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US Plans To Bulldoze 50 Shrinking Cities
chrb writes "Two days ago Slashdot discussed broke counties grinding their tarmac roads into gravel. Now the Telegraph reveals plans to raze huge sections of at least 50 US cities to the ground. The resulting smaller cities will be more economical to run, and the recovered land will be returned to nature."
Nothing useful ever came out of that. :)
East Capitol Street, NE and 1st Street, NE Washington, DC 20002
They could have started with New Orleans before sending all that money.
Can DC be first?
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
The article mentions Baltimore, which makes sense. If you've ever visited some of the, shall we say, less popular portions of that city, you'll find block after block of boarded-up rowhouses. It's actually kind of eerie. Hell, even if you take Amtrak and go past Charm City, you'll see lots of houses that are in dismal shape (but nevertheless, sadly, are still occupied).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
We wall these areas off and turn them into Escape from New York style maximum security prisons. As long as we don't fly Air Force One over that airspace we should be OK. Kurt Russell is getting a bit too old to keep helping us out with that sort of thing.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
We could build a containment wall around these cities and use their infrastructure to support our growing prison population. Why not? Worked well enough for the Australians -- they eventually recovered and prospered!
White flight into the suburbs has brought us nothing but Wal-Mart and SUV's. I grew up in a suburb, and I hated how I was not able to go anywhere without a ride from my parents because everything was so far apart. Should I have children, I will not put them through that sort of social isolation.
Unfortunately Dayton, OH should be on that list. Just lost NCR.. you know it's bad when a company that was founded in your city over 100 years ago packs up shop without even giving the host city/state a chance to appease them.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
So lets see here. They'd like to raze parts of Detroit (Homicide rate of 47.5% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Detroit/)and Philadelphia(Homicide rate of 27.7% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Philadelphia/). Both of which also have large ghetto type areas which house hundreds of people who I'm sure that most of us here wouldn't want living in our backyards.
My question...Where are we moving all of these people if we're (According to TFA) "returning the land we raze to nature"? Won't this boost the crime rate and lower the property values of people who live in the smaller, surrounding suburbs?
How this isn't considered "ethnically cleansing" cities is beyond me. It seems as if the only people who would be affected negatively would be minority groups.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
This seems like a win-win scenario. Construction companies get hired to demolish the old buildings, which stimulates the economy and if the right buildings get the axe, old run down buildings full of lead paint and asbestos insulation go away and are replaced with meadows, forests or new greener buildings. The catch would be all the geezers coming out of the wood-work to save all the "historical sites"
Hearing this makes me think of Detroit. Its population is constantly shrinking and much of the city is in disrepair. I've ridden greyhound busses through it a few times and you pass mile after mile of boarded up, dilapidated buildings.
It makes one wonder what the city would be like if it ended up being completely abandoned, sort of like Rome after the fall of the empire.
Most likely there would be a half-attempted cleanup effort, but it would probably fail. Demolishing buildings isn't cheap. Returning the land to it's natural state is even more expensive, not to mention nature would probably do it herself over a slightly longer time frame.
This reminds me of the "urban renewal" projects of the 50s and early 60s, when huge sections actually were razed in various major cities. Boston's West End was a victim of this.
It's widely considered to be one of the stupidest projects the government's ever done.
Here I thought we were supposed to encourage people to move back into cities so high population densities would make mass transit more viable. Silly me.
If this plan includes Detroit, I fully support it. Otherwise, I think it's sad and wrong and I oppose it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The great depression brought us some awesome things in parks.
Maybe this one can lead to some awesome parks.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"Returned to nature"?
Bull!
It's just more corporate "demolish and redevelop" - just like 9/11.
Detroit seems to be the wisest place to begin with. High crime, lost Stanley cup, agony of the car companies. Let Sillicon Valley become the new city for car makers. Li-Ion rules!
I hope that they do this in a sensible manner, introducing large parks inside the cities, instead of concentrating on creating a dense urban pimple with no nearby parks.
I.e., you make the city desirable via being an attractive area to live. This eventually brings in more modern businesses that have employees that demand such things.
I think someone seriously underestimated the hazardous nature of building materials. R
azing a building containing asbestos or Ammonium bromide which a lot of older buildings contain (fireproofing) and just leaving it there is quite stupid!
A modest home in a lot of 7 abandoned (or un-sellable) homes is worth very little. But, if the home owners are willing to relocate, they could potentially own a similar home, closer to a "living" civilization, and bordering the nice new woods that has now been created out of all the empty districts. That home is worth a lot more.
