Youngstown, Ohio: "The Place That Makes Us" | Documentary: America Reframed

America: ReFramed is a documentary series that runs on the PBS World Channel.  Last week they repeated a previously shown program, "The Place That Makes Us," on redevelopment efforts in Youngstown, Ohio.

Downtown Youngstown.  Photo: Ohio Stock Photography.

With the decline of the steel industry, Youngstown, about 75 miles southeast of Cleveland--has lost about 2/3 of its population. 

Once a thriving city of great wealth, it still has a remarkable downtown core with many tall buildings.  

But with that level of population decline, many of the neighborhoods are dotted with abandoned buildings or empty lots where once extant houses have been demolished ("Non-profit looks to demolish nearly 800 abandoned houses in Youngstown," WKBN-TV).

Youngstown is noteworthy in planning circles for the Youngstown 2010 initiative, which focused on planned shrinkage, recognizing that the city would not be able to re-attain the heights reached when it was a thriving industrial town in the 1960s ("As Its Population Declines, Youngstown Thinks Small," Wall Street Journal, 2007; "WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin," 2021).

The documentary focuses on four people, the director and housing programs manager of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a community development  organization focused on rehabilitating houses to stabilize otherwise shrinking neighborhoods, as well as maintaining commercial buildings like the Foster Art Theatre ("YNDC buys Foster Art Theatre, Will Shut it Down," Youngstown Vindicator), Julius T. Oliver, a city councilmember interested in restoring the vacant South Field House complex (once part of South High School) as a thriving community center, and the woman who gets to buy one of the houses fixed by the YNDC, a beautiful historic house, for only $55,000!

This house on Pineview Avenue was restored by the  Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation.

The documentary is grim.  

It shows people working on improving their community despite significant handicaps of population, business activity, and money.  But at the same time, they're doing great work.

It's definitely worth watching.

WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin

People protesting outside of Senator Joe Manchin's houseboat, which is his DC domicile.  Photo: © Sarah Silbiger / Greenpeace

The Washington Post's Paul Waldman has a column, "Joe Manchin has all the power — and a catastrophic lack of imagination," about how the Senator from West Virginia, in a closely divided Senate, has all the power to scuttle President Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda and legislation, but that he isn't interested much in particular benefits, he only expresses what he doesn't like--climate protections, child care benefits, increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Waldman argues (not using the word) that Manchin is pretty much a nihilist, not concerned at all about the needs of his constituents.  The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch has a number of great articles about Manchin's wealth as derived from investments in the coal industry, which shapes his "policy" preferences and agenda ("Joe Manchin beats his chest for D.C. elites while struggling W. Va. waits for help," "Joe Manchin’s ‘blind trust’ is an utter farce").

Photo: Destination Signs.

Note that this article ("Manchin takes aim at Build Back Better, but his real focus is on West Virginia," Conversation) argues that Manchin cares about the needs of West Virginians, although making no case for it.  If his focus is on West Virginia, it's on corporations.  Also see "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?," New Yorker.

West Virginia is pretty much a basket case. According to US News and World Report, the state ranks 47th in the nation, on the various criteria it ranks. It's a great example of the so-called "resource curse" experienced by nation-states in the Third World, where resource extraction has limited economic benefits within the nation of extraction ("Families of those killed in mine disaster criticize Blankenship," CBS News).

It has the worst rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States--deaths are 8x higher than the number of murders.  We know about how it was ground zero for opioid addiction ("Gazette-Mail wins Pulitzer for investigative reporting," Charleston Gazette-Mail).  

The state's coal industry continues to contract, while leaving environmental degradation in its wake ("Environmentalists allege pollution from West Virginia mine," AP), and the state only adds to the degradation by having a limited approach to environmental regulation ("'All the water's bad': In McDowell County, you have to get creative to find safe drinking water," NBC News).  The state's poverty rate is 16% and the child poverty rate is almost 20%.

Why don't federal legislators work to develop "community plans" focused on helping their constituents?  Sure they work on various stuff, federal grants for development and transportation, on military bases, VA hospitals, national parks ("Park designation delivers on promised increase in visitors at New River Gorge," WV MetroNews), and getting federal agencies if they can, but there isn't an overarching plan.  

And they do constituent services (hopefully) -- casework -- helping individual constituents break through bureaucratic logjams.

But for the most part, legislators work for the interests of corporations (Who Rules America? website by Professor G. William Domhoff).  And Manchin is a prime exhibit of this fact ("Corporate donors gave to Manchin before announcement he wouldn't support Build Back Better: report," The Hill).  Although they are not alone ("The Fracking Shill Local Newspapers Love to Publish," New Republic).

What if Senators and Representatives were to develop community plans, having a public process that wasn't a bag job, where people could have substantive input, with a planning website and metrics measuring accomplishments wrt the plan's precepts?

A State House district plan for Utah Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost.  This reminds me of my surprise when attending The Avenues Street Fair and seeing how Utah State Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost (official website, campaign website) had a whiteboard in her booth about developing a five year "community plan" for her district.

I haven't followed up with her on the progress, but I thought it was very interesting.  

How many elected officials have a "plan" for their district, let alone work to develop such a plan with constituents?

Proposed Ward 4 focused planning framework in DC. It also reminded me of when I was thinking of running for City Council in DC, how I came up with what I thought was a much more Ward-specific platform for running ("Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015), although in talking with people about mounting a campaign, I was reminded that while I like talking to people especially door to door in a campaign, I don't like the kind of people who tend to be into running campaigns.

