(Surprise, suprise. This jackass Harvard professor had a regular
column on the NY Sun, a neoconservative weekly that went out of
business last year.)
NY Times March 16, 2010
Economix - Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness
By EDWARD L. GLAESER
Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard.
Can Detroit shrink to greatness?
After decades of betting that white elephant projects, like the
city’s monorail, would reverse decline, Detroit’s remarkable
mayor, Dave Bing, a former N.B.A. All-Star and successful steel
entrepreneur, has focused on right-sizing his city and its government.
At the extreme, urban right-sizing could mean bulldozing large
swaths of the city. Will the benefits of downsizing Detroit
outweigh the costs?
Detroit became a great industrial hub when a city of small
entrepreneurs evolved into the home of the Big Three. Their vast
factories provided good wages to hundreds of thousands of ordinary
Americans, but over the last 50 years, areas with abundant small
companies have grown more quickly than places dominated by a few
big firms. Skilled cities have also been more successful than
less well-educated places, and only 11 percent of Detroit’s
adults have college degrees. People and companies have moved to
warmer areas, and Detroit can be awfully cold. Industrial
diversity has been more conducive for growth than manufacturing
mono-cultures, and Detroit practically defined the one-industry town.
Given that Detroit was on the wrong side of history with
competition, education, climate and industrial diversity, it isn’t
surprising that the city’s population fell from over 1.85 million
in 1950 to 912,000 in 2008.
Economic and social headwinds ensured that Detroit would shrink,
but public policies did little to halt the city’s decline.
Manufacturing jobs have moved disproportionately to right-to-work
states, and Michigan is strongly pro-union. Neither 1960s urban
renewal nor the 1970s Renaissance Center, nor the People Mover nor
the Joe Louis Arena nor General Motors’ Detroit/Hamtramck
Assembly, which was built by using eminent domain to level
Poletown, did much to hold Detroit’s population steady. The city
lost at least 150,000 people during every decade from 1950 to 1990.
The whole idea of saving declining cities by building more is a
mistake, since the hallmark of declining cities is that they have
plenty of infrastructure relative to people. Detroit’s houses
sell for a fraction of the costs of building anything new. The
monorail glides over essentially empty streets. Indeed, there is
surely more wisdom in Mayor Bing’s plan to shrink the city’s
footprint than in the light rail system simultaneously being
planned for Detroit.
But what does it mean to right-size a city?
As cities lose people and tax revenues decline, it often makes
economic sense to close a public structure, like a school. Kansas
City has put itself in the forefront of this trend by choosing to
close 28 of its 61 schools to meet the reality of declining
enrollments and limited funds, which is a little odd since Kansas
City’s population has been quite stable for two decades.
Closing schools, or any public facility, is never easy, but it is
hard to argue that a cash-strapped municipality isn’t within its
rights if it chooses to cut costs by reducing the number of public
facilities. If a district closes particularly poorly performing
schools, children may end up getting a better education as a
result, albeit at the cost of a longer bus trip.
A second strategy, proposed by Mayor Bing, goes beyond closing a
few schools, and eliminates the provision of public services to
some parts of a city.
Detroit has a large number of communities that are dominated by
empty lots and vacant homes. Mayor Bing has spoken of providing
incentives for the people still living in such areas to relocate,
and warned them that “if they stay where they are I absolutely
cannot give them all the services they require.”
For a big-city mayor to warn that some areas will be no-service
zones is radical, but our country is filled with less populated
areas that lack public trash removal, bus service and water
provision. In a sense, Mayor Bing would just be treating the
least dense areas of Detroit like those other less dense areas.
Of course, one might hope that if Detroit provides fewer services
to some of its homeowners, then he would also cut their property
tax bill.
The third, and most extreme, approach is to bulldoze buildings and
turn them over to some alternative use, like parks or agriculture.
Razing empty, dilapidated, hazardous structures is fairly
uncontroversial, but more questions must be raised if the mayor is
going to forcibly move significant amounts of people in order to
physically reshape large land areas.
If the residents of largely empty areas aren’t willing to sell and
move, then we are back in the same quandary that always faces
large public changes in urban land use, like the construction of
G.M.’s Poletown plant. To what extent should a city put perceived
citywide interests ahead of the wishes of individual property-owners?
If removing a largely vacant neighborhood really generates
significant gains, then some sizable fraction of those gains can
be given to the citizens who will have to give up their homes.
If generous payments, rather than eminent domain, are used to move
the remaining residents, then right-sizing can be win-win.
But if Mayor Bing tries to do too much, too quickly, without
giving enough to the residents who have to move, then right-sizing
will justly be seen as yet another example of the public
insensitivity and folly that has unfortunately marred too many
past efforts at dealing with urban distress.
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