Growing the Shrinking City with Demolition?

(This is the third in a series of articles addressing urban housing in America)

The list of US cities that lost size and luster due to de-industrialization is long and includes once shining US powerhouses like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore and Buffalo. The list of ideas how to fix the problems arising from the decline is even longer than the list of shrinking cities.

 

Occupied and vacant houses near Greenmount cemetery , Baltimore
(photo ArchPlan)

The main problem is the significant surplus of houses, the direct result of a shrinking population, which itself was the result of the loss of jobs. Many houses stand vacant and have fallen in disrepair. Baltimore alone is said to have somewhere between 16,000 or over 30,000 of them, depending who does the counting. Some of those are close to ready for move in, many others have open roofs and collapsed floors and walls and are seemingly beyond repair.

Last week we tried to figure out why even cities with a large housing surplus still have an urgent need for affordable housing and why those surplus houses do little to provide affordable housing. 

This article will discuss what to do with those vacant houses, which are clearly a problem. According to a widely cited statistic by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Initiative, a community has no chance to grow and attract new residents when it comprises more than 4% vacants. 

 

The relations between Baltimore City, County and Maryland State population: A shrinking city in a growing region
(Source: In House Job: Rachel Rose Rita Hilvert, 2007)

It’s hard to decide if the vacants are the cause or the effect of the inability to grow. While they are certainly unattractive and sometimes dangerous, they are hardly the main factor preventing people from moving to a neighborhood. More plausible is that the vacant houses are result of people having left the neighborhood for independent reasons. There may well be a negative feedback loop at work, but it appears certain that without changing the underlying causes for the decline there won't be demand for the vacant houses. 

 

Baltimore City map of vacant houses

What is needed is nothing less than a paradigm shift in which neighborhoods become attractive to different demographic segments that see opportunity in the city. Such a shift can come from external factors such as strong regional growth and in-migration into a market, but it can also come from within cities, its stakeholders and the strength they have. A paradigm shift inside a devastated community is hard to fabricate. It can come from the edges if neighboring communities are on the mend or it can come from a big catalytic investment inside a dis-invested community that is able to "create" a market.

Indeed, scholars of the vexing issue of vacants warn of seeing the problem as anything else than an economic problem. Economics are the explanation for how the problem began pointing to the tectonic shift in which heavy industry and manufacturing left cities or closed down entirely. Economics must be the mechanics with which a reversal gets leveraged.

 

There are wonderful squares, churches and
buildings in historic West Baltimore

Not to forget national policy and demographics. The corollary to local economic shifts was a pervasive, national, anti-urban policy that encouraged urban flight, sub-urbanization, economic and racial segregation, and an emphasis on home-ownership over renting, all fueled by massive population growth, growth in wealth, cheap energy, and a strong orientation towards consumption.

To reverse decades of such strong seismic events requires equally powerful economic and policy forces. Luckily, several are on the horizon:

• The two largest cohorts in the history of the US, the baby-boomers and their offspring, the millennials both have rediscovered the city as an attractive place to live. 
• Additionally immigration has fueled national population growth which gravitates towards cities for their cultural diversity and more affordable accommodation. 
• The post-industrial economy is communication and people driven. Post industrial corporations don't require huge fixed assets that cement them to ports, rivers, rail or commodities. Their assets are people and information, both still the essence of cities. As employees return to cities, mobile as they are, corporations follow. They, too, will pick a location that has an active lifestyle and vibrancy. 
• Lastly, decreasing mobility due to congestion and a trend towards higher energy cost (even if there was this recent and most likely temporary trend reversal).

Even all those factors combined have not turned Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit or Baltimore into growth centers again. At least not the heavily dis-invested sections of town. So how big is the problem?

The good news is that the vacant house problem is not directly proportional to the population loss. A key to understanding the vacant house problem requires the distinction between population shrinkage and household shrinkage. In Baltimore, for example, the reduction of total population is 30% down from the peak of 960,000 to about 630,000 now. But that doesn't mean that a third fewer houses would be needed to cater to the current population because the number of households has gone down much less (only about 10%).  The reasons are that household sizes, expressed as the number of people per household, have shrunk dramatically, while the space needs per person have drastically increased.

Small former worker housing in Middle East, a community in East
Baltimore (photo: ArchPlan Inc.)

So, instead of a whopping 100,000 dwelling units being surplus, "only" 16,000 to 30,000 actually stand empty (the number has such a wide range depending on the definition of vacant as a structure or also as a lot). With the average household size still in decline those vacant structures could be filled with just about five to fifteen thousand new households or some 10-40,000 people, depending what household size one aims for. In a region that grows by several 100,000 residents per year, and given the ever larger number of households of just one, this shouldn't be too difficult for Baltimore. It would be somewhat harder for Detroit or Pittsburgh located in largely flat-lining regions, but by no means impossible.