It's obvious that the kind of home growth that we saw over the last ten years is not sustainable for any substantial amount of time. And it's a little ironic that many of the same construction companies that were thrown together to build the homes might transition into companies that are hired to tear down the very same homes... but, having said that, nothing makes me happier to think that we might rollback at least some of the ugly brown areas and return them to Nature.
Rent them out to Israeli army for training purposes.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
"But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said."
Ya know they's in barney when the dustcarts dont' e'en have any rubbish to pick up!
With the amount of civil war and civil unrest in the world, one would think that a displaced or repressed person from Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Darfur, Sudan or near any place of high population density would bother to learn English and move out to the United States with for stability, law enforcement, cheap housing and a shot at a job.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..."
I know that a lot of people disagree with me on this and a lot of people here in the states are downright afraid of/opposed to immigration but I still think it's a shame they bulldoze houses due to lack of occupants. Granted, the people moving in would have to be sustained by welfare for a time but they could create their own markets and industry. It hasn't gone without problems in Minnesota but I can assure you it's for the betterment for those individuals and the diversity of Minnesota in the long run.
My work here is dung.
. . . that should do the trick real quick. And we could finally have an answer to that baffling scientific question, is there water in Camden, New Jersey?
If there is, you can bet that it belongs to some other city.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
But... but... I thought urban was hip and with it, and we're supposed to make fun of anyone within line of sight of more than two trees next to one another. ;-)
Country mouse: I have a yard with three trees.
City mouse: Cousin marrying hillbilly!!!
This reminds me of the tent houses that were supposedly popping up all over the place a few months back, full of homeless victims of the recession. Turns out the only one (that I could find any real reference to) was in Sacramento, CA, and it was mainly because that city has such a good homeless program. The people living in the tent city weren't homeless because of the recession, they were normal homeless people, incapable or unwilling to find a job.
The only city they actually mention in the article is Flint, Michigan; but Flint has been having problems long before this recession. The chances of it ever growing to it's former size are about the same as Bodie ever being populated again: not likely, it's a ghost town.
The article tries to spin it like it's the end of some American dream of having lots of space, and we are all going to have to start living close together now, because it's cheaper for utilities, etc. Not likely.
Qxe4
Think of this as an extension of the whole broken windows theory. When you are surrounded by broken windows you treat a neighborhood as bad (never mind the residents). When a person is surrounded by blighted neighborhoods then the only thing they can see is blight. Improve the environment, change the neighborhood - it can only help change the residents.
Seriously, urban renewal, up to and including, bulldozing whole blocks out of existence is nothing new. People move on from one area to another, and as long as we have some empty space (and yes, yes we do), it's not going to change.
Rome may be the Eternal City, but it has changed considerably.
Whether or not these specific plans are worthwhile, I decline to comment, but I see nothing unusual about these as they are.
FTFA:
"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.
take older rust belt cities and remove the suburban sprawl surrounding them and prune them down to their urban core, and then you have a city layout from the days before the rise of the automobile
as gas prices continue to rise, urban development plans will favor this model of development: tightly clustered cities with good public transportation, surrounded by parkland. a much more humane and livable environment. places like phoenix and las vegas and houston, nothing more than giant sprawling suburbs really, will become inhospitable to affordable living while rust belt cities will develop a new cachet as nice places to live: condos and coops in refurbished historical buildings surrounded by healthy woodlands, with easy public transport or foot traffic to anywhere you want to and need to go
of course this cachet of "nice place to live" also has to imply some sort of job growth too, but as these rust belt cities shrink, they have ample opportunity to invest in emerging job sectors to bolster that sort of growth
then the choice between sitting in your car in a traffic jam on the freeway at $4/ gallon gasoline in 105 degree phoenix won't look as nice as walking the charming old refurbished downtowns of historic cities. these old cities have good bones, they just need to be pruned and invested a little in, and natural growth will take hold again
notice one city not mentioned as ripe for bulldozing: pittsburgh. yet pittsburgh is pretty much a poster child of a rust belt city. why? good planning for investing in future job sectors:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_612352.html
now compare pittsburgh's sober but cheerful outlook to the armageddeon-level job losses at work in the newer suburban sprawl cities that relied too much on overheated sectors like construction
detroit and flint and any other city heavily dependent on automobile manufacturing, alas, has a different story than pittsburgh. but this part of the larger picture at play here: the death of the automobile, the death of suburban sprawl, the return to small compact cities with a livable core surrounded by healthy woodland and with good public transportation
i for one welcome the death of the age of the automobile and the idiotic environmental damage of gas guzzling automobiles and space wasting burbs, and the inhumane anonymity of living in the isolating mcmansions and sitting in traffic jams, in areas of the country no one can survive in without artificial air conditioning
death to california
long live ohio
mark my words: the 1950s trend of everyone moving west will be replaced in 2025 by stories of everyone out west moving to the midwest belt
for the same reason: better quality of life
mark my words
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just a modern version, maybe with slightly better planning, of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_United_States .
