Recommendation to shrinking cities: Think small

Gary’s declining population reveals a grim truth: The city’s population continues to decline at one of the highest rates statewide. Thus, the City of the Century can no longer lay claim as the largest municipality in the region.

The downward trend isn’t new for cities within the Rust Belt. The loss of industrial jobs is forcing cities to redefine themselves.

But the biggest hurdle the former giants must overcome is perception, says a national expert on shrinking cities.

“Gary certainly has terrible problems, but they’re not alone,” said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You look around the country in the Midwest, Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania that have very similar problems. How do they deal with it? The first thing is (realizing) I am a smaller city. I am a smaller city than I was, and I’m not going to become what I was 50 or 60 years ago.”

Success lies in figuring out how to become a better city by accepting the reality of a smaller population.

“In a way it seems simple,” Mallach said, “but it is really incredibly complicated.”

The pioneer in that realization is Youngstown, Ohio. A former steel stronghold, the city now has a population of about 67,000. The city is known for its Youngstown 2010 plan that adapted the city’s goals toward its reality. Instead of planning for growth, city officials outlined a strategy of how to scale the city back, move people from essentially ghost neighborhoods and cut down on infrastructure.

What the plan had in robust vision it lacked in practicality, say those tracking Youngstown’s attempts at a renaissance.

“The model is unproven so far,” said Dan Moulthrop, co-director of Ohio-based civic engagement organization Civic Commons. “They’re trying to do several things knowing they’re not going to get bigger but could get stronger. The challenge for Midwest industrial cities is not attracting population, but figuring out how to stay strong and accepting a shrinking population and making the most of it.”

Instead of relying on one city to provide the answer, shrinking cities need to look around the country for examples, Brooking Institution’s Mallach said. Flint, Mich., is home to the Genesee County Land Bank, which develops and sells vacant and abandoned properties. Cleveland has an urban design group and Reimagining Cleveland focusing on innovative uses of vacant lots. Blight has morphed into gardens, wetland restoration and a vineyard.

“Youngstown has hardly sort of turned itself around in any sense yet,” Mallach said. “It’s a good example of at least some of the things that people can do in terms of coming up with new economic activities ... You can look at a number of different cities that have demonstrated different ways of doing something or another well.”

Youngstown, Ohio

Limited resources and the city’s budget struggles fueled Youngstown residents’ call for elected officials to prioritize funding spent on neighborhoods. Earlier plans for the city relied on projected population increases up to 250,000 residents. Youngstown 2010 accepted and planned for population decline.

The vision was to identify areas of the city with high vacancy rates and try to get residents to move out of those areas. After the blocks were unoccupied, the idea was to demolish the houses and return the area to a natural green space, Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative representative Steve Novotny said.

“It was the whole idea of physically shrinking the city, entire city blocks, and turning it into green space. That has not happened at all. There are a couple of cases but not really to the scale the 2010 plan was hoping for and what people were hoping for,” Novotny said.

The plan also focused on creating industrial districts from old brownfield sites, reclaiming neighborhoods and building a vibrant downtown.

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. is trying to attract residents to “anchor neighborhoods” or those with the greatest assets and chance to regain occupancy. Last year, the group focused on Youngstown’s historic Idora neighborhood bordered by a large park in the city.

The neighborhood group is also charged with helping the city target its demolition efforts. A key objective in Idora was ensuring all 115 vacant lots in the neighborhood were clear of blight. Four community gardens were built.

“The idea is you take places with some kind of asset where people should want to live and enhance that,” said Liberty Merrill, a program coordinator for the group. “Certainly it was not choosing the stable neighborhoods. What has been done historically is the peanut butter approach. Spread it out evenly. Now we’re trying to focus and make visible change in neighborhoods and neighborhoods that have the potential to be self-sustaining.”

Yet, co-director of Youngstown State University’s Center for Working-Class Studies John Russo says Youngstown 2010 was never about the city’s neighborhoods.

“All the emphasis of 2010 was the idea of economic development and so changing the image of the city,” Russo said. “In some ways it has done that. But there was just no concern on neighborhoods, and most of the economic development that occurred that brought work into Youngstown, people have lived elsewhere.”

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams didn’t return a call for comment for this story.

In Northwest Indiana, one local proposal with resemblance to Youngstown’s shrinking strategy is Indiana University Northwest’s Midtown project.

Project coordinators want to develop the Broadway corridor from Fourth Avenue south to the IUN campus with affordable housing and public transportation, giving people the incentive to relocate, IUN associate professor Earl Jones said.

“In some ways it mirrors a shrinking kind of strategy,” Jones said, “without any focus on shrinking per se.”

Gary Mayor Rudy Clay still maintains the city’s census numbers don’t account for the city’s true population. City officials are examining whether census workers surveyed Gary less frequently than other areas.

“I personally knocked on doors and personally got involved in getting people to sign the forms,” Clay said, “so (I know) from personal experience that we have many, many more people.”

Flint, Mich.

Flint became a symbol of deindustrialization with the decline of the American automobile industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Youngstown, planners in Flint’s 1960s heyday thought the city of 200,000 would grow to 350,000 by 2000.

Today, Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, is home to around 111,000 people with one-third living in poverty. In 2002, the state of Michigan placed Flint into receivership for two years.

Around the same time, Michigan changed foreclosure laws to make it easier for governments to revitalize abandoned properties. Thus was born the Genesee County Land Bank, which encompasses the city of Flint. The idea is that tearing down large blocks of abandoned homes helps prevent crime and stabilize property values.

Land Bank Executive Director Douglas Weiland said the bank has a variety of functions. It has demolished about 1,200 blighted properties, rehabilitated many houses, sold side lots to existing homeowners, redeveloped several downtown buildings and sold about 2,100 properties. The Land Bank also has formed urban garden partnerships and kept properties clear of weeds and trash even if they aren’t in the Land Bank.

“Where there is blight and problems with abandoned buildings, regardless of who owns them, the government winds up owning the problem,” Weiland said. “We can put these properties back into use in some way.”

The Land Bank is funded through penalties and fees on delinquent property taxes, federal grants and donations. The land-banking concept is now a focus of federal urban redevelopment strategies, and several cities are setting up land banks, including Indianapolis.

Weiland said the Land Bank has helped around 600 people, who wouldn’t normally qualify for housing loans, become homeowners. But he admits that it’s not the solution to every problem.

“It’s by no means a panacea,” Weiland said. “We’re dealing with some of the most difficult problems in urban areas. It takes a while to show results, and you’re not going to see it overnight.”