The reality in Baltimore has been different, though, in spite of widespread demolition efforts that began to take on a large scale in 1990 with Housing Commissioner Dan Henson envisioning as many as 11,000 demolitions in a dozen years. He managed to tear down 4,000 in three years. In a famous Saturday action with city owned heavy equipment, a mid-block demolition unintentionally brought down a party-wall as well and exposed the neighbor sitting on his sofa watching TV.  Housing subsequently refrained from midblock demolitions. Yet, the total number of vacants has largely flat-lined. In 2002 then Mayor Martin O'Malley, now a presidential candidate, promised to deal with 5,000 houses through his Project 5,000. Again, the effort hardly made a dent in the total supply of vacants.

The anatomy of a Baltimore rowhouse block. Source: In House Job: Rachel Rose Rita Hilvert, 2007)

Not only Baltimore, but most of the old rust-belt "legacy cities" have failed to grow and to fill the too many vacant units that are spread across way too many communities. The Baltimore city-wide average for vacants is between 5 and 10%, the worst hit neighborhoods have in excess of 30% vacants. By comparison, Detroit has a citywide average of nearly 23% of vacants or nearly 80,000 total out of a total of 340,000 housing units.

For these cities to register overall growth, segregation is still too severe, wounds are too deep, and dysfunction from the relentless shrinkage too pervasive, no matter that some parts of these cities are thriving just fine. The coexistence of such starkly different internal markets is one of the most vexing economic features of the modern US city.

Demolition of the 2100 block of north Stricker Street where the Governor
announced the demo funds. (photo: ArchPlan Inc)

One of the pseudo market-oriented strategies to rectify the oversupply of houses are attempts at massive demolition, presumably to bring supply and demand into balance and ostensibly also to make a city more attractive for new residents.  The strategy has been repeated in many cities, in fact, most shrinking cities embarked on these self-mutilating massive demolition programs. It’s like somebody who wants to sell a once attractive but aging car not by touting its vintage charm or its historic oddities but by ripping out all of the features that need repair.

Detroit, faced with bankruptcy, could no longer afford its vastness. That it has combated the massive vacancy problem with widespread demolition is not too surprising: Grown and raised as an auto city, its lack of density would be a problem in the best of times. But for denser cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Cleveland which were raised on walking and streetcar transit, this solution is pure poison. Many of the vacants are located in historic districts consisting of once beautiful houses of a kind that fetch in other neighborhoods high sales prices. Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia all boast in their most prosperous neighborhoods exactly those same type houses they demolish so happily in the dis-invested parts of town. 

The surplus home demolition programs continue the failed "slum and blight removal", a dark spot in the post-war history of most cities, which has caused havoc to the social and built fabric of cities to such an extent that this strategy actually has caused and exacerbated the strong bifurcation of these cities’ housing markets. 

photo: ArchPlan Inc.

Whether or not the nightmare of urban renewal or urban freeways descended on a community depended in postwar America largely on which race occupied the houses. Thus urban renewal and the term "slum and blight" removal became feared by community and social justice activists as much as by preservationists. To add insult to injury, the newly created low-income high rise projects that had been constructed in the name of slum and blight removal, subsequently failed, not only themselves as the supposedly better solution for an urban living arrangement, but their failure dragged down entire surrounding neighborhoods as well.

None of this seemed to be on the mind of Maryland's Governor last week when he rode into the center of now infamous Sandtown (the home of Freddie Gray) and announced he would triple the city's $10 million annual demolition fund.   He posed in front of a backhoe, once again promoting massive tear down of houses in an African-American community. With his program he is aiming for the demolition of some 4,000 units with an about $75 million influx of demolition dollars. "Demolition dollars on steroids" Baltimore's African-American Mayor call it and it sounded as if she was happy about it. She hardly seemed alone: barely anybody seemed to mind the irony of this approach. Most praised the attention and "investment" in dis-invested neighborhoods in the ailing central city.

“Fixing what’s broken in Baltimore requires that we address the sea of abandoned, dilapidated buildings that are infecting entire neighborhoods..[...]They aren’t just unsightly, they are also unsafe, unhealthy and a hotbed for crime.” ,” Larry Hogan, Governor

Not much seems amiss one block north from the selected demolition

There is much research showing that this is the wrong way of saving a city or community, or of attracting new growth. The Center for Community Progress dedicated a whole conference to the topic of "turning vacant spaces into vibrant places" in 2012. Tulane University teaches a course on the matter. It shouldn't take academic studies to have the aspiration that poor neighborhoods undergo the same recovery as many mixed-race and mixed-income communities elsewhere in the city with the exact same housing stock and often with a past that included abandonment as well.

the "highway to nowhere ransacked the West Baltimore communities no
pock-marked with vacants (photo: ArchPlan)

There are, in fact, whole cities that have succeeded in exactly that. They filled almost all their vacant houses in such a successful manner that many observers have forgotten that they were also once plagued by population collapse, abandonment, and decay. Examples include the now shining beacons of Boston, San Francisco or Washington DC, the latter situated nearly identically to Baltimore in the 1990s, and having had the most recent very stunning turn-around of the three.

