Municipal disinvestment facts for kids
Municipal disinvestment is a term in the United States which describes an urban planning process in which a city or town or other municipal entity decides to abandon or neglect an area. It can happen when a municipality is in a period of economic prosperity and sees that its poorest and most blighted communities are both the cheapest targets for revitalization as well as the areas with the greatest potential for improvement. It is when a city is facing urban decay and chooses to allocate fewer resources to the poorest communities or communities with less political power, and disenfranchised neighborhoods are slated for demolition, relocation, and eventual replacement. Disinvestment in urban and suburban communities tends to fall strongly along racial and class lines and may perpetuate the cycle of poverty exerted upon the space, since more affluent individuals with social mobility can more easily leave disenfranchised areas.
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Case studies
New York City
Partly in response to the RAND report, and in an effort to address New York's declining population, New York's housing commissioner, Roger Starr, proposed a policy which he termed planned shrinkage to reduce the impoverished population and better preserve the tax base. According to the "politically toxic" proposal, the city would stop investing in troubled neighborhoods and divert funds to communities "that could still be saved." He suggested that the city should "accelerate the drainage" in what he called the worst parts of the South Bronx through a policy of planned shrinkage by closing subway stations, firehouses and schools. Starr felt these actions were the best way to save money. Starr's arguments soon became predominant in urban planning thinking nationwide. The people who lived in the communities where his policies were applied protested vigorously; without adequate fire service and police protection, the residents faced waves of crime and fires that left much of the South Bronx and Harlem devastated. A report in 2011 in the New York Times suggested that the planned shrinkage approach was "short-lived". Under the planned shrinkage program, for example, an abandoned 100-unit development on one piece of land could be cleared by a real estate developer, and such an outcome would have been preferable to ten separate neighborhood-based efforts to produce 100 housing units each, according to advocates of planned shrinkage. According to this view, a planned shrinkage approach would encourage so-called "monolithic development", resulting in new urban growth but at much lower population densities than the neighborhoods which had existed previously. The remark by Starr caused a political firestorm: then mayor Abraham Beame disavowed the idea while City Council members called it "inhuman," "racist" and "genocidal."
According to one report, the high inflation during the 1970s combined with the restrictive rent control policies in the city meant that buildings were worth more dead for the insurance money than alive as sources of rental income; as investments, they had limited ability to provide a solid stream of rental income. Accordingly, there was an economic incentive on the part of building owners, according to this view, to simply let the buildings burn. An alternative view was that the fires were a result of the city's municipal policies. While there are differing views about whether planned shrinkage caused fire outbreaks in the 1970s, or was a result of such fires, there is agreement that the fires in the South Bronx during these years were extensive.
In the South Bronx, the average number of people per [fire] engine is over 44,000. In Staten Island, it's 17,000. There is no standard for manning areas of multiple dwellings as opposed to one- and two-family residences.
By the mid-1970s, the Bronx had 120,000 fires per year, or an average of 30 fires every 2 hours. 40 percent of the housing in the area was destroyed. The response time for fires also increased, as the firefighters did not have the resources to keep responding promptly to numerous service calls. A report in The New York Post suggested that the cause of the fires was not arson but resulted from decisions by bureaucrats to abandon sections of the city. According to one report, of the 289 census tracts within the borough of the Bronx, seven census tracts lost more than 97% of their buildings, and 44 tracts lost more than 50% of their buildings, to fire and abandonment.
There have been claims that planned shrinkage impacted public health negatively. According to one source, public shrinkage programs targeted to undermine populations of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in the South Bronx and Harlem had an effect on the geographic pattern of the AIDS outbreak. According to this view, municipal abandonment was interrelated with health issues and helped to cause a phenomenon termed "urban desertification".
The populations in the South Bronx, Lower East Side, and Harlem plummeted during the two decades after 1970. Only after two decades did the city begin to invest in these areas again.
New Orleans
New Orleans differed from other cities in that the cause of decline was not based on economic or political shifts but rather a destructive flood caused by a hurricane. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, planned shrinkage was proposed as a means to create a "more compact, more efficient and less flood-prone city". Areas of the city which were most damaged by the flooding – and thus, most likely to be flooded again – would not be rebuilt and would become green space. These areas were frequently less desirable, lower-income areas which had lower property values precisely because of the risk of flooding. Some residents rejected a "top-down" approach of planned shrinkage of municipal planners and attempted to rebuild in flood-prone areas.
Detroit
The city of Detroit, in the U.S. state of Michigan, has gone through a major economic and demographic decline in recent decades. The population of the city has fallen from a high of 1,850,000 in 1950 to 677,116 in 2015, kicking it off the top 20 of US cities by population for the first time since 1850. However, the city has a combined statistical area of 5,318,744 people, which currently ranks 12th in the United States. In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, which it successfully exited on December 10, 2014. Poverty, crime, shootings, and urban blight in Detroit continue to be ongoing problems.
Roxbury, Boston
Planned shrinkage in Roxbury is not unique to the RAND policies enacted in the 70s and 80s. The area succumbed to numerous fires as out-of-town landlords sought out the only way to earn back some profit on homes that no longer sold. However, the neighborhood's response to planned shrinkage through community action has made it an example to other neighborhoods of the success of people-first organizing. The neighborhood had worked with the Boston's administration, but refused to give in to bureaucratic control by the city, protesting whenever the municipality neglected their redevelopment.
"Shrink to survive"
"Shrink to survive" is a contemporary form of planned shrinkage which emphasizes short-term razing of the city: Where a city enacting planned shrinkage policies takes a Laissez-faire approach to disinvesting in its communities, cities can take an active role in that reduction. This includes investing in more aggressive land buyback and enforcement of eminent domain in order to obtain ownership of a property, relocate its residents, and demolish it.
Such proposals, which began around 2009, entail razing entire districts within some cities or else bulldozing them to return the land to its pre-construction rural state. The policies have been studied not only by municipal and state authorities but also by the federal government, and may affect dozens of declining cities in the United States. One report suggested that 50 U.S. cities were potential candidates, and include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis. Proponents claim the plan will bring efficiency with less waste and fraud; detractors complain the policy has been a "disaster" and advocate for community-based efforts instead.
Flint
Shrink to survive was initiated by Dan Kildee during his term as Treasurer of Genesee County, Michigan. He proposed it as a way to handle municipal problems in Flint, which had experienced an exodus of people and business during the automobile industry downturn. Flint had been described as one of the poorest Rust Belt cities. One estimate was that its population had declined by half since 1950. In 2002, authorities established a "municipal land bank" to buy abandoned or foreclosed homes to prevent them from being bought up by real estate speculators. One report was that by the summer of 2009, 1,100 homes in Flint had been bulldozed and that another 3,000 had been scheduled for demolition. One estimate was that the city's size would shrink by twenty per cent, while a second estimate was that it needed to contract by 40% to once again become viable financially.
Shrink to survive in other cities
Shrink to survive has been enacted in other medium-sized cities in the American Rust belt such as the Michigan city Benton Harbor, as well as the Ohio city of Youngstown. One report suggested that city authorities in Youngstown had demolished 2,000 derelict homes and businesses. In addition, shrink-to-survive has been considered for inner city suburbs of Detroit.
Municipal authorities in Gary, Indiana are considering plans to shrink the city by 40%, possibly by demolition or possibly by letting Nature overgrow abandoned buildings, as a way to raise values for existing structures, reduce crime, and restore the city to fiscal health. The city has suffered a sustained decline in job losses and a consequent housing bust.