Past entries on national and West Virginia/state economic development 

Marshall Plan/New New Deal.  In November 2020, I wrote a piece, "What should a domestic Marshall Plan/21st Century New Deal look like?," in response to an op-ed in the Washington Post by eight Rust Belt mayors, arguing for a "Marshall Plan" for their region, in response to a decline in the use of fossil fuels produced there, and the impact on their communities and economies, with the idea it is better to be proactive than reactive.

My basic point was that we need a "Marshall Plan" for the nation, not just the Ohio River Valley Basin.

Economic planning in response to the contraction of the coal industry.  In March, I wrote another piece, in response to the United Mine Workers calling for a retraining and economic revitalization program because of the continuing contraction of the coal industry ("United Mineworkers Union calls for a revitalization/economic development/mitigation program in response to the decline of the coal industry").

I was remiss in not responding to a couple comments on this piece, which made the point that these industries are contracting and that rebuilding many of those micro-economies is a long shot, so out-migration should be part of the equation.

This is not unlike how Hurricane Katrina led many New Orleanians to leave the city, and they found better economic opportunities as a result ("Starting Over Many Katrina victims left New Orleans for good. What can we learn from them?," New Yorker).  From the article:

Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, for Sampson and the small army of his former graduate students who now populate sociology departments around the world, neighborhoods are the great obsession: What effect does where you live have on how you turn out? It’s a difficult question to answer because the characteristics of place and the characteristics of the people who happen to live in that place are hard to untangle. As Kirk drove around the Lower Ninth, however, he realized that post-Katrina New Orleans provided one of those rare occasions when fate had neatly separated the two variables. In the course of bringing immeasurable suffering to the people of New Orleans, Katrina created what social scientists call a “natural experiment”: one day, people were in the neighborhoods where they had lived, sometimes for generations. The next day, they were gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away. “They had to move,” Kirk said. What, he wondered, were the implications of that?

This billboard is famous in urban planning circles.  It was put up in Seattle, when Boeing laid off 60,000 employees, 60% of its workforce (HistoryLink).  Photo: Seattle Times.

Place versus People strategies.  This is tough for local economic development authorities, whose jobs are place-focused and who would be fired for advocating for contraction, the way Youngstown, Ohio did with the Youngstown 2010 project ("Study calls Youngstown 2010 plan a ‘cautionary tale’," Youngstown Vindicator), or in the European Shrinking Cities initiative from the 2010s.  The city was once an economic powerhouse of steel production.  Now all those plants are closed.  

ED officials saying that people are better off leaving for jobs elsewhere is a big no no.

The Vindicator story discusses a study of the Youngstown 2010 project, offering caution based on an academic study of the initiative ("Plan Implementation Challenges in a Shrinking City," Journal of the American Planning Association, 2019, also see this).  The authors do focus on the barriers to change.

At the same time, I think the authors miss key points.  The first, being that ten years is hardly enough time to seriously evaluate a plan under these conditions.  (For example, it took 25 years to see substantive benefits from the DC area Metrorail system, and even longer to see impacts outside the core of the center city.)

Second, the kind of economic devastation faced by Youngstown (or Flint or Detroit Michigan, etc.) is comparable to a natural disaster, and it takes decades to recover from such, even infavorable circumstances.  Third, in this situation, the difficulties such communities face in lack of access to capital as well as customers and needs for the capital also take decades to rectify.  Revitalization in such situations takes 30-50 years.

-- The Future of Shrinking Cities:Problems, Patterns and Strategies of Urban Transformation in a Global Context, UCB Institute for Urban and Regional Development
-- "Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017
-- "Lessons from CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania," 2020

As an example of the issue of capital, This Christian Science Monitor article ("One neighborhood reaches for resilience: A letter from Chicago") discusses the revitalization program in the Pullman neighborhood of South Chicago, which has landed $450 million in inward investment, and the program is still in early phases with limited visible improvements.  It's a good example of how much capital is needed to counter long term disinvestment.

Photo from the Toronto Star article, "‘These good old boys done stole our damn boots’: In his home state, protesters want Joe Manchin to get with the Biden program."

Conclusion.  Activists should come up with a social and economic revitalization plan for West Virginia, and challenge Senator Joe Manchin to support it, and to outline his objections in a substantive way.

What should a domestic Marshall Plan/21st Century New Deal look like?

A number of Midwestern mayors wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Post, "Eight mayors: We need a Marshall Plan for Middle America," about the need for an economic revitalization program for their section of the Midwest, the Ohio River Valley.  

(After WWII, the Marshall Plan was launched as an economic revitalization program for the war torn nations of Europe.)

Making the point that the region is forecasted to lose 100,000 jobs in response to the decline of the fossil fuel industry--oil was first discovered in the US in Pennsylvania, and the region is a leading producer of coal and oil and natural gas by fracking.

From the article: 

According to our research, taking advantage of our community assets, geographic positioning and the strengths of our regional markets can help create over 400,000 jobs across the region by investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency upgrades to buildings, energy infrastructure and transportation assets.

Also see "There's no better time than a crisis to think big, industrial-state mayors argue," Crain's Cleveland Business.

Then again, there is a similar piece from 2009, by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, but more broadly focused on the Midwest.   

But as far as cities go, the issues of Midwestern cities like Youngstown or Pittsburgh aren't different from those of Baltimore or St. Louis, Stockton, California or Tacoma, Washington. 

In short, a domestic Marshall Plan/New Deal needs to be applied nationwide.

