U.S. Census data for several peer cities over the last seven decennial censuses. In it, I concluded that Detroit’s experience of abandonment was entirely unique:

    Between 1950 and 1970, the decline in Detroit’s white population was on the low end of the spectrum of cities on this list, but it was in the ballpark. Prior to 1970, Detroit and St. Louis were the white flight laggards. After 1970, the bottom fell out and Detroit stood alone. While there certainly are economic reasons white residents may have had for moving, this graph may lend credence to the twin theories of Motor City white flight – the 1967 riots and the 1973 election of Mayor Coleman Young.

    I’m not trying to persuade anyone of the invalidity of their decision to move from Detroit. There were good reasons and not so good reasons. I’m only trying to describe its impact relative to other cities. And where exactly are those white residents who left over the last 60 years? Certainly many have passed on. Some are currently in the Detroit suburbs or elsewhere in Michigan. Some are part of that great Detroit Diaspora that took them to New York, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland. There are clearly at least 1.5 million reasons why white residents left Detroit.

    But the fact is, had Detroit experienced white flight at the same combined rate as the other cities on this list, and not experienced any other changes, there would be nearly 350,000 more white residents today. Maybe 140,000 more households. Maybe more stable neighborhoods.

    Can you imagine that? An additional 350,000 residents means Detroit would still be a city with more than one million people. It would likely be viewed in the same way that a Philadelphia or Baltimore is now – challenged but recovering – instead of the urban dystopia it’s widely seen as today. What impact would that have had on the city’s economy? On the metro area’s economy? On the state’s economy? Or simply the city’s national perception?

    I’ve mentioned here on several occasions that the reason I chose the planning profession is because I grew up in Detroit during the 1970s. I looked around and saw a city with an inferiority complex and saw people leaving in droves. My naïve and childish thinking was, “instead of leaving the city, why don’t people stay and work to make it better?”

    Silly of me. Abandonment is the American way.

    Nonetheless, I view Detroit’s bankruptcy announcement positively. It acknowledges that its troubles are far deeper than most realize. It can be the springboard for fiscal recovery, a re-imagining of the city and an actual and complete revitalization. Detroit indeed is in uncharted waters, and its abandonment means that in many respects it could be viewed as a frontier city once again. I would not be surprised if, after restructuring and reorganization, after recapturing its innovative spirit, the city could see growth almost like it did at the beginning of the twentieth century, mimicking what, say, Las Vegas has done for the last 40 years. Even at this dark moment, Detroit has assets that are the envy of other cities.

    But let no one forget that it is abandonment that brought Detroit to this point.

    This piece originally appeared at The Corner Side Yard.

    Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years.  He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

  • What Detroit’s Bankruptcy Teaches America

    As has long been expected, the city of Detroit has officially filed for bankruptcy.  While many will point to the sui generis nature of the city as a one-industry town with extreme racial polarization and other unique problems, Detroit’s bankruptcy in fact offers several lessons for other states and municipalities across America.

    The Day of Reckoning Can Take Much Longer Than We Think to Come

    What’s most surprising about Detroit’s bankruptcy is not that it happened, but how long it took to get there. In authorizing the bankruptcy filing Gov. Rick Snyder talked about “60 years of decline.” He’s not joking. It’s been widely known that Detroit has been in trouble for a very long time.

    Time Magazine ran a 1961 story called “Decline in Detroit.”  Jane Jacobs described its lack of vitality in her 1961 classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:

    Researchers hunting the secrets of the social structure in a dull-gray district of Detroit came to the unexpected conclusion there was no social structure….Virtually all of Detroit is as weak on vitality and diversity as the Bronx. It is ring superimposed upon ring of gray belts. Even Detroit’s downtown itself cannot produce a respectable amount of diversity. It is dispirited and dull, and almost deserted by seven o’clock of an evening….Detroit today is composed of seemingly endless miles of low density failure.

    Moving from urban planning to economics. She wrote in 1969’s “The Economy of Cities”:

    This was the prosperous and diversifying economy from which the automobile industry emerged two decades later to produce the last of the important Detroit exports and, as it turned out, to bring the city’s economic development to a dead end.

    These are both well known, but the record of troubles in Detroit even predates this, going back at least to Life Magazine’s 1942 article “Detroit Is Dynamite” which gave a prescient warning to the city just a year before 1943’s race riot.

    For a city as uniquely troubled as Detroit to remain in serious decline for such an extended period of time before going bankrupt is a testament to the sheer resilience of cities. It also suggests that those predicting eminent doom for their own city unless it changes its ways are likely to end up as false prophets.

