Urban Planning and Plotting

There was an interesting story on NPR about an attempt by Flint to downsize. Just 60 miles from Detroit, another casualty of the auto industry is reeling. According to the article, one third of the homes in Flint have been "abandoned." (I suspect that while one third of the houses may well be vacant, foreclosures and evictions probably have taken a greater toll than "abandonment.") The vision of at least one city planner there is to have it be a shrinking city: "The idea is to bulldoze entire neighborhoods. The smaller city would then be cheaper to run and help pave the way for better times ahead, advocates say."

On one level, I see the point. Cities that are no longer at capacity are not earning enough in tax revenues to pay for all the needed city services. Providing police, firefighting, streetlights, and trash collection would definitely be easier with a smaller geographic area. The demolition of vacant houses would make areas much safer. Using the vacant land for urban agriculture would benefit the community as a whole.

On another level, every suspicious impulse I have is on full alert. I don't know Flint, but I'm wondering if this is another push at urban removal. I'm guessing that much like Detroit, while some areas have higher concentrations of vacant homes than others, empty houses dot most neighborhoods in the city. So when the Genesee County treasurer talks about needing to create a new map, deciding block by block where "it makes sense to either let nature take the land back or to create some intentional open green space," I get nervous. I know I wouldn't want some county executive deciding whether my block would be razed or not. I'd hate to live in a Detroit where it was decided that Downtown, Midtown, East English Village, and Rosedale Park are big enough to contain all remaining city residents so the rest of us just need to relocate there so the rest of the city can be leveled and Detroit be more efficient.

No thank you.