Baltimore which has struggled for decades with the ever larger number of abandoned properties has developed its own rather sophisticated and multi-pronged program dubbed "Vacants to Values" (V2V), a program now five years in the making, years that have seen successes and failures and above all a great number of lessons learned.  (An independent evaluation can be found here).

Baltimore's Commissioner for Housing and Community Development describes demolition not as the first answer but as "the last resort", even though the most common photo op of V2V has been of a backhoe tearing into a rowhouse, often at the behest of neighbors. Certainly, among the many thousand abandoned homes there are many that actually should be taken down, particularly if they have been shoddy speculative construction to begin with, as is the case in many old workers settlements in East Baltimore. But Sandtown and West Baltimore, where the Governor announced his demo/ investment plan, has proud three story structures that, once renovated, would outclass the standard suburban inspired replacement "townhomes" any time of the day.

 

Restoration of  rowhouses in East Baltimore

V2V has taught Baltimore economic lessons, namely that re-investment requires recreation of a market in a sequence of steps which may include some targeted demolition but, more importantly, include initial catalytic, subsidized, “game-changing” newly-constructed or rehabilitated homes or investment into community health services, schools, and community centers. These efforts are most successful if they initiate virtuous cycles which stabilize a community by including job training, workforce development and community employment. Adjacent or nearby anchor institutions must be leveraged as areas of strength, and natural boundaries such as cemeteries or railroad tracks must be used as backstops to protect a rebuilt area from blight lapping back in from neighboring devastated zones. Subsidized investments must fade out to be followed by market-based initiatives. 

The non-brick-and-mortar actions which aim to re-build social capital through community hiring, workforce training, health services, elimination of food deserts, safe zones for children and generally a level of city services comparable to better-off areas are at least as important as construction. Only with a plethora of actions can a community be revived, provided it isn't too large.

 

Restored homes in Baltimore's historic Reservoir Hill, done by a
housing co-op as affordable rentals (photo: ArchPlan)

To imagine a gradual revival of all disinvested neighborhoods in a large city requires a lot of patience, many resources and players, and it requires a strategic step-up deployment of available resources. All that takes the long view. Hectic short-term actionism is likely to do more harm than good, especially when it comes in the form of demolition, an inherently irreversible action. Taking the long view requires an idea about what makes the city of tomorrow tick. 

From what one can see, the city of tomorrow will thrive based on being able to attract talent. As Maryland's Secretary of Commerce observed in a talk to business people, the #1 concern for 2016 expressed by business is the available workforce.

There are many indications that highly mobile talent is looking for cultural identity and authenticity in selecting their place of choice. Second tier cities like Baltimore and Oakland are gaining traction, stepping out of the shadow of the the shinier, bigger, and more famous neighbors where they have been for so long.  Now Washington and San Francisco are falling out of favor for many as too expensive, too glossy, and for having lost their grit and original identity. 

Assuming a future when 3-D technology and international trade complications may make local production viable again, the cultural identity of making stuff that the former industrial hubs carry in their DNA cannot hurt either.

 

new affordable housing where rowhouses were demolished: East Baltimore
(photo:ArchPlan)

Those largely economic factors may very well infuse enough new energy into shrinking legacy cities to reverse their decline and allow for a renaissance. 

The infusion will only be successful if it does not displace existing residents. In an Oakland that sees tech companies coming to town the mayor calls this "techquity", combining technology with equity. Gentrification which uses the additional residents to leverage advantages for the existing population such as a reduction of the property tax burden, improved schools and better services as well the economic benefits that come from new enterprise is worthy of being called a renaissance.

One can dismiss those projections and aspirations as pie in the sky. But as I showed, there are solid indicators that make even the rebuilding of large parts of a city a quite reasonable undertaking. Most legacy cities are well underway on this path. 

To see that, it takes a horizon that exceeds what people consider expedient today or what matters in an election cycle. Cities exist and develop over hundreds of years and much of what we consider for demolition today has been around for a century. Clearly this requires respect, consideration, and a long-range plan, not just a big yellow excavator. When Baltimore selects a new mayor this year, that long view should be a necessary prerequisite.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

The two other articles in this series:
Pop up urbanism for the homeless?
How to build more affordable housing

Links:
Tearing down is giving up (Strong Towns)
Historic Preservation and Rightsizing

In Shrinking Cities, Preserving Existing Buildings Can Stem The Loss

Jennifer R. Leonard and Alan Mallach, “Restoring Properties, Rebuilding

Communities: Transforming Vacant Properties in Today’s America” (Center for

Community Progress, 2010).
No Property Left Behind (Thesis)
Rachel Rose Rita Hilvert,  In-house job Social Transformation