To me, the much derided "Green New Deal" should be one leg of such a program ("What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained," New York Times).  From the article: 

Introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, the proposal calls on the federal government to wean the United States from fossil fuels and curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. It also aims to guarantee new high-paying jobs in clean energy industries.

Hoover Dam, Nevada, constructed between 1931 and 1936.

Speaking of the New Deal, it's a much better example and perhaps more relatable than the Marshall Plan, because it was a US-centric program.

Certainly New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, WPA, PWA, the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification initiatives--not just creating the ability to deliver electricity to individual homes and businesses, but the building of hydroelectric facilities in the west like Hoover Dam and the creation of the Bonneville Power Authority demonstrate that the nation has been able to act in the face of great need.

Note that the categories below are not mutually exclusive. 

Reorganizing the federal government's approach to both cities and rural areas.  After the Obama election in 2008, I wrote about reorganizing HUD and related programs, recommending the transformation of the agency into a Department of Cities and Regions as a better way to focus on the needs of cities, and about reorganizing USDA and related agencies in a similar fashion as a better way to focus on rural needs beyond "growing more food."

-- "Metropolitan Revolution (book review)," 2013
-- "Resurging cities, resurging metros, the impoverished and the Metropolitan Revolution," 2013

Poverty, the precariat, neoliberalism and globalization. Neoliberalism--the idea that the market is always more successful than government action--might have been an okay paradigm if it hadn't been accompanied by a reduction in government supports simultaneous with an increase in economic and social vulnerability.   

Instead of developing new supports in order to help people succeed in a neoliberal economic environment marked by Social Darwinism--survival of the fittest, we reduced the availability overall, and didn't develop new approaches to match different and more difficult circumstances ("The dangers of a 'winner take all' economy," Maize Magazine).

In short, when people needed more help, we provided less.

Globalization has limited intra-national labor market protections, pushing down the value of labor in high wage countries like the US reset towards the prevailing wage in low cost countries--India, China, Mexico, etc.

Manufacturers either moved their operations overseas, to lower cost or non union areas within a nation,  and/or have significantly reduced wages, like how Caterpillar bought a locomotive manufacturing company from GM, closed the higher wage Canadian plant, relocated all production to a plant in Illinois, reduced wages across the board, and later threatened to relocate the plant to a Southern non union state ("Electro Motive Diesel considering leaving La Grange facility," West Cook News).  Boeing's been doing the same thing, moving production from high wage Metropolitan Seattle to nonunion states in the south and midwest ("Boeing to move 787 production to South Carolina in 2021," Reuters).

Outsourcing is a related phenomenon.  Companies reduced the number of direct jobs by contracting out various functions and the labor necessary to perform those functions.

Replacing labor with capital.  Plus replacing workers with capital--machines, equipment, computers, software applications, etc.--also reduces employment more generally and depending on the business sector, can reduce wage income for many, while improving outcomes for some.

For example, microcomputers have eliminated secretaries, spreadsheet software has eliminated bookkeepers and accountants, and a typical automobile manufacturing plant has one quarter of the number of employees compared to 1970.

It bugs me to no end when Republicans lambaste cities and Democrats for failure, when those failures have been produced by economic dislocation having zero to do with the decisions of locally elected officials.  (Book review, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, New York Times, 1996).

What to do?  To assist labor in such conditions, we should have done two things.  First, create a national health care system independent of employment.  Second, invest in education at all levels.  Not just traditional "book learning" but trades too (our plumber in DC makes as much money as good lawyers).  Retraining.  Self-improvement, etc.  All types.  And less expensive access to education too.  I don't know if that should mean "free."  (More about "free" education in another proposal.)

Components of a New New Deal/Domestic Marshall Plan

1.  Real national health care and a public health system.  The pandemic is further proof that the way we organize and deliver health care is flawed.  Tying health care to employment fails in recessions, when unemployment rises catastrophically.  

It's even worse when government makes decisions based on ideology and politics rather than on science, evidence, and need ("Blaming the victim vs. blaming the system: Federal officials blame pandemic deaths on poor health practices of individuals").

• Health care provision needs to be independent of employment.  Ironically, I thought that was going to happen in the late 1980s, because US manufacturers--especially Michigan based automakers, were less competitive relative to foreign firms because they provided health care and pensions to their employees, and their competitors did not.  
• Health care needs to be reorganized to focus on health and wellness, not just sickness.  This is true for both urban and rural areas.  So much of chronic disease is lifestyle related--a function of behavioral choices.  I've written about moving to a wellness paradigm in terms of cities ("Ordinary versus Extraordinary Planning around the rebuilding of the United Medical Center in Southeast Washington DC | Part One: Rearticulating the system of health and wellness care East of the River," "A glaring illustration of the need for comprehensive health and wellness planning in DC: Providence Hospital") but the principles are universal.  
• Health care needs to better integrate public health with health and wellness, not just sickness care.  This goes double for public health ("More communities need to integrate health care and public health programming").  The US response to the coronavirus has been a disaster is so many ways.
• A rural hospital network needs to be developed independent of the profit motive.  Even before the pandemic, rural hospitals were closing at a rapid rate ("Getting Health Care Was Already Tough In Rural Areas. The Pandemic Has Made It Worse," NPR).  Rather than let hospitals close, states and the federal government need to step in and create a rural health care system.  Pennsylvania ("EIGHT MORE HOSPITALS JOIN PA'S RURAL HEALTH MODEL" HealthLeaders, "Can we heal rural health? All eyes are on Pennsylvania’s bold experiment," Philadelphia Inquirer) and Mississippi ("What can Mississippi learn from Iran," New York Times) are examples where the states are addressing this.
• Urban health care networks may need to be backstopped also.  Hospitals are closing in major cities like Philadelphia ("Tower Health’s financial condition called ‘precarious’ in credit downgrade to ‘junk’ status," Philadelphia Inquirer), Baltimore, New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. The pandemic has proved the need for slack resources.  But the health care financing system prioritizes efficiency and minimizing redundancy.  Providing extranormal financial support to keep urban hospitals open should be an option, but as part of a reconfigured and rearticulated health and wellness system ("On brink of disaster, Jackson turns profitable thanks to visionary CEO," Miami Herald, "More communities need to integrate health care and public health programming") .

