How Should We Grow Our Cities?
To counter unsustainable forms of haphazard outward growth, out cities should look to approaches that repopulate their inner core and organize cohesive and connected new neighborhoods (Photo by Lynn Betts, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service)
Many of us may not remember, or indeed are not old enough to know of the Kerner Commission report issued 40 years ago which addressed the causes and problems related to the urban riots of 1967-68. This was a time of great upheaval in our central cities, and many cities still bear the scars of these riots, evidenced by inner city neighborhoods where more land remains vacant than is developed. It also marks the beginning of the shrinking of our older cities – the emptying out of the inner and middle city and the explosive growth of the urban fringe.
It seems that it doesn’t take a riot to create substantial inner city disinvestment; our markets can do it on their own. While, the recent real estate boom did produce housing reinvestment in and adjacent to many of our downtowns, this investment seldom followed into older, underperforming neighborhoods. Is there something endemic in our market economy, our development processes and our national psyche that causes development to bypass the inner city and continue to grow outward? What, if anything can we do about it?
One challenge of the last century focused on coping with increasing population growth. Most cities responded by accommodating an outward expansion into the countryside. New populations, especially working class immigrants, occupied older, developed places whose original population moved to the suburbs.
But when a replacement population is no longer available, inner city areas experience property abandonment and under utilization of existing housing stock. The impact of the ongoing mortgage foreclosures and related relate credit crunch will exacerbate this problem for the foreseeable future..
Consider the insidious process that we are experiencing: land development, even in “stagnant” cities, still tends to follow the historic pattern of new investment at the urban periphery. This is reinforced by transportation improvements that cater to the demands of the edge and, in so doing, increase the attractiveness of outlying sites for new development at the expense of “inner city” areas. As growth continues on the periphery, support development ( jobs, shopping, and entertainment) tends to locate there further reinforcing peripheral rather than internal locations as the choice locations for new real estate investment.
As a result, internal locations, except perhaps for the downtown and adjacent areas which have a character and attractiveness unique to the region, lose population, see disinvestment and become a location which is the only affordable choice for poorer populations. The combination of poor population and older public and private infrastructure results in the inability to maintain the quality of the inner city environment. Thus, a centrifugal force develops which empties the inner city of investment, quality housing and related services and spins such investment towards the urban fringe.
This is more than the oft decried impact of “sprawl”. It’s sprawl plus abandonment. The challenge to cities which are witnessing a shrinking center and growing periphery is to find ways to reduce outward expansion and encourage concentration and redevelopment.
How do we do this? How do we encourage reinvestment within the city such that the periphery and immediate downtown area are no longer the only market alternatives for new development? This is not an easy question, nor is it a popular course of action given all sorts of commitments to peripheral investment.
All cities suffer to some degree from this phenomenon. In some, the market economy is strong enough to facilitate older neighborhood rehab, often through public private partnerships. Chicago is one example where LISC has partnered with numerous inner city CDC’s to support neighborhood redevelopment through its Quality of Life Planning program.
Youngstown, Ohio, addressed this issue in another way, determining that some of its prior inner city areas should become open space. Decatur, IL is discussing another approach which seeks to reduce the trend of outward development and redirect investment toward the city center and inner city neighborhoods. Elements of the evolving Camiros assisted City-County plan include industrial, educational and tourism policies to enhance investment in the center of Decatur and its neighborhoods rather than along an ever increasing periphery.
The challenge for Decatur, and other cities witnessing a shrinking center and growing fringe, is to finding workable strategies to reduce outward expansion and encourage concentration and redevelopment. This requires four broad courses of action:
1. A commitment to revitalizing central city neighborhoods as a resource for new investment for the upper and middle income families while maintaining an appropriate supply of affordable alternatives.
2. A focus on transportation improvements that encourage concentrated, centralized development, rather than suburban, dispersed development.
3. Public and private investments and actions to assemble and develop in-city contemporary sized residential, commercial and industrial land parcels attractive to new development.
4. Strong and committed public and private leadership to encourage central city economic sustainability and to redirect cultural forces that are primarily oriented to outward expansion back toward the city center.
Camiros worked with CDC's in 14 Chicago neighborhoods to prepare plans to strengthen and rebuild their neighborhoods through the LISC NCP planning process. This is one way to counter shrinking city syndrome
In the end, the proper response to a shrinking city condition is to encourage reinvestment within the urban core such that the periphery is no longer the only alternative for new growth and development. It is about creating a viable choice for those who have the economic wherewithal to make such choices and assuring access to jobs, quality retail goods and public services for those whose location choices are limited by the economics of their situation.
Over time the cost saving of this sustainable urban development approach are sizeable. Social cost savings will be found in the l improvement of key facilities and systems such as the city school and park systems which meet the expectations of an upwardly mobile population. Environmental costs will be reduced as less raw, greenfield land is converted to subdivisions and shopping malls; runoff and drainage problems as well as traffic will be minimized. Economic costs will be reduced by the elimination of redundant facilities and infrastructure needed to serve a geographically spread-out population, and the reduced travel times and distances inherent in the creation of a more concentrated form of urban development.
Some might argue that Americans, especially the citizens of our smaller cities, have no interest in central city living. After all, the American ideal has always been the single family home on an individual plot of ground. Concentrated development does not conflict with this ideal, it merely argues that housing should not occur as piecemeal development on “available” greenfield sites. While these sites might initially appear to be located in the “country”, they are really just the first actions in building numerous unrelated subdivisions which over time grow into each other in a manner which is neither country nor city.
Rather, concentrated development should be taken to mean the orderly development of limited amounts of greenfield land located and designed to create neighborhoods rather than scattered subdivisions, and the orderly redevelopment of underutilized central city neighborhoods, commercial and employment areas in a manner which provide lifestyle options for the variety of economic and social classes which create “community.”