    Indeed, Detroit’s day of reckoning may not even yet be fully given that various challenges to the bankruptcy filing are expected. The fact that Detroit has limped along for so long suggests that cities may be able to survive nearly definitely as “zombie municipalities” similar to zombie banks. Though this may possibly end a Greek style crisis at some point, a very lengthy existence as the undead would seem to be possible.

    Decline Poisons Civic Culture and Sunders the Commonwealth

    Detroit also illustrates that once decline starts it sets in motion a toxic civic dynamic that makes the tough choices needed to turn things around nearly impossible. Just as growth begets growth, decline begets decline, and part of the reason is social dynamics.

    This comes about because in a city in decline – such as in late imperial Rome –people start thinking only about themselves and no longer come to see themselves as part of a greater enterprise or commonwealth. The city and suburbs, blacks and whites, taxpayers and unions no longer see their fortunes as linked. Rather than rising and falling together, it’s every man for himself.

    When the pie is growing, it’s easy to come to an agreement over how to divide it because everybody can get a bigger slice at the same time. But when the pie is stagnant or shrinking, zero-sum thinking takes over. To make a sacrifice is seen to in effect allow someone else to profit at your expense. Perhaps these dynamics were present latently before, but tough times bring out the real civic character.

    In Detroit’s case everyone from public employee unions who refuse to give up any of their benefits (and will no doubt fight to deny the bankruptcy filing) to suburban towns that would rather pretend the city does not exist have played a role in setting the disaster. With nobody willing to sacrifice for the greater good, prisoner’s dilemma logic results happen. You can see this playing out in nearly any troubled American city. By contrast, it seems to be healthier places like Denver that have managed to build stronger regional civic consensus. It’s simply easier in those places.

    Instead, Detroit chased conventional wisdom approaches and fad of the month type endeavors ranging from constructing the fortress-like Renaissance Center to the People Mover to former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s “Cool Cities” program, none of which did anything but generate hype. What they all had in common is a transfusion of subsidies to the city (and taking on debt) rather than building a consensus around addressing the real issues.

    America Doesn’t Learn Lessons From the Past

    The last thing Detroit teaches us is that America too often doesn’t learn from its mistakes. Detroit’s troubles have been evident for quite some time, yet it’s hard to see that many other post industrial cities have managed to carve out a different path. Rather, they pretended that Detroit’s civic was somehow unique due to its auto industry dependence – and managed to ignore other failed cities as well – while embarking on the same turnaround strategy via conventional wisdom and silver bullets.

    They have even managed to ignore failures much closer to home. Booming new suburbs can look just 5-10 miles down the road to see yesterday’s hot spot now turned into a festering mess of dead and dying malls, declining schools, increasing poverty, and falling home prices. Yet most of them are simply replicating the same pattern that is destined to fail financially over the long term in any region without either severe building restrictions or very high population growth.

    Sadly, none of these augur favorably for change. Detroit may continue to garner special international attention as a train wreck people can’t stop watching, but less spectacular slow motion civic failures seem likely to remain commonplace unless somebody finds a way to overcome these forces.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile.

    Photo by Kate Sumbler.

  • Observations on Urbanization: 1920-2010

    Ninety years have made a world of difference in the United States. Between 1920 and 2010, the nation’s population nearly tripled. But that was not the most important development. Two other trends played a huge role in shaping the United States we know today. The first trend was increasing urbanization, a virtually universal trend, but one which occurred earlier in the high income countries, while the other was a rapidly falling average household size. 

    National Trends

    In 1920, the United States had just crossed the same 50 percent urbanization threshold that China recently crossed. By 2000, the United States was 81 percent urban. 

    The second trend was even more significant. Average household size has fallen from 4.6 in 1920 to 2.6 by 2000, where it remained in the 2010 census. The result is that there are now 7.7 times as many households (Note 1) in urban areas as there were in 1920 (Figure 1).

    Urban Area Trends

    In the 1960s, the Urban Land Institute sponsored research by Jerome P. Pickard (Note 2) to replicate urban area population and density data going back to 1920, using the generalized criteria that had been developed by the Census Bureau for the 1950 and 1960 censuses.

    According to Pickard’s work, there were five urban areas in the United States with more than 1 million population in 1920. Unfortunately, the publication did not include Detroit, which undoubtedly had an urban area population of more than 1 million in 1920 (Note 3). In addition, Pickard found nine urban areas with populations between 500,000 and 1 million.

    By contrast, today there are 42 urban areas with more than 1 million population and 38 with between 500,000 and 1 million population.

