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Interesting article on how Flint City Council is deciding to deal with Flint. Does demolition really mean progress?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html?_r=1&hp
Into Detroit
12 years ago
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By DAVID STREITFELD
ReplyDeletePublished: April 21, 2009
FLINT, Mich. — Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.
Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.
The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.
“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”
The recession in Flint, as in many old-line manufacturing cities, is quickly making a bad situation worse. Firefighters and police officers are being laid off as the city struggles with a $15 million budget deficit. Many public schools are likely to be closed.
“A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can’t base government policy on hope,” said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. “We have to do something drastic.”
In searching for a way out, Flint is becoming a model for a different era.
Planned shrinkage became a workable concept in Michigan a few years ago, when the state changed its laws regarding properties foreclosed for delinquent taxes. Before, these buildings and land tended to become mired in legal limbo, contributing to blight. Now they quickly become the domain of county land banks, giving communities a powerful tool for change.
Indianapolis and Little Rock, Ark., have recently set up land banks, and other cities are in the process of doing so. “Shrinkage is moving from an idea to a fact,” said Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s finally the insight that some cities just don’t have a choice.”
While the shrinkage debate has been simmering in Flint for several years, it suddenly gained prominence last month with a blunt comment by the acting mayor, Michael K. Brown, who talked at a Rotary Club lunch about “shutting down quadrants of the city.”
Nothing will happen immediately, but Flint has begun updating its master plan, a complicated task last done in 1965. Then it was a prosperous city of 200,000 looking to grow to 350,000. It now has 110,000 people, about a third of whom live in poverty.
Flint has about 75 neighborhoods spread out over 34 square miles. It will be a delicate process to decide which to favor, Mr. Kildee acknowledged from the driver’s seat of his Grand Cherokee.
He will play a crucial role in those decisions. In addition to being the treasurer of Genesee County, whose largest city by far is Flint, Mr. Kildee is chief executive of the local land bank. In the last year, the county has acquired through tax foreclosure about 900 houses in the city, some of them in healthy neighborhoods.
A block adjacent to downtown has the potential for renewal; it would make sense to fill in the vacant lots there, since it is a few steps from a University of Michigan campus.
A short distance away, the scene is more problematic. Only a few houses remain on the street; the sidewalk is so tattered it barely exists. “When was the last time someone walked on that?” Mr. Kildee said. “Most rural communities don’t have sidewalks.”
But what about the people who do live here and might want their sidewalk fixed rather than removed?
“Not everyone’s going to win,” he said. “But now, everyone’s losing.”
On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year — one of many savings that shrinkage could bring.
Mr. Kildee was born in Flint in 1958. The house he lived in as a child has just been foreclosed on by the county, so he stopped to look. It is a little blue house with white trim, sad and derelict. So are two houses across the street.
“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”
Watching suspiciously from next door is Charlotte Kelly. Her house breaks the pattern: it is immaculate, all polished wood and fresh paint. When Ms. Kelly, a city worker, moved to the street in 2002, all the houses were occupied and the neighborhood seemed viable.
These days, crime is brazen: two men recently stripped the siding off Mr. Kildee’s old house, “laughing like they were going to a picnic,” Ms. Kelly said. Down the street are many more abandoned houses, as well as a huge hand-painted sign that proclaims, “No prostitution zone.”
“It saddens my heart,” she said. “I was born in Flint in 1955. I’ve seen it in the glory days, and every year it gets worse.”
Mr. Kildee makes his pitch. Would she be interested in moving if the city offered her an equivalent or better house in a more stable and safer neighborhood?
Despite her pride in her home, the calculation takes Ms. Kelly about a second. “Yes,” she said, “I would be willing.”
I saw this article too. I think downsizing is certainly the right idea. They can take those largely vacant areas and consolidate them into parks, orchards, or farms. This is happening in Detroit, too. It would be nice if this could be organized. A better solution would be to offer free housing to people who move to these cities, but I think having nice, large parks would be cool too. Certainly, allowing empty buildings to remain and become vandalized is no solution.
ReplyDeleteA rather bleak, related article in today's Free Press:
ReplyDeleteApril 21, 2009
A vision of the next Michigan
By Ron Dzwonkowski
Free Press Associate Editor
Job losses in Michigan during 2009 will reach 239,000 or, if you need some perspective, about twice the entire population of Flint. That's according to a revised forecast from University of Michigan economists as detailed today in a report from Lansing's Gongwer News Service.
This picture is twice as bad as the one painted just six months ago by the U-M Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics -- and 50,000 more lost jobs than state officials were told in January to expect during the year. These losses will be on top of the more than 600,000 Michigan already has lost since 2000. Put another way, by the end of 2009, Michigan will have lost more jobs since 2000 than four states had people in 2000.
Oh, there will be some job gains, too. Gov. Jennifer Granholm was in Manistee on Monday to help launch a new wind turbine factory that will employ 120 people. Glad to see it, but there aren't nearly enough such jobs being created to offset the mega-losses as the auto industry shrinks and restructures.
These are permanent, too, not layoffs or cyclical adjustments. And with them will go a lot of retail spending, plus sales and income taxes. Next come lost property taxes as homes and buildings are left vacant. All these revenues sustain the state, local governments and public schools.
It seems logical, too, since people go where the work is, that Michigan will lose population for a third straight year in 2009, probably not enough to drop from the top 10 states in the next census but enough to lose more clout in Congress as other parts of the nation keep slowly growing.
And who will be going? Young, educated people hunting for a career and the younger among the hordes of former auto workers, those with much of their work-life left. So the "next Michigan," in the near term, will be an older, smaller state with less income and tax revenue.
Now, there may be -- indeed we hope there is -- a "next Michigan" in a generation or so that is still a smaller place but also better-educated and home to loads more small and mid-size employers, nimble, entrepreneurial companies that focus on biotechnology, engineering, advanced manufacturing, alternative energy and other emerging sectors.
But that's not the Michigan immediately in our headlights. The immediate next Michigan is a shrinking place -- as measured in people and money -- where change is being dictated by the economy. We didn't get out in front of it, so now we must react to it. For government, state and local, that's meant cutting, cutting, cutting and fighting, fighting, fighting over where to do it. That's not the same as making wholesale adjustments for a new reality, the dreaded "restructuring" now being forced on the auto industry.
It's time, though. The circumstances are indisputable. Government in this state was built for "the last Michigan," not the immediate next one or the one we hope will emerge from the wreckage.
My guess, though, is that the state will use a combination of cuts and federal stimulus money to patch things together for yet another year or two and leave the longer-term thinking to the leadership to be elected in 2010. It's the wrong course as the Citizens Research Council pointed out in a State Budget Note this morning:
"The State has been operating with a structural deficit, a deficit that will not be eliminated by a more buoyant economy,'" the respected CRC said. "... It has met the constitutional balanced budget requirement principally by using nonrecurring sources of income totaling over $8 billion ... and has not solved the basic structural problem. Federal stimulus dollars ... will provide the State with $7 billion, which will help in the short run, but which may make more difficult the resolution of the structural deficit."
The CRC notes that the stimulus money "will mask the size of the cuts necessary to deal with the structural deficit" and will create a revenue "cliff" when the money is gone.
This fiscal situation should at least get the public thinking about one possibility: Passing a proposal that will be on the 2010 ballot to call a convention to write a new state Constitution. Let the current officeholders deal with today while a new group meets to draw up a framework that will better serve the Michigan of tomorrow, in terms of government, education, regulation and taxation. Our 1963 Constitution fills nearly 60 pages in the Michigan Manual and has been amended about 30 times. It's due for an overhaul, just like the state it is supposed to serve.