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By Jason SegedyJuly 25, 2016Follow me on Twitter @thestile1972Glendale Cemetery, AkronThis morning, I read a piece in The Atlantic, entitled Do Parts of the Rust Belt Need to Die Off?  In it, Texas A&M’s Galen Newman argues that some of America’s struggling cities should embrace their decline, and plan around it.  He goes farther and says, essentially, that in some cases, these cities will never be coming back, and that we need to be realistic in contemplating their future - even if that means permanently shutting down entire neighborhoods and relocating the residents.On one level, this makes some degree of sense.  It goes without saying that nearly every major cultural, economic, and social trend in the United States over the past 70 years has been unkind to the cities of the so-called Rust Belt – everything from air conditioning, to deindustrialization, to freeways, to suburbanization.  Large swaths of these cities, to be sure, are shadows of their former selves.Yet, on another level, I had a visceral negative reaction to the entire concept.  Yes, some of it was an emotional response “No, I don’t want my city to die!” But much of my discomfort with this piece was based on reason, as well.I don’t think that Galen Newman, or others who share his ideas, are trying to intentionally do harm to our cities.  I believe that they are trying to help. Nonetheless, I think that many of these ideas are wrongheaded, and that if implemented, will do far more harm than good.Should your city die?  For, if we are to discuss the issue honestly, let us dispense with the abstraction of an indefinite article, and get concrete with a personal pronoun:  not a city, but your city.Should your city die?  It’s not an academic question.  It’s a big existential question.  It’s a question that involves entrenched social and economic trends; involves a personal and collective choice between fatalism and hope; and, most importantly, involves the lives of millions of people in the cities of America’s Rust Belt – places that many people think they know a lot more about than they really do.Are they places that are full of promise and opportunity, which often pleasantly surprise unsuspecting outsiders when they visit?Or are they places that are often their own worst enemy, full of intractable problems, shambling toward the abyss of despair?Are they like Boxer, the fabled work horse who had a good run, but is no longer needed on the animal farm, so it’s off to the glue factory?Or are they like the Velveteen Rabbit, the stuffed child’s plaything who, although old, shabby, and discarded, transcended its circumstances, and became a real rabbit through the sheer power of love?Should we give up on Rust Belt cities, and adopt untested, draconian social-engineering schemes like the forced relocation of residents?Or is there a way forward; one that builds on the legacy of the past, but envisions something new and transformative for our foundering urban places?These are important questions.  I will attempt to wrestle with them by posing three more:1)      Are Rust Belt cities dying?2)      If Rust Belt cities are dying, why should we care?3)      If we do care, what can be done to save them?Are Rust Belt Cities Dying?The first question is fundamental.  Are Rust Belt cities really dying?  How we phrase and answer this question is important.  If we’re talking about regions, the reality, even here in the Rust Belt, is that hardly any of them are shrinking, let alone “dying”.The following table shows population change between 1960 and 2010 in a selected number of medium-to-large-sized cities in the Eastern Great Lakes region, often associated with being the poster children for Rust Belt decline.Of the 12 cities shown in the table, all lost a significant percentage of their population between 1960 and 2010, but only two (Buffalo and Pittsburgh) actually lost population at the regional level.  When the evolving vagaries of metropolitan area geography at the Census Bureau are taken into account, several more of these regions could be considered to have lost population:  Greater Youngstown, for example, contained two counties in 1960, but three in 2010. By nearly any accounting, it is probably functionally smaller today, than it was in 1960.Similarly, some other regions are not growing nearly as fast as this table indicates. Greater Cincinnati, for example, contained only three counties in 1960, but by 2010, had expanded to a region of 15 counties.  Again, some of this is actual urban growth, but some of it is more a result of adding exurban counties in Kentucky that have little connection to urban Cincinnati, other than commuting patterns.The arcane nature of Census Bureau geography notwithstanding, even the regions that have lost population have done so at a fairly gradual pace.  At the regional level, the sky isn’t falling, although it is fair to say that it may be a bit overcast.  Let’s move on to the core cities themselves.  Here the weather is far stormier, and the picture becomes far more complicated.  It is undeniable that there are profound and seemingly intractable socioeconomic disparities between all of these regions and their core cities.  