2.  Responding to urban poverty.  I've written a bunch about equity planning, social urbanism, and new and integrated approaches to addressing multi-generational poverty in cities.  

Social urbanism is an approach, pioneered in Medellin, Colombia that invests in community infrastructure such as libraries, schools, parks, and transportation access as a way to (re)build social inclusion, public safety, and economic opportunity.

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017
-- "Broken windows/collective efficacy: Baltimore; Newark; Grand Junction, Colorado; Pittsburgh; Albany," 2019
-- "Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019
-- "Equity planning: an update," 2020
-- "Basic planning building blocks for "community" revitalization programs that most cities haven't packaged," 2020
-- "The need for a "national" neighborhood stabilization program comparable to the Main Street program for commercial districts," 2020
-- ""Utility" infrastructure as an opportunity for co-locating urban design and placemaking improvements," 2020

Co-location of programs and services should be a priority.

Slide from a presentation by David Barth and Carlos Perez.

3.  Investing in rural social infrastructure.  It happens that the field of community development is in part derived from the rural economic development function of agricultural extension programming ("Community development in America: A history," Sociological Practice).  I recognized in college that the work in community development is equally applicable to either rural and urban settings in most cases.

-- Downtown and Business District Market Analysis, University of Wisconsin Extension

Social "urbanism" isn't about urbanism so much as it is about investing in what sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in Palaces for the People, calls "social infrastructure," which are civic institutions like schools, libraries, parks, and other assets, complemented by programming.  This approach to community investment and reinvestment is equally relevant to rural areas.  

Although too often attitudes in rural areas, focused on "individualism" and fatalism when it comes to community and collective action can make this quite difficult ("In the land of self-defeat," New York Times).

4.  Urban and rural economic development.  Needs to focus on  entrepreneurship and business development, harvesting existing knowledge and material resources and transportation systems.  

A key element is leveragng higher education.  Spokane and Greensboro, North Carolina are great examples of how to do this ("Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016).

But it's not just any kind of education institution that has economic development potential ("Can a coal town reinvent itself?," New York Times, "Lessons from the CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania," 2020).  They have to be focused on productive outputs--engineering and technical colleges, scientific research, business development, etc.

And different forms of business including cooperatives and other forms of business organization that focus on keeping revenues and profits circulating locally.

For example, cooperative business ventures are a way to keep retail operating ("Economic development for small towns needs to include the development of cooperative stores," 2014; "The need for a new rural community cooperative movement," 2017) as populations shrink or in communities that have been abandoned by chain retail.

The multi-business Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland and the Push Buffalo and Green Worker Cooperatives in the Bronx energy conservation business cooperative are examples of business forms where the workers are owners.   The Mondragon Corporation group of over 250 worker cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain is Spain's 10th largest corporation.  The National Co-operative Bank helps to fund cooperative enterprises.

But there needs to be a recognition that smaller communities in rural areas can be harder to help when it comes to economic development in the face of a more integrated world economy ("Small cities struggle," 2017).  

The Massachusetts approach to revitalizing "gateway cities," the once booming smaller cities across the state that had once been thriving manufacturing and business centers, which declined as industry consolidated and moved away, needs to be further developed and applied more widely. 

And there needs to be a change in business recruiting, which is often a race to the bottom in terms of tax incentives and competition between states and cities to land firms ("Tax incentives to attract businesses: Wisconsin's Foxconn debacle," 2020).  

5.  Investment in "Infrastructure."  The Trump Administration said it wanted to build infrastructure, although mostly it proposed loans, the sale of existing assets, and focusing on infrastructure with positive revenue streams ("Trump Administration Infrastructure Program Priority List," 2017). 

But even if the Trump Administration were serious (" How 'Infrastructure Week' Became a Long-Running Joke," New York Times), the anti-government, anti-investment philosophy of the Republican Party made such a program a long shot, because they completely uninterested in the government being a player in infrastructure investment..

But infrastructure shouldn't be seen as either a Republican or Democratic issue.  It just is.  And it's fundamental and foundational for economic success and growth.

While Oklahoma City is a "big city," it is in "flyover country," not coastal.  

Former Republican Mayor Mick Cornett's book, The Next American City: The Big Promise of Our Mid-Sized Metros, outlines a world class approach to a community social and economic infrastructure development program aimed at making the community better and more attractive for business and residential recruitment.  It demonstrates that urban success can happen anywhere and isn't limited to the East and West Coasts.

A domestic infrastructure program should address energy, roads, bridges, transit including ferries, ports, parks ("National Park Service delayed $11 billion in maintenance last year because of budget challenges," Washington Post) etc.

