Rebuilding Akron: A Photo Journey
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By Jason SegedyApril 29, 2016Follow me on Twitter @thestile1972Our dynamic and visionary new Mayor, Dan Horrigan, is
committed to growing Akron again.
We do this by making a great place even better - by building new housing, by rehabilitating existing buildings, by encouraging entrepreneurship and commercial redevelopment, and by using artistry in urban design to create irresistible places for people to live, work, and play. For roughly 80 years, Akron was the center of the
global rubber and tire industry. It was
home to the headquarters of four of the world’s five largest tire manufacturers – Goodyear,
Firestone, B.F. Goodrich, and General Tire. In 1920, it was building half of the world’s tires. By 1982, not a single a passenger tire was
built in the city. The impact on the
city’s economy, culture, and psyche was profound.Between 1910 and 1920, Akron was the fastest growing city in the entire nation, expanding from a population of 69,000 in 1910 to 208,000 in 1920.
As a result, much of the city’s housing was built in the 1910s, and is now 100 year old. Like most cities, it is a place of diverse neighborhoods: hastily-built, poorly planned ones in the city’s urban core; solidly middle-class, well-planned, historically significant ones, like Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park; and opulent ones containing palatial homes on tree-lined streets, like Merriman Hills and Fairlawn Heights, built for its most affluent residents.The city hit its peak population in 1960, expanding to 290,000 residents. Since 1960, the
city has lost 31% of its population. Today it is home to 198,000 residents. Despite losing 73,000 residents between 1960 and 2000, the number of households (90,000) remained consistent for 40 years, due to shrinking average household size.But since 2000, Akron has lost an additional 19,000 people and over 6,000 households. This has led to a growing problem with vacant and abandoned properties.Despite its
significant loss of population and manufacturing jobs, it is inaccurate to pigeonhole Akron as a “shrinking Rust Belt city”. The fact that the city once contained
the corporate headquarters of at least half-a-dozen Fortune 500 companies, and all of
the wealth that they generated; and the fact that it has since diversified its economy, retaining and attracting new high-paying jobs, means that it is still home to some of the most
stable and affluent urban neighborhoods in the entire Great Lakes region. Like most places, it should not be painted with an overly broad brush.Today, when it comes to housing, Akron
is a city of contrasts. It is not one real estate market, but half-a-dozen.
Approximately one-quarter of the city’s housing is in great shape, while another one-quarter is extremely
distressed. The remaining 50% could be
characterized as being at a tipping-point of sorts - largely solid, older homes, in middle class neighborhoods - for now.The city
contains approximately 96,000 housing units. The median housing unit (houses and apartments) was built in 1952. 64% of them were built prior to
1960. More housing was built during the Great Depression than has been built since 2000.When you look at the housing on Akron’s near-west side, for example, you can see the radial pattern of the pre-1920 homes that
were built along the former streetcar lines.
You can also see the way that adjacent neighborhoods evolved and filled-in, between 1920 and 1960, along with scattered pockets of more recent infill development. You can also see, on the bottom right, a downtown where very few people currently live.This map of housing in Akron and its inner ring suburbs illustrates the radial streetcar pattern even better – neighborhoods with the
highest percentage (88%+) of housing built before 1960 are the darkest red, while those with the
lowest (less than 12%) are the darkest blueAkron (from akros - Greek, for “high place”) is a city of
hills that was home to an incredibly
dirty industry. The wealthy moved northwest - uphill
and upwind of the pollution. That
pattern holds to this day – the neighborhoods with the highest median house
prices (over $120,000) are in dark red, the lowest (under $57,000) are in dark blue. A similar pattern
holds for annual median household income - the neighborhoods in dark red have a median household income of $54,000 or more; those in dark blue have a median household income of less than $18,000.Approximately 6% of the
city’s housing is vacant (and not for sale or rent). Vacancy is not
evenly distributed. In the darkest red
neighborhoods, over 13% of the homes are vacant; in the darkest blue, less than 1.4% are.We are presently hard at work crafting a
housing strategy that reflects today’s reality – that of a city that contains thousands of solid, beautiful, well-maintained historic homes, and that of a city that has torn down 2,100
abandoned houses in the past five years.We are committed to pursuing a growth strategy in Akron. One that looks at reality with both eyes wide open, and that employs time-honored urban design principles and innovative placemaking strategies to build on our considerable strengths, and to turn our liabilities
into assets.We are reinventing Akron as a place to not simply work, or play,
but to live. Our long-term goal is to
grow back to 250,000 residents by 2050, and our short-term goal is to get our current population of 198,000 back over 200,000 by 2020.I don’t believe
that a “Shrinking Cities” model of mothballing infrastructure and relocating
residents will work for us. Instead of
putting precious time, energy, and money into shrinking, let’s build on our
neighborhood assets, and figure out how to grow again.Why does it matter if we keep losing population?