Most of them are struggling mightily on nearly every measure of social and economic health, and none of them have posted positive net population growth since 1960.Even more distressingly, the same intractable socioeconomic disparities that exist between these core cities and their metropolitan regions, also exist within each core city, at the neighborhood level.  Many individual neighborhoods in these cities are at, or are quickly approaching, levels of social and economic distress at which it might be accurate to say that they are “dying”.We’ll come back to that point, in greater detail, later in this post.  But for now, let’s make this point clear:  major Rust Belt population clusters aren’t disappearing anytime soon.Detroit, probably the world’s foremost example of a city that, to read media accounts, is dying and has no future - still has 700,000 people, and anchors a metropolitan area of over 4 million.  It is the busiest U.S. international border crossing, in terms of trade, and it is located on the world’s largest inland waterway.The Detroit region is not going anywhere anytime soon.  Despite its many woes, it occupies one of the most advantageous pieces of real estate on the North American continent.Akron, where I live, which is a far smaller city than Detroit, still has 4 million people living within an hour’s drive of downtown.  It is located at the geographic center of the 16th largest metropolitan region (Cleveland-Akron-Canton) in the nation.  The economic opportunity implicit in being located in such close proximity to so many consumers, workers, and jobs isn’t going to disappear either.The core city, to be sure, is not the same thing as the region – as those of us who live in the core city know better than anyone.  But, despite media pronouncements to the contrary, even the most distressed core Rust Belt cities are not analogous to a ghost town in the old west that had 2,000 people at its peak, without another soul living within 50 miles of it.  That obscure, old silver mining town in the Colorado mountains that you can’t name might have been a one-industry town, just like Youngstown was, but there still exists an incredibly important difference of degree between the two, if not also one of kind.Whether a smaller city like Flint or a large one like Detroit, we’re still talking about established places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents, surrounded by hundreds of thousands or millions more.  The critical mass of people, and economic activity, even in a massively shrinking city like Youngstown, is staggering.Most of these cities aren’t where they are simply because someone decided to build a factory there. Nearly all of them have profound geographic assets (water, transportation routes, proximity to markets) that aren’t disappearing any time soon, regardless of what any given industry decides to do.Despite the trends of the previous half-century, if one were to contemplate the long-term future of a region of the country, one might do well to worry about large swaths of the Sunbelt, rather than the Rust Belt.  What about the long-term future of the cities of the desert Southwest, or much of coastal Florida, where the locational advantages are far less profound, especially given climate change, and where it is inevitable that largely superficial and transitory economic activity (tourism, gambling, retirement) will one day come to an end?  It is not entirely unreasonable to think that 50 years from now, pundits might be writing about a resurgent Detroit, and a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.Many people think that they know why Rust Belt cities are losing population, but it is a very complicated topic.  Many of the theories regarding why these cities are declining tend to just as often reflect the proponent’s ideological perspective, as they reflect objective reality.Shrinking household size, for example, accounted for 46% of the observed population decline in St. Louis between 1950 and 2010 – a far from inconsequential number.  Regardless of deindustrialization, or white flight, a city that was built-out in 1950, in an era where every social trend was pointing toward smaller households, really had nowhere to go but down.  Yet almost no one has written about this fact, because it isn’t as interesting as stories about racial tensions and abandoned factory buildings.As Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns, has astutely pointed out, people from one ideological perspective can find plausible urban decline narratives that run completely counter to plausible narratives put forth by people of the opposite ideological perspective. In the Rust Belt, the decline of manufacturing is an oft-cited culprit for core city population decline, and it is certainly an important factor.  But the very really challenges that these cities and regions are facing are not just due to the loss of manufacturing.  It is probably more accurate to say that Rust Belt urban problems are American urban problems, with the loss of industrial jobs providing an unwelcome overlay of additional complexity and distress.The American urban problem, in short, is the erosion, since World War II, of the basic concept of what a city even is:  a densely developed, diverse, mixed-use, walkable place.  