And unlike the Obama era ARRA ("Roads vs. transit and the stimulus package" and ""Chance" continues to favor the prepared road builders"), transportation projects should be multi-modal, whereas too often in the US, road projects fail to include transit, unlike in European countries like Denmark 

6.  Energy and climate change infrastructure.  The proposed Green New Deal is a way to position an infrastructure agenda for energy and climate change.  

The challenge is the investment in legacy fossil fuel production and consumption systems (including sprawl), and the (un)/willingness of legacy companies and governments to shift to new paradigms ("Petrostate vs. electrostate," Economist).

• Renewables are key.  
• Improving the resilience and capacity of the electricity grid.  
• Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency.  
• There's a lot of discussion about the opportunity of "green hydrogen."  
• Transportation remains a ripe opportunity
• Dams and hydropower (last summer's collapse of dams in Mid-Michigan, leading to the flooding of Midland, is an example of under-investment and failed regulation)
• shifting from gasoline to electric and hydrogen powered vehicles ("California’s Ban on Gas Cars Could Go Nationwide — But Still Doesn’t Go Far Enough," New York Magazine/Curbed)

I am particularly intrigued by offshore wind power as a way to make electrification work.  For example, offshore wind off Maine is capable of generating 36x the state's current energy needs ("After Scotland Tour, Maine Hatches Offshore Floating Wind Turbines Plot," CleanTechnica).  Puerto Rico shouldn't be burning oil for electricity, but reaping renewable energy opportunities from the sea.  There are 20+ states with significant seacoast access.

(Better than e-vehicles are a shift to transit and other sustainable modes.)

7. Transit and transportation. There are so many opportunities. 

• Expanding urban transit systems, especially strengthening and extending connections between stations, major trip generators (like airports), bus system improvements including busways, etc.
• Expanding state and multi-state railroad and bus networks (Colorado's growing Bustang network is a model), with a focus on electrification of railroad passenger systems, powered by electricity generated from offshore wind.  (More on this later.  I've been strongly influenced by how railroad services are organized and delivered in Japan, and of course cities like London and Paris.)
• Shifting shorter range airplane travel to railroads.  
• Development of high speed rail passenger services.
• Freight railroad system improvements, especially as a way to "expand" capacity on Interstate freeways by shifting trips from trucks, and to support rural economic development
• Hydrogen fuel networks for long distance trucking.  
• Expansion of ferry and water taxi systems.  
• Opportunities at ports and inter-modal connections with railroads.  
• Canals and barges.
• Metropolitan scale bikeway networks, bicycle parking systems, payroll deduction and loan programs to buy bicycles, and active programming to shift people from the car to the bike
• promotion of e-bikes as a way to support longer distance bike commuting
• Implementing Signature Street urban design programs ("Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces""), low traffic neighborhoods, and pedestrianized districts ("Why doesn't every big city in North America have its own Las Ramblas?" and "Diversity Plaza, Queens, a pedestrian exclusive block") in cities

8.  Water and sewerage system improvements. Many rural and urban water systems face massive upgrade costs to improve water quality and reduce stormwater and sewage discharges into rivers and lakes.  The GAO estimates more than $600 billion in needs over the next 20 years, while the American Society of Civil Engineers says over $1 Trillion over 25 years.

9.  TOD and affordable housing.  Transit oriented development builds higher density mixed use housing and other uses at transit stations.  This encourages transit use and reduces car trips.

Not only is there tremendous demand for new social housing as population continues to grow, as well as a greater diversity of housing types, including Single Room Occupancy, housing the homeless, etc., there is a tremendous backlog of maintenance needs for existing public housing, over $30 billion ("Fixing Public Housing: A Day Inside a $32 Billion Problem," New York Times).

In return for funding, communities should be required to agree to higher density.

Maybe a national program to help finance a wider scale creation of accessory dwelling units in cities.

10.  Broadband/Community broadband.  The pandemic and shift to online schooling has made very clear the existence of a digital divide in both urban ("What the coronavirus reveals about the digital divide between schools and communities," Brookings, "“The cruel irony of the digital divide” in Colorado: Urban poor are left behind even as access, technology improves," Colorado Sun) and rural ("No signal: Internet ‘dead zones’ cut rural students off from virtual classes.," NYT) areas.  

Plus rural areas need faster Internet access to support economic development.

It's possible to create community broadband networks to make signal more widely available, usually involving a mix of public and private resources ("The Dos and Don'ts of Community Broadband Network Planning," Government Technology,).

Relatedly, this Wall Street Journal article,  "Private 5G Networks Are Bringing Bandwidth Where Carriers Aren’t," discusses how businesses are creating their own private 5G networks to cover facilities at a cost as low as $5,000.

It's can be harder to do in rural areas, but still eminently possible, through electricity providers, municipalities, states ("Internet network set to beam into Md.’s rural areas won’t help students this fall," Washington Post), and other entities.  

Cities and nonprofits can seed such systems in lower income communities in urban areas ("Building the People’s Internet," Urban Omnibus).

-- Community Broadband Networks, Institute for Local Self Reliance

Lessons from CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania

The once thriving Bethlehem Steelworks in Allentown is now an arts complex.  CNN photo.

Allentown is a Pennsylvanian community that has been crushed by deindustrialization.

It along with nearby Bethlehem, had been home to a significant proportion of the country's steel production, along with other manufacturing such as Mack Trucks (since closed and consolidated into a plant in Hagerstown, Maryland).

Benefiting from relative proximity to New York City and Philadelphia, it has some ability to regenerate.

