6.12.2009

Bulldozing Flint

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

Excerpt:

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

3 comments:

  1. Sounds like yet another government type is acting on the fallacy of broken windows.

    Now if they were talking about bulldozing the District of Columbia, then they might have a point. But not Flint!

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  2. I looked at houses on Realtor.com

    I think (really) that Flint would be a good place to live.

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  3. Ja, the worst part of Flint is coming through on 69 (?) and those big old Buick buildings look like a scene out of "Metropolis." Other than that, and some neighborhoods with higher crime rates (Lapeer doesn't exist for no reason, after all), it ain't all bad.

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