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Ooo! Ooo! (waving hand) Californian here! Can Sacramento go third?
And then Corona. Why? Just because.
The issue to me is that hyperinflation that occurred during the early and mid 200's, and the hyperdeflation we are now living with. During the inflatory period, everyone was taking fictional money out of their fictional property values to buy real goods. Banks made money, people got stuff, everyone was happy. The problem now is that, like it was with credit cards, people owe more than they possible can pay, and so the best thing to do is to walk away from the house. All this is covered by taxpayers. We can complain, but nothing can be done.
I think we just need to admit we have lived through 8 years of insanity, a national coke addiction, get over it, and move on. We don't need to pass blame, or punish people, just solve problems. If population is declining, and there are no jobs, and no people to live in the homes, then let's raze the land and return it to natural habitat. Hell, I say with a significant portion of a development is empty, pay the people to move, and raze the whole thing.
But we do have families without homes. Families who were priced out of home given the greed of the home investors at the expense of the home owners. It seems that since we have already bailed out the banks and the taxpayers have already in effect covered those mortgages, it seems that the FHA could help families move into the foreclosed homes. Right now the FHA does not want to deal with the average foreclosed home. Right now the FHA thinks that homeless is better than a imperfect home. That a leaky roof is worse than no roof at all. So it seems to me that there is a lot of housing available, and a lot of demand for cheap housing. When I say this the first time, and I saw the brookings institute, I saw it as a plot to maintain unsustainable property values rather than an way to help the country move forward.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This is understandably a touchy subject for a lot of people. It's hard to overstate the sense of loss; more than that, the sense of historical obliteration. Neighborhoods where once happy, prosperous people lived productive lives are vacant, and one cannot help but feel that those happy, prosperous people are gone, perhaps never to return, and those empty houses stand like tombstones marking the death of their dreams.
Of course, this is thankfully not really true - those happy and productive people simply moved to other places, where they continue to live out their happy, productive lives. We feel bad about razing these homes because we feel like we are razing the lives of the people that used to occupy them. But those people left those homes behind long ago. They've moved on - so should the rest of us.
We feel sick about obliterating what should be valuable assets. This is a hard problem too. laborers built these structures, many of them good strong structures, some of them the likes of which will not be seen again. With care, they should be able to last centuries. But a society too obsessed with preserving the past - particularly a past that is not valued - is a moribund society. We should not carelessly annihilate our history. But at the same time we need to remember who we, historically, are:
We are a dynamic society. We are a dynamic people. The only constant is change. These cities shrank while other cities grew. It is in many ways a reflection on the freedom of our society, that people and businesses decided to leave and go elsewhere. Other places gained while these places lost. Now it's time for the principle of creative destruction to come into play. It's time to give up on what people have freely decided they don't value. It's time to re-allocate resources from failure to profit. It's time to clear the landscape of the ruins of yesterday, to make room for the possibilities of the future.
The ideas in this article are on the right track. We can't get sentimental about a past that is gone, never to return. Raze the unowned buildings, now sheltering criminals and vagrants. Hell, de-annex the empty land and return it to the township. Sell whatever mobile capital goods are underutilized. Wipe the ordinance book clean and start over again. Put every budget item and every tax on the chopping block. Clear the path for future opportunity, or it will never arrive.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Perhaps the giant ufo or giant bowser option might work as well.
Relocating population from sparsely populated area into that of a smaller area does allow the government to more easily monitor and control the said population as there are now substantially smaller area to cover. I am just waiting for one day when the said area will get fenced off with electrified barbwire and guard towers with sentry guns built around the perimeters, for the... protection of the caged population.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I don't like this idea. Sure, abandoned structurally unsafe buildings should be torn down. Tearing down empty big box stores might not be a bad idea either, but tearing down usable homes and entire neighborhoods seems like very short-term thinking to me.
I've noticed that often poorer neighborhoods have some very nice old homes. We shouldn't be tearing them down, we should be restoring them. There's lots of historic architecture out there that helps give cities their character, and already too many beautiful buildings have been torn down to build CVSs and parking lots.
What happens when the economy does rebound and the demand for housing rises? The remaining housing will be costlier and developers will just go ahead and replace the demolished neighborhoods with expensive "luxury" apartments, condos and McMansions that people will need to take out expensive mortgages to afford. It will be the housing/mortgage bubble all over again.