 A number of years ago, the State Legislature created a special form of "tax increment financing" district (TIFs are used to support bonding authority--the idea is that new development will spark tax revenues that wouldn't have been generated otherwise, and the new tax revenues are spent solely on paying off the bonds) which even includes income tax revenues from new residents("State level initiatives to support center city revitalization in smaller towns," 2014).

There are other programs as well, including:

• a neighborhood improvement zone initiative with the acronym ANIZDA, the large scale arts initiative aimed at reviving "The Steel" called the Bethlehem SteelStacks Arts + Cultural Campus (ASLA award discussion; "Factory-Turned-Arts-Campus Forges Future from Industrial Past," Metropolis Magazine), which takes up under 10% 
• of the 120-acre site that is part of the overall regeneration program including small scale manufacturing and logistics related business development
• colleges and community connection efforts
• community food initiatives -- a chapter in the Island Press published book Food Towns USA focuses on the area.

Over the weekend, CNN ran a longform story on the town, "Reinvention in the Rust Belt."

Two elements stuck out.

How community organizations can contribute to crime reduction.  First, it's not always easy to grasp, but Professor Patrick Sharkey in Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence argues that community organizations and community responses to crime were a significant factor in the crime drop period that followed the increase in crime that peaked during the crack cocaine era.

The CNN article describes one such organization in Allentown, Promise Neighborhoods of the Lehigh Valley, and the various programs and initiatives it sponsors and operates to redirect people from criminal activity.

It's a great illustration I think of what Prof. Sharkey was writing about ("Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime," American Sociological Review, 2017). 

Although we have to remember that there are plenty of ineffective organizations and initiatives as well.

The need to include entrepreneurship within community revitalization programming.  Community focused "microenterprise development" is a key element of the approach outlined in Community Economic Development Handbook by Mihalio Temali. 

-- presentation

I think of "community economic development" as incorporating many more ground-up approaches, which I also call "Building a Local Economy," versus more traditional "economic development" which tends to be top-down and focused on large organizations as the leads, and often these organizations are not local.

The second point from the story is about how most public programs on community revitalization in poor areas don't foster self help and entrepreneurship very much.  The article discusses JB Reilly and his City Center Investment Corporation, which is the developer behind much of the new construction in the city center--hotels, housing, retail, etc.

After a tour of some of the neighborhoods of the city outside the core, he came up with a program called Real Estate Laboratory, to work with potential entrepreneurs from the community, in rehabilitating and improving individual residential properties, so that they can participate in and benefit from real estate led improvement.  From the article:

... another outgrowth of Reilly’s engagement with the community: a program called the Real Estate Laboratory that would provide mentorship and financial connections to help local residents buy and rehab distressed apartment properties. The goal was for them to become property owners and landlords in their own community. Through a partnership with Reilly’s alma mater, Lafayette College, participants would attend classes and receive intensive coaching on investing and entrepreneurship, as well as hands-on training in how to maintain and fix their properties themselves to keep costs low.

Reilly pledged $1 million to get it off the ground. He also offered his influence with the banks to help make the case that those who completed the program — many of them with unconventional credit records — would be loan-ready. The goal was to begin to create a consistent pipeline of local developers who could have a hand in redeveloping and strengthening their community from within. The program would be housed in a glass-fronted street-facing corner unit of one of Reilly’s office towers.

Also see "City Center developer presents plans for ‘The Real Estate Lab’ to ANIZDA," WFMZ-TV.

New York Times article on community decline associated with loss of work

Comparable to the New York Times Magazine cover story last year on Baltimore ("Tragedy of Baltimore"), Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn just published a powerful article in the New York Times about the decline of Kristof's boyhood home community of Yamhill in Southern Oregon, "Who Killed the Knapp Family?"

Apparently the article is an excerpt from a new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (review).

They point out that deindustrialized cities are rural areas share common characteristics. "When Work Disappears" people and communities break.

And the US has a very weak social support network, so such decline isn't staunched.

In the last few weeks there was reporting on a study that found in communities where manufacturing plants closed, drug use was up ("Auto plant closures tied to surge in opioid overdose deaths," Reuters)
.

This shouldn't be news.  When I was in college I worked for a time at the University's Survey Research Center, and one of the studies we did was on the impact on health from the loss of work and health insurance coverage.  It was grim talking to those people...

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I have only come across work about "the precariat" in the last couple years.

But with the backlash against "globalization," I've come to realize that the real problem is the failure to provide systems of support to communities and individuals that lose out to globalization -- health care, access to quality education and work retraining programs, economic development programs, etc.

As Robert Reich says, it's not like corporations are out to help communities or countries, just their shareholders ("American firms aren't beholden to America – but that's news to Trump," Guardian).

Instead, the US cuts health care, food stamps, unemployment support, etc. (As does Britain, and this was a major factor in the Brexit vote, as people were convinced to blame the European Union for the Conservative Party's austerity program.)

Investment is social infrastructure such as health care, "social urbanism" ("Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019), rural development, is the necessary response.

But a problem with rural development is that people and communities can be very hard to help, because the idea that government can be helpful is ideologically oppositional to the conservative political narrative. From the New York Times article "In the Land of Self-Defeat":

His comment reflected a worldview that is becoming ever more deeply ingrained in the white people who remain in rural America — Washington politicians are spending money that they shouldn’t be. In 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory, Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the attitudes she observed after years of studying rural Americans: “The way these folks described the world to me, their basic concern was that people like them, in places like theirs, were overlooked and disrespected,” she wrote in Vox, explaining that her subjects considered “racial minorities on welfare” as well as “lazy urban professionals” working desk jobs to be undeserving of state and federal dollars. People like my neighbors hate that the government is spending money on those who don’t look like them and don’t live like them — but what I’ve learned since I came home is that they remain opposed even when they themselves stand to benefit.