Because the size of our population has incredibly important ramifications for our tax base; our employment base; the performance of our schools; the distribution of everyday amenities like grocery stores, shops, and restaurants; the delivery of public services; and less tangible, but equally important things like our sense of place and our sense of ourselves.Fiscal: We will have the same amount of infrastructure to maintain and the same level of public services to provide, whether we grow or shrink. Permanent contraction of our population means the
same amount of services to pay for, with less people to help share the cost of paying for
them.Equity: As our neighborhoods are abandoned, decline, and become hollowed out, access to social and economic opportunities diminishes along with the population: the jobs disappear, the doctor’s offices disappear, the grocery stores disappear – relocated, often, to a distant and increasingly inaccessible locale.
The job, hardware store, or barbershop that used to be a short walk around the corner is now a 45-minute bus ride away. Social: The
intangible, but critically important issue of sense of place: As our once-vibrant neighborhoods and commercial districts become mouths full of missing teeth, our
residents’ sense of place and sense of self is correspondingly diminished.Akron was recently
ranked as the most affordable housing market of the 100 largest metropolitan
areas. The good news is that it is an inexpensive place to live. The bad news is
that the low cost of housing makes it extremely difficult to cost-effectively rehabilitate many houses in most neighborhoods.In
many of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, a house can easily be
had for $20,000 or less. However, even after an investment of $60,000 or more to rehabilitate it, the owner may still only be able to sell it for $40,000.
It is a difficult market proposition.The Strategic Housing Plan that we are working on recognizes our current reality – that
of a stagnant housing market where new construction has been minimal, where it
is difficult to cost-effectively rehabilitate homes, and where much of our
urban fabric is being eroded by demolition.
The Plan will examine three questions: What do we have? What do we need? How do we get there? The last question is the most important and most complicated one to answer. We will need half-a-dozen (or more) different redevelopment strategies for our neighborhoods, depending on which neighborhood we are talking about.We are reaching out to developers, home builders, and realtors to figure out how to strategically, intentionally, and creatively rebuild each one of our neighborhoods.
Doing this well will require public, philanthropic, non-profit, and private sector leadership; in partnership with everyday people working together, one block at a time, one neighborhood at a time, to rebuild and transform their community.
No matter how great of a place this city is to live (and it is) we can’t grow again if we don’t figure out how to build and rehabilitate more housing than we tear down. It’s simple arithmetic. Right now, we have an oversupply of houses that people don’t want, and an undersupply of houses and apartments that people do want.
The time is right
to take a fresh look at both supply and demand. The market has
begun to change, especially Downtown, as Millennials, empty-nesters, and others interested in urban living, are demanding new
multi-family housing. There is also an untapped market for rehabilitating historic homes in many of our neighborhoods. The challenge is to learn how to make that happen in a cost-effective manner. The opportunity is the revitalization of the numerous high-quality, historic, irreplaceable neighborhoods throughout our community that can serve new generations of Akronites for the next 100 years. As we rebuild Akron, it is important that we avoid false choices – neighborhoods versus downtown; commercial development versus residential development; people versus jobs. The answer to these questions is not a multiple-choice “either/or” - it is an “all of the above”.
We need to make our Downtown more like a neighborhood, with thousands more people living in it.Downtown currently has a 23% commercial vacancy rate, as many law offices, accountants,
and other professional services have relocated to the suburbs. We can turn that current liability into an asset, through adaptive residential reuse of commercial buildings, as places to live.Like most cities
in the Great Lakes region, Downtown Akron is full of irreplaceable and high-quality
historic architecture.And, like most
cities in our region, we did terrible things to our Downtown through urban
renewal.We will be reforming our zoning code to adopt form-based overlays to encourage the type of
mixed-use, walkable development that originally made our Downtown so successful
as a place to live, work, and play.
We need to make our neighborhoods more like a downtown, with revitalized, walkable, mixed-use business districts. Neighborhood development is economic development. The old Akron that
remembers being the Rubber Capital of the World is fading away. A new Akron, with
different memories and different needs is being built - looking forward, but standing on the shoulders of giants.The past is what we are building on with our Innerbelt Freeway repurposing
project. Planned in 1963, and built between 1970
and 1986, at a cost of over $300 million in 2015 dollars, the Innerbelt was designed to carry over 100,000 vehicles per
day. Today, it carries roughly
18,000. Built as a
so-called “urban renewal” project, it displaced thousands of people in the
city’s urban core, all in the name of economic development, which largely never materialized. Due to an ill-conceived premise, poor planning, and cost-overruns, it was never completed.
For over a decade,
it sat as an actual “road to nowhere”, failing to connect to another freeway.
After 16 years, it was finally connected to I-76/77 on the south, but a proposed linkage to State Route 8, on the north, was never completed.In 1999, a mere decade after the last section of the freeway opened to traffic, Akron’s leaders decided that it might finally be time to view the roadway as a sunk cost, save millions of dollars in future operations and maintenance costs, stop throwing good money after bad, and repurpose the northernmost mile of the freeway.