We should be encouraging more people to move to cities. They're more environmentally sustainable then suburbs. If there's a glut of empty homes, we should be making home ownership easier and affordable, not tear them down.
Tearing down blocks of buildings to return them to nature might make city government accountants and narrow minded environmentalists happy, but it's really a wasted opportunity.
I thought there was a big concern in this country for the plight of the homeless. While I'm not usually one to to condone the government giving away my money, it seems to me that they've already stolen that property so they can tear it down. Couldn't we at least put up some of the homeless in these buildings? Looks like the usual ineffectual government meddling we've seen before. The gov. complains for years on end about social problems while using them as a pretense to expand its power and then when a way to solve the problem comes along they ignore it and do something that will only make it worse.
Take a look at http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html. Houses decay if they are not maintained. They decay rather rapidly. Unless ownership can be conveyed in some fashion to attentive stewards, a house will come down one way or another. Far better to plan the inevitable downsizing than to pretend it isn't going to happen.
All engineering should consider the full lifecycle. These houses were built in more optimistic times, but was it thought they would stand forever? The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
Hopefully, this will somewhat apply to the toilet that is Camden, NJ. More specifically, my hope is that 'razing huge sections' equates to 'extensive fire bombing'. I am not advocating loss of life or anything, but that whole area is in need of a reboot.
It sounds like an opportunity to buy large blocks of land cheap then resell it to developers in 10 or 20 years and make a bundle. Sure, it will be a bust in some areas but if you do it in 50 cities enough will be profitable to make it worthwhile.
Nevermind the fact that you are disrupting people's lives.
If you are going to do this, do it in areas that are uninhabitable and which would cost too much to rehabilitate, such as some of the areas destroyed by Katrina.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
while i read your post and the one you are responding to
zzz
maybe he is modded off topic because he is more concerned with grudges and overarching indictments and acid-laced blame than anything useful
people who are consumed by pointing fingers and little more are yet a further symptom of any societal blight you or the post you are responding to describes
the way out of any problem in this world is positive, optimistic ideas and attitudes, regardless of what got you there
not useless, pointless doom and gloom
and so he is off-topic, and correctly modded as such: his post has more to do with acting out his psychological damage than anything anyone else wants to read or might find useful
maybe he has good reason to be bitter. maybe his indictments are valid. but he needs to reach a point where the words that come out of his mouth are constructive, before anything he says is of any value to anyone else
until then: -1, off-topic. the correct mod
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Give a free house to each new immigrant that has a university diploma. Boom in pop, smarter pop, house go to good use, don't have to spend on demo.
because i just finished reading this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/18oregon.html
it pretty much negates everything you just asserted
i especially like this graph:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/06/18/us/18oregon_graph.ready.html
let's see: oregon almost as bad as michigan in terms of unemployment, but at the same time experiencing an influx of refugees from california
so oregon, as opposed to michigan where everyone is fleeing, has the worst economic recovery prospects of any state in the union, thanks to the rats scurrying off the sinking ship to your south
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But Baltimore has Natty Boh, the best cheap beer in the world.
http://www.nationalbohemian.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bohemian
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
While I can see the merit of this from the perspective of the city having to deal with the upkeep of such lands, my mind keeps coming back to the idea that this is more a move to increase, or bolster, declining property values by simply adjusting supply in regards to demand.
Is this a move on the part of the "haves" trying to maintain the value of property that they will be selling/renting to the "have-nots"?
Despite the common-sense this proposal appears to be based on, I cannot seem to shake the feeling that this may not be in the best interests of those most hurt by the current recession. Sure, maybe this will free up tax dollars for more important programs, but will it drive up rent prices and nullify any savings for the low-income familys? Will those freed-up tax dollars simply be spent on rent subsidies?
The one good thing in all this, something I have no doubt about, is the return to nature. Now, THAT is something I have a hard time finding fault with.
All in all, maybe we should give it a little more time to examine the long-term results of this plan before throwing the rest of the country into 'dozer mode.
Actually someone was doing a study on these type of occurrences and was trying to concur that expanding a city's living plans might need a better decision structure in place. I always though to myself that the most efficient structure that can go up
is a self sustaining apartment building with shops at the bottom floor for whole slew of services, not only for the amount of traffic it generates, but also for the economy as a whole...when you have a laundromat , a blockbuster, a subway, a loblaws all on the first floor and the rest is apartments on the rest of the floors, you can save alot of time from running around...also a certain amount of close proximity is needed for let's say next door's apartment contains a florist, a shoemaker etc... but with a repeating cycle of about 4 blocks before hitting another of the same service. This is exactly what happens in downtown new york....and it's amazing!