The article discusses community opposition to a library in Rural Arkansas.

Also see the New Yorker article, "Arlie Russell Hochschild's View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump" which discusses the book Strangers in their Own Land, a study of the Tea Party movement and conservative support for Trump and the Republican Party.

Also see "An outline for integrated equity planning" (2017) and the comments, which lists other best practices not compiled in the original piece, as I come across them.

(WTF?) University of Michigan faculty raise objections to UM investment in creation of Detroit Center for Innovation

A c. 1940s post-war ad by a company then based in Detroit. In the 1950s, Detroit had something like 15 auto assembly plants, now it has two.

The University of Michigan announced the creation of a new Detroit Center for Innovation, in association with Dan Gilbert, principal of Quicken Loans and a big investor in the physical revitalization of Detroit albeit focused on the core and private equity honcho Stephen Ross (who has his own issues, "Who is Stephen Ross, the billionaire criticized for his high-end Trump fundraiser?," Washington Post) in an Opportunity Zone which have issues ("I figured out why Opportunity Zones won't amount to much") on a site that had originally been slated for a jail.

The College of Literature, Science and the Arts has a Detroit-based program, the Semester in Detroit, where students live in the city, take classes and do projects, and faculty of the program have criticized the DCI proposal ("UM Semester in Detroit faculty express concerns about new Detroit Center for Innovation," MLive).

From the letter:

UM would offer masters degrees and “stackable certificates” for professionals who would serve the emerging high-tech economic system, building capacities in areas such as artificial intelligence and cyber-security, emerging fields in what some have called the rise of “surveillance capitalism.” As reported by Detroit Free Press business columnist John Gallagher, the planning for this project occurred almost exclusively behind private, closed doors with no input from long-time Detroit residents, community institutions or city council. ...

The city of Detroit is important - both historically and contemporarily - for understanding the complex and inextricable conflicts created by capitalism’s dependency on racial and economic oppression and inequity. While such conflicts have been present since colonization of the original Anishinaabe lands that became “Detroit,” we need only look back a few years, or even weeks, to see how white billionaires continue to “re-imagine” majority-black Detroit in their own image and for their own economic benefit. Given this history, and considering the private interests involved in this partnership, we believe the “Detroit Center for Innovation” is an inappropriate and irresponsible deployment of the University’s social, economic and intellectual capital. ...

So many companies once based in Detroit and with manufacturing facilities in Detroit and the surrounding area no longer exist. 

Many recent major development projects in Detroit have skirted, abused or manipulated the spirit and legal requirements of Detroit’s community-benefits ordinance. ...

The land for this project encompasses the boundary between the historic black neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, which were strategically destroyed by the city of Detroit, in conjunction with the federal government, in the mid-20th century. How will these community histories and legacies be honored and empowered without tokenism and cultural cooptation? And, who will decide?

Yes, I think universities need to be careful about the relationships they make with funders and programs.

Given his recent controversies, I'd probably back away a bit from Stephen Ross.  OTOH, he is a UM graduate and gave enough money to the business school to have them rename it in his honor--first after a donation of $100 million, which he followed up with a second $100 million 9 years later..

But UM and Dan Gilbert, even Stephen Ross, aren't responsible for all the faults of capitalism and to possibly scuttle this investment/program as a result would do a lot more harm to Detroit.

I do think such criticisms can and should be used to make the program better, and more focused on generating more direct benefits for the city.

But Detroit's biggest problem is disinvestment.  The solution/response to disinvestment is investment.

The city has is a loss of two-thirds of its population over the past 60 years and much of its industry.  It needs to reboot the business ecosystem in order to be able to generate growth in the face of abandonment.

When I first heard of the proposal, I thought about an article I had read about Walter Chrysler, and why he was able to create a car company without a lot of internal capacity.  It was because he was able to rely on a rich ecosystem of suppliers.

-- "Markets, Networks, and the Rise of Chrysler in Old Detroit, 1920—1940," Michael Schwartz, Enterprise & Society, 1:1 (2000)

In the 80+ years since, the business ecosystem of auto production has changed significantly, bulked up, so that such an ecosystem no longer exists.

But that's true of many different industries.  And many other cities have been equally crushed by the changes from consolidation and relocation of manufacturing outside of the US.

Could a UM DCI help to rebuild such an ecosystem across multiple business sectors, thereby helping to rebuild not only Detroit, Michigan and US manufacturing (cf. "Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.," Wall Street Journal) but the city's economy and attractiveness as a place to conduct business and reside?

(My problem is that I have to forget my memories of what Detroit was before 1970--many of us did not recognize that the city was in serious decline at the time--and take such proposals from where they are, where the city is today.)

Brilliant piece on Chicago's woes by Aaron Renn

Speaking of why I have so much respect for the Urbanophile blog (I had the privilege of meeting "Chicago" bloggers Aaron Renn and Lynn Stevens of Peopling Places when I attended the Main Street conference there in 2009-- Lynn and I were going to meet anyway and she brought Aaron along), Aaron has a piece in the City Journal (yes, the publication of the "conservative" Manhattan Institute).

It's on how he sees Chicago's situation--a city deeply in debt, with a shrinking population both for the city and regionally, lack of a particularly strong business sector powering claims to being a "global city," comparatively low per-capita GDP, and its role really being the center city (from the standpoint of center-periphery concepts in underdevelopment studies, although he doesn't cite this work) of the still declining Midwest (with the exception of those areas experiencing booms related to oil and natural gas production).