Given that reality, suburbanization, in general, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme, in particular, are extremely important reasons for the decline and fall of many Rust Belt cities – older places which were already facing headwinds due to the decline of their manufacturing-based economies, which also happened to lose their industrial bases at the exact same time that Americans were rejecting traditional urban life wholesale.But that was then, and this is now.  Signs that the suburban model of development is, too, a failed approach, are now appearing.  The endless cycle of transfer payments between governments, underwritten by federal transportation spending, and public and private-sector debt, which largely fueled the building of the suburbs, is quickly coming to an end. When it fails completely, there will be a desire to return to the city.  In the piece in The Atlantic, Newman states:What I think is going to happen is that a lot of these old, large cities are going to die out. I don’t think they’re going to officially die, but I think we’re going to have to let some of them go, while these other newer cities are going to sprout up and take off with modern-age industries. It will probably be a pendulum swing. I don’t know if it will happen before I die, but at some point these older cities aren’t going to be able to sustain economies because of the way industry grows now and technology changes so fast. And so the pendulum’s going to swing back and forth, but all of these smaller cities are going to grow larger and all of their suburban belts are going to overlap. So we’re going to be really looking at regional-based growth rather than city-based growth to some degree. He’s about forty years too late.  This isn’t a description of what will happen.  It’s a description of what has already happened.  I’m 44 years old, and we’ve been pinning our hopes on regional-based growth models for my entire lifetime.  What’s actually happening now is that the whole paradigm for regional-based economic growth is falling apart.  We’re witnessing the beginning stages of the end of big - the big corporation, the big government, and the big region. Place-based growth is currently on the upswing, and Americans of all generations are beginning to long for the lost sense of place and local community that has been methodically destroyed since the late 1960s.In 1974, the Richfield Coliseum was built on the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, right in between Cleveland and Akron, because it was thought important that a major civic structure be seen as serving the entire region.  It lasted a mere 20 years, replaced by a new arena in downtown Cleveland, which was built in 1994, because it was thought important that a team bearing the name “Cleveland”, actually play in Cleveland. The Coliseum was reduced to rubble in 1999.  Today it is a grassy meadow, and herds of deer have replaced the sports fans and concert goers.The Coliseum was regional growth – in both a metaphorical and literal sense. For years, pundits, prognosticators, and policy wonks have been telling us that the age of the central city is over; that it is the region that is important. Economies are based on regional job markets, they say, and improvements in transportation and communications are making local places (even large ones) increasingly irrelevant.The fact that economies are regional is true - as far as it goes.  But like anything viewed through one lens only, it does not tell the whole story.Are regions important? Of course. But so are places.  Like so many other things in the realm of urban public policy, this is not a binary, either/or, choice.Why Should We Care? In the piece in The Atlantic, Newman states:We need to accept that some of these big cities need to die, pieces of the city need to die off, not the whole city, to make way for future growth. That’s what I think, but people don’t want to hear that because we’re talking about their homes, that’s where they live. They shouldn’t have to hear that.It is true that people don’t want to hear it.  And it is true that reality trumps our wishes, whether we like it or not.But the story that is being told here is not the whole story.  The scenario that Newman is describing (dead cities with no possibility of revival) is not reality, either.  It is true that all of these Rust Belt cities are struggling to one degree or the other. Some, like Detroit, Flint, or Youngstown, are fighting for their very survival – but they are not inevitably fated to die.  Again, the implied analogies between the Rust Belt city and the ghost towns of the old west, where everyone just packed up and left, are misplaced.  This iconography may be embedded deep in the American psyche, but it does not recognize the incredibly complicated web of connectivity (social, economic, environmental, physical, and even spiritual) that exists between modern cities and their suburbs. I would argue that abandoning our core cities to their supposedly inevitable fate is not like removing a wisdom tooth or an appendix.  The core city is not a vestigial appendage that is no longer needed.  Instead, it is like removing a beating heart from a temporarily ailing, but otherwise healthy person.  When the heart is removed, the patient dies.  