    In 1920, the five major urban areas for which there is data had an overall population density of 8,400 per square mile (3,700 per square kilometer). This figure dropped continually, except for between 1940 and 1950 as to its present level (Figure 2) of approximately 3,100 per square mile (1,200 per square kilometer).

    However, caution is required, because before 2000, urban areas generally contained only complete municipalities. Two of the nation’s major urban areas had substantial rural (greenfield) expenses inside their core cities in 1920. This was most pronounced in the core city of New York, where most of Queens and most of Staten Island were undeveloped. Between 1920 and 2010, these two boroughs added more than 1.8 million population, most of which was on greenfield land, rather than the densification of the existing urban neighborhoods. This was in effect, suburban expansion within the city of New York. The same dynamics occurred, to a lesser degree in core cities such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

    Pickard finds a population density of 10,600 per square mile (4,100 per square kilometer) for the New York urban area in 1920. It had fallen by half to 5,300 per square mile (2,050 per square kilometer) by 2010.

    Core City and Suburban Growth

    Over the period, the bulk of the population growth (92 percent) was in the suburbs (Figure 3). Even that figure, however, understates the extent of suburban growth. As was above, the inclusion of rural areas as urban in municipalities appears to have been a major driver of the population increase in the city of New York, which added 2.4 million people between 1920 and 2010. Among the other five major urban areas, which includes an estimate for Detroit (Note 2), the core municipalities lost population in each case over the 90 years, though they all continued to grow at least until 1950.

    All of the six major urban areas in 1920 were in the Northeast or the Midwest. The fastest growing urban area from 1920 to 2010 among the six was Detroit, despite the huge losses of its core municipality (Figure 4). No municipality in the world of Detroit’s 1950 size (1.85 million) has lost so much of its population (1.1 million) in all of history. Yet, the Detroit urban area is estimated to have added approximately 2.6 million people to its urban area population since 1920, for an approximately 240 percent increase in population. The Detroit urban area peaked in 2000 at 160,000 higher than in 2010. The second fastest growing larger urban area was Chicago, at approximately 175 percent, while Philadelphia gained 146 percent and Boston 142 percent.

    Urban Areas with 500,000 to 1,000,000 Population in 1920

    The nine urban areas with 500,000 to 1,000,000 population in 1920 had a much lower population density, at 7,200 per square mile (2,800 per square kilometer). This figure, however, is artificially low because of the Los Angeles urban area’s extremely small 1920 density (1,700 per square mile or 650 per square kilometer). Just a few years before the 1920 census, Los Angeles had annexed the San Fernando Valley and other largely rural areas. As a result the city quadrupled in land area. Again, the inclusion of rural areas in the core city rendered Pickard’s urban area (and that of the Census Bureau to at least in 1950) unreflective of actual urban densities in Los Angeles.

    Milwaukee: More Dense than New York

    The Milwaukee urban area, with a population of 504,000 had the highest density in the nation, at 10,900 per square mile (4,200 per square kilometer), which was the last time before 1990 that the New York urban area was not the most dense major urban area. In 1990, the Los Angeles area became more dense than  the New York urban area. By 2000, both the San Francisco and the all-suburban San Jose urban area had also passed New York,

    Falling Densities and Causes

    The population density declines were substantial over the period, at from 63 percent to 70 percent. At the same time, falling household sizes created the requirement for more houses and household densities fell at a slower rate, 37 percent in the largest areas and 50 percent in the smaller metropolitan areas. There were other factors as well, such as more efficient manufacturing and commercial operations, that took more space, urban planning requirements in some metropolitan areas (such as Boston and Atlanta) that required larger than market  building lots (large lot zoning)and the general preference for more land and space on the part of consumers. The US has not been alone in this. The trend toward lower densities has been virtually universal, from Mumbai and Manila to Moscow and Milan.


    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    —-

    Note 1: Assumes the same average household size for urban and rural areas.

    Note 2: Jerome P. Pickard, Dimensions of Metropolitanism, Urban Land Institute, 1967.

    Note 3: In 1920, the municipality of Detroit had a population of 993,000 and a population density of 12,700 per square mile (4,900 per square kilometer). Wayne County, which includes Detroit, had a population of 1,170,000. The land area of the county was approximately nine times that of the municipality, nearly all of it rural. On that basis it is estimated that the urban area would have had no more than 1,100,000 residents.

    Photo: New York in the 1920s (Singer Building in foreground, Woolworth Building in the background). Photograph by the U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office (PIO).