Akron’s Innerbelt Freeway at 12:30 p.m. on May 14, 2015. Construction begins this year to reconfigure the entire length of freeway shown in this photo.
The project will occur in two phases. The first,
beginning this Spring, will rebuild the parallel service roads (Dart Avenue and Rand Avenue) as urban
streets. When that project is completed
in 2018, the centerline of the freeway will be permanently closed to
traffic. The project will free up
approximately 30 acres of land for reuse.The second phase of the project could reconnect portions of the urban street grid, placing a special focus on pedestrian connections between Downtown and the West Hill
neighborhood. Clearly, there is demand
to walk between the two places.The West Hill
neighborhood contains a treasure-trove of Victorian-era architecture –
cemeteries, homes, and winding brick streets.The second phase of the project will entail a strategic planning process, which will culminate in a comprehensive land reutilization strategy. It will be important to restore the site using time-honored urban design principles so that it evolves into an authentic urban place, containing a mix of uses, including housing and green space, so that Akronites can enjoy this reclaimed space in the heart of our city for generations to come. My hope is that someone will be able to visit this site in twenty years, and find that the project has been designed so well, and Downtown and West Hill have been knitted together so seamlessly, that they will never know that the Freeway even existed.Dreaming or Doing? It’s another false choice. The
key to rebuilding our community is to think big, but to work equally hard on doing the small things extremely well. American cities have often gone astray, looking
for that mega-project or that silver bullet. The urban renewal of the 1960s brought us expensive freeway projects like the Innerbelt, and cold, foreboding civic spaces like the original incarnation of Cascade Plaza. More recently, cities have placed their faith in stadiums, convention centers, and casinos. Few of these projects have delivered the civic benefits that they originally promised. It is not that these things are unimportant - they can be great things, and they may well be necessary, but they are insufficient. A sledgehammer is a valuable tool - but not if you are trying to repair a watch.
Does this mean that we should never do or dream anything big? Of course not. But we must be prudent, patient, and wise. Our cities are far more akin to a living organism than they are to a machine. Given that reality, we must then tailor our approach to fixing (healing) them, accordingly.I believe that the way forward is to put
people and places first. Big plans are important, but so are little plans - because they often involve fundamentals, are easier to pull-off, and more
readily establish trust, inspire hope, and build relationships. Trust, hope, and relationships are the indispensable ingredients necessary for doing bigger things further down the road. Without them, we labor in vain.Inside/Out is a
great example of a little thing done well. An initiative of the Akron Art Museum, the project installs life-sized reproductions of the
museum’s collection at various sites around the city. Here’s an installation located at the spot of the artist’s actual vantage point, when he painted it in the 1930s.The Main Street Viaduct, built in 1923, was replaced by the Y-Bridge in 1981. This installation was located at Waters Park in North Hill, overlooking the Y-Bridge. This installation, not officially part of Inside/Out, follows the same premise. Here’s new-wave band, Devo, exhibited life-sized in the original S. Main St. storefront where this photo was shot in 1978.Akron2Akron is a
neighborhood walking initiative where everyday people take the lead on
organizing walks in their neighborhood to discuss whatever they would like to
discuss with participants. Photo credit: Tim Fitzwater (buy his stuff)The walks have
been extremely popular, especially with younger people. Over 70 people turned out for this one, in Akron’s Wallhaven neighborhood, on a
dreary March day.
Photo credit: Tim Fitzwater (buy his stuff)Better Block is
another great example: Last year, we accomplished what is believed to be one of the largest Better Block installations in the United States to date. Working with Jason Roberts, here’s what we
planned……And here’s what we
did: transforming North Hill’s 1920s-era Temple Square business
district, by shrinking an oversized North Main Street, installing new street trees, public gathering spaces, a bocce
court, and six pop-up businesses.The Better Block radically altered the perception of the North Hill neighborhood for residents and
visitors alike – we got over 2,000 people to come out the weekend that it was
installed.The street looked
and felt safer and so much more vibrant.In the 1920s, North Hill was home to thousands of Italian and Polish immigrants. Today, it is home to over 5,000 Nepali and
Bhutanese immigrants, our newest Akronites, who are helping to revitalize the neighborhood.During Better Block weekend we held a 3.5 mile long
Open Streets event. Main Street in Akron was completely closed to traffic
on a Sunday afternoon. Like Better Block, the event helped
people imagine places and spaces in a new way.Thanks to the Knight Foundation, last
October, we held 500 Plates: a dinner for 500 people on the Innerbelt Freeway. The Freeway was
closed to traffic, and 500 Akronites from over 20 neighborhoods were
invited to come out and discuss the future of the soon-to-be-repurposed
freeway.All of these
events serve to remind people of the most important truth in city building – that
all of the planning and urban development tools that we use – plans, maps, zoning ordinances, building codes, tax increment financing, complex public processes – they are all simply a means to an end. They are not ends in themselves. We forget that at our peril.The end that we are seeking to achieve is the
creation of wonderful places for the wonderful people that live in our city. May we all arrive at that end – working
together.