We don’t need euthanasia. We need a good heart surgeon.  We’re not talking about numbers on a balance sheet.  We’re talking about people.People are the lifeblood of the city.  A city isn’t a collection of infrastructure that happens to contain people.  It is a place for people to live that happens to contain infrastructure.  People must always come first.  The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.Regardless of what some advocates of regionalism might say, city boundaries are not arbitrary and meaningless.  Core cities will continue to profoundly matter, especially to the people (often disproportionately poor) that remain.Municipal boundaries are not irrelevant, whatever the regionalists may tell you. Economies may be regional, but in most of the nation’s fastest declining cities, government is not.  Municipal boundaries affect taxation, land use policy, public safety, education, public infrastructure, and the delivery of social services. When a city’s population declines precipitously, the proportional demand for the public services that it provides shrinks less than its population, with the end result that its residents end up paying more in taxes, for less in services.  Even if this were not the case, it is expensive and (politically speaking) exceedingly difficult to scale-back and shrink long-term capital investments in public infrastructure – as “shrinking cities” like Detroit and Youngstown have discovered.  What goes on within a given city’s actual municipal boundaries has incredibly important ramifications for its tax base; its employment base; the performance of its 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 its sense of place and its sense of itself.  As cities 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.  To pretend as though the economic and social well-being of city residents is not directly impacted by population decline is to turn a blind eye to reality.This is not just about bricks and mortar infrastructure, or civic pride.  It is about people.Are the things that are associated with place (like tradition, identity, stability, and community) objective values that are intrinsically important?  Or are they just subjective and arbitrary?  Are they really just subordinate means to allegedly more important ends such as economic development and personal profit?Are places really nothing more than engines for economic growth that, like machines, can be discarded as obsolete when they are no longer “useful” in the most reductive, narrowly-defined sense of that word?  Or do places have an emotional and spiritual significance that we ignore at our peril?And what about the people themselves?  Where do they fit into the equation? Where do they stack up on the balance sheet, and in the benefit/cost calculations?  Who is measuring the true human cost of abandoning entire neighborhoods, entire communities, and entire ways of life?  Is it possible to truly understand the social, economic, and spiritual impact of our collective decisions on where and how to build our communities?These questions are never considered in conversations about economic growth and development.  But they should be.What Can Be Done?I don’t believe that a “Shrinking Cities” model of mothballing infrastructure and relocating residents will ever work.  Instead of putting precious time, energy, and money into shrinking, we, in Rust Belt cities, should be building on our neighborhood assets, learn how to stabilize in the present-day new normal, and yes, one day (perhaps sooner than anyone thinks) grow again.I am convinced that “smart decline” is harder work than “smart growth”, and it is not at all clear that “smart decline” even works.  Detroit has talked about it for years, but it hasn’t really done it.  To imagine that a place like like Detroit, which does not even currently have the resources to adequately maintain core public services, will somehow be able to implement a highly-complex, top-down program of relocation and infrastructure removal, both effectively and efficiently, defies credulity.  It hasn’t happened.  It’s not going to happen.Youngstown, another alleged “smart decline” champion, has been unable to implement any of the most formidable tenets of its famous 2010 “shrinking cities” plan, such as forced relocation or infrastructure removal. The plan received a huge amount of press upon its completion, and it recommended a lot of other modest strategies that have truly helped the community, but I have yet to see one detailed analysis of how the big, ambitious, top-down “smart decline” strategies it recommended were successfully put into practice.Instead, what Youngstown has been doing, probably better than anyone, is harnessing the DIY ethos and creativity of amazing and talented young people like Ian Beniston (YNDC) and Phil Kidd (Defend Youngstown).  These efforts deserve a blog post of their own.  Ian, Phil, and their colleagues, involved in the critical but unsexy work of ground-level urban revitalization, have been rock stars, but their work hasn’t involved theoretical “command-and-control” strategies of relocating people, shutting off utilities, tearing out infrastructure, and formally mothballing neighborhoods.  