-- The Second-Rate City?:Chicago’s swift, surprising decline presents formidable challenges for new mayor Rahm Emanuel


He also mentions bureaucracy as stultifying local business development (he doesn't mention contracting, my bicycle facilities systems integration firm ran into the buzzsaw of Chicago contracting last fall), and the failure to systematize laws and zoning practices, but instead preferring the very personal practice of law and action according to "aldermanic privilege" -- kind of like so-called "state's rights" arguments to allow states to do mostly really terrible [and yes, occasionally good things, but very rarely] things like discrimination, instead each Aldermanic district does its own thing, mostly badly.  Along with corruption and the power of the political machine, these ways of dysfunction make it hard to re-generate organic growth.

It's kind of a Chicago specific chapter that would be great to include in an update of the book, The Future Once Happened Here, coincidentally authored by a Fellow of the Manhattan Institute, Fred Siegel.

A lot of people criticize Siegel's work, but I think it's not just inciteful but insightful, and if you don't understand what's up, and you're just focused on cheer-leading, you'll never really be able to improve your city and its economic position, in either its metropolitan, regional, or national context.

Likely people will take Aaron's article as personal criticism rather than critical analysis, and the problems present will continue to fester and only get worse.

Is abject failure necessary for a community and organizations to be able to rebuild?

Most people who know stuff know that in the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. steel industry went through a wrenching reinvention, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs, as steel production became an industry organized on a global scale, and production shifted from a mass production method to a system focused on shorter runs and specialty products. See "The Role of Management in the Decline of the American Steel Industry" from the journal Business and Economic History (1996).

All the time while the big producers were failing, smaller companies like Nucor, with a different business model and system for production, succeeded.

The automobile industry and the related unions couldn't have been unaware of the failure of the steel industry, as changes in both industries impacted the other.

I guess that was a dry run, but ignored, for Detroit. Not to mention that in 1979, John DeLorean wrote a brilliant book about the failings of the automobile industry, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. Or even an article in the Economist ten years later, "On a clear day you can still see General Motors" which looked at the continued failures of the company and the industry. DeLorean's book had a huge impact on me in terms of approaching organizational development and institutional change.

Maybe you have to hit rock bottom before you become willing to change, willing to innovate?

It shouldn't have to be that way, and it might just be a factor of the different kind of innovation ecologies that exist between industries that develop as large, mass production oriented companies vs. industries that come out of a more startup, bottom-up culture like the difference between technology clusters along Route 128 in Massachusetts vs. Silicon Alley in California as described by AnnaLee Saxenian in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128

I joke that some cities develop "a desperate willingness to experiment because they have no other choice" and finally, Detroit has reached that point.

As The Doors sang in "Been Down So Long":

Well, I've been down so Goddamn long
That it looks like up to me
Well, I've been down so very damn long
That it looks like up to me
Yeah, why don't one you people
C'mon and set me free

Last night, I watched the Planet Green cable network's mini-series, "Detroit in Overdrive," a three-part program about Detroit's revival, which repeats on Monday August 8th.

I found about half of the running time of the programs relevant to the stated purpose of the program.

Showing automobile design students at Center for Creative Studies wasn't relevant, neither was traveling to and touring a GM plant in Grand Blanc, Michigan, which is 61 miles away from Detroit, and Genesee County isn't even considered part of the "metropolitan statistical area" that the Bureau of Census considers to be the Detroit Metropolitan area. Undoubtedly these segments were to please GM, the sponsor of the programs.

Most of all the "arts" stuff that was featured was about community building.

But this stuff was interesting:

• Joe Faris, a past contestant on Project Runway, working with a manufacturer of "clothes" for manufacturing robots to produce jeans;

• maybe Kid Rock's production of craft beer at some unidentified brewery;

• the Woodbridge Records kids, who aren't all that different from indie, start-up music labels elsewhere, but at least they get their vinyl records manufactured in their home city which is unlikely for most other indie labels;

• how urban agriculture programs in the city are also selling their products to restaurants and vendors, and at Eastern Market, Detroit's public market and food wholesale distribution center;

• the studios and artists and craftspeople in the Russell Industrial Center;

• how the University of Michigan has a "Detroit Partnership" day which gets more than 1,300 students (mostly students of privileged backgrounds) into the city for a day of volunteerism (they never did that when I went to UM);

• how the Center for Creative Studies, a college of design based in Detroit, and long known for its automobile design programs, has a social activism product design class, and in that class, Veronika Scott created a coat for the homeless that can be manufactured in the city as a jobs development and health initiative (the coat ends up being made of Tyvek after 5 attempts using other materials failed, and it can serve as a sleeping bag too) -- CNN story on Veronika Scott.

But I don't think the series convinced me that there is an overarching understanding of what happened to the city and why, including the negative power of segregation and racism ("Detroit's distress: A Q + A with Thomas J. Sugrue" from the Newark Star-Ledger--Professor Sugrue has written many books about Detroit's decline).

The episodes were more focused on cheerleading and showcasing what we might call the gritty determination of heoric peoples. None of the "experts" interviewed during the course of the program came from institutions outside of Detroit and its suburbs.

I don't think anyone searching for guidance on how to revitalize their weak market neighborhoods would get a fair amount of "overarching" insight from the programs, although the stories and ideas are interesting and some of the projects are really great.