Their work is of a different sort entirely.The solution isn’t to shut these cities down.  The solution is to repair them. That’s not the same thing as being Pollyannaish about growth. Repair may never lead to growth (at least as we formerly understood that term) but growth will never come without repair.American cities have often gone astray, looking for that mega-project or that silver bullet.  They placed their faith, first in 1960s-era urban renewal, and then, later, in the prosperity theology of stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and casinos.It would be an equal and opposite error for cities to place their faith in the predestination theology of Smart Decline.  Both errors place far too much faith in the idea that big, top-down projects and plans are going to save us.  It is the little things that truly make the difference. These are the things that 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 overcoming fatalism, and for doing bigger things further down the road. Without them, we labor in vain.A sledgehammer is a valuable tool - but not if you are trying to repair a watch.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.The idea that we are fated to decline, and that the past is prologue, sells our cities short.  When we write-off whole neighborhoods, or even entire cities, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds even more apathy, cynicism, and despair.The solution is not to destroy our communities, but to provide functional places for people to live.  I refuse to believe that it cannot be done. And if it ultimately cannot, I believe that we should die trying.In the piece in The Atlantic, Newman states:Yeah, one of the main things you’re going to run into is that if you’re trying to concentrate development, that means you’re going to have to restructure. There are people who remain in the city, people who actually stay and live there. But you’re going to have to relocate those people that stay if you’re going to try to grow like that. So there’s a lot of people fussing that they don’t want to be relocated, but cities are going to have to say, “we are only going to provide services to these certain areas, so if you want these services, you’re going to have to relocate into these areas.This sounds like the urban renewal of the 1960s, all over again.  It’s disturbing, the degree to which the notion of relocating entire populations (sure to be disproportionately poor and non-white) is passed off as being not much of a big deal. There is a grain of truth here.  Could we be in a triage situation, and might we need to prioritize and concentrate on certain neighborhoods rather than others? Absolutely.  That’s called setting priorities in an environment with scarce resources, and it’s what Rust Belt cities have to do every day.  But that’s a far different proposition than advocating for a modern version of urban renewal - forcibly relocating people and shutting whole portions of the city down.  Not only is this conception of “Smart Decline” inequitable (and, I would argue, unethical) - it is completely impractical.  Can you imagine the time, energy, and money that it would take to actually implement such a strategy?  Wouldn’t those precious human and financial resources be better spent saying “You know what, our city is in rough shape, but we have hundreds of thousands of potential residents living just a few miles away from us, many of whom have a lot of social and economic capital.  Why don’t we focus our efforts on attracting them to live here?”And again, attracting them doesn’t mean relying on the silver bullets of a new stadium or casino, or the snake oil of the latest urban planning fad.  It means embarking upon the incredibly hard and unsexy work of doing the dozens of fundamental things well (housing, public safety, education, transportation, health, arts, culture, entrepreneurship, small business, jobs) that make a city a truly great place to live. What we have in our neighborhoods, cities, and regions, today, is primarily an economic distribution problem, not an economic growth problem.  We don’t need to worry about more growth in the Rust Belt.  We need to better align the growth that we already have present in our region with the needs of all of our people.We don’t need to build more ships.  We need to get the ships that we already have in our fleet into the harbor, and we need to repair the ones that are damaged.  The rising tide can only lift the ships that are out at sea.  It can’t help the ones that are taking on water, or the ones that are anchored in drydock.The people who will ultimately fix the cities of the Rust Belt are not those who work in them, play in them, or write about them. These cities will be be fixed by those of us who actually live in them, and love them - not because of their imperfections, but in spite of them.  When you actually live in and love a place, its future is not theoretical or academic. Its future is your future, and that of your brothers, and sisters, and neighbors.We are our brother’s keeper.  Let’s not worry about whether we are individually capable of meeting all of our neighbor’s needs. Let’s just start by loving our neighbors as ourselves.  When enough of us do that…I think we’ll be surprised at what we can do, serving together.