The only thing is that when a structure goes down, because of proximity, it affects others as well. Take for example 9/11
when a building went down, the adjacent buildings all suffered massive damages...some of which were too extreme to repair.
We could limit the amount of floors this type of concrete "web" could be allowed to have...
Anyone remember those self sustaining bio-domes...well this would be a close precursor before actually bringing into the frey, biologicals, solar energy retention, water recycling etc...
It would be very interesting to close off part of a disused city or even a whole city and leave it as it is to see how nature would take over without human influences. Would it decay as some predict?. Would nature take over tower blocks for high rise living? ... The nearest experiment we have is Chernobyl, but thats nothing like American conditions such as weather etc.. and a 2nd city to compare how nature adapts to part or even a whole city without humans around would be fascinating.
Also part of a disused city would be a very valuable and useful proving ground for advanced research in robotics, such as cars using the road networks and urban exploring robots. Its a once in a life time chance to gain unrestricted access to a big part of a city.
Another very good use would be to leave part of a disused city as a film set of a slowly decaying abandoned city. (The WW2 Blitz in London created a lot of disused buildings that appeared in many films for decades). Part of a city would be an incredible once in a lifetime opportunity to create a huge film set that doesn't disrupting and interrupt normal working cities and its cheaper and easier for film companies to use. So its win win for these companies helping the US film industry and other businesses in cities otherwise inconvenienced by filming. The film companies must be able to see the potential. It would be such a good help to the US film industry for many years to come. They could even set up a joint company to manage the disused part of a city for the film industry and lease parts out to film companies world wide.
You act as though any self respecting person needs any additional reasons to hate the worst president to ever be inflicted upon the country.
Even though Obama is taking the country downhill faster than Carter, that's no reason to hate him - instead just gently remind him and the Democrats the reason people voted for them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
which underlies how you rationalize your piss poor attitude?
i don't understand the connection, but i'll take it as a sign that i've struck a nerve
so let me sever the nerve completely with a fact, which melts everything you say like a snowball in a furnace:
if you don't have anything positive to say, you're not helping whatever it is you believe in
contemplate that. try to find an observation that in any way negates that fact
shut up until you learn how to be optimistic. why? simply for the sake of whatever cause you care about. your current words hinder whatever it is you care about
or become a lewis black style comedian. that's the only value of your words currently: humor
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A person is proposing this. It is not agreed on (or even commented on from what I can tell) by anyone in the government.
Holy crap. I could propose anything I wanted too, doesn't mean it is going to happen and that doesn't make it a news story!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Seriously wtf people? it clearly says that they are going to knock down buildings that are not currently occupied in any legal sense. they are not kicking poor people out of their homes, they are just knocking down old buildings that no one wants any more so that the land can be put to better use. This seems like a good idea for seriously blighted parts of cities that no one goes to anymore. if someone then wants to buy the land and actually do something with it, the city makes some money buying land cheap and selling it un-blighted, the city gets new businesses who need cheap land an infrastructure. The city can then plan for more people building and moving into these area's (god forbid maybe actually put in better public transportation). I am not so sure about the whole "green" part of it.
There are blighted and vacant properties all over my town, too. A large fraction of them are uninhabitable, and so badly dilapidated that recovering them would not be economical. Those can go; they're not safe, they're atrocious to look at, and nobody in their right mind would ever purchase and repair them.
However - and I'd like to think that with the recent housing bust, there's been talk of doing something like this - the housing authority and the many highly active charities operating here should treat this as an opportunity. Letting a one or two bedroom home rot when there's a growing number of people out on the street putting themselves and others at risk is a waste. Why do that when they could be housed in these residences on the condition that they help restore the property and seek employment? (Such programs, already active here, are part of the reason our rates of homelessness and crime are a lot lower than logic dictates that they should be.)
Rumors of land-grabbing aside, the simple fact is that there are more - many, many more - vacant homes here than we could possibly fill, and a large portion of them have decayed past the point of no return. That's after considering that a nice house here is dirt cheap these days. Get rid of the blights, the eyesores, the deathtraps, and do as we've done with helping the needy to establish themselves. It'd be an improvement.
I live in an area that would be directly impacted by this type of plan. I own an old home in the North Side of Pittsburgh and I am in absolute support of this. 1/2 of the houses on my street are abandoned and boarded up. If the City were to come in and demolish them (which they have slowly started to do) it would not only increase the safety of the area. It would also raise the property values which would in turn increase tax income to the City.
The problem we're faced with is no new development will happen in parts of the area until we purge the beyond repair buildings. Why would any erect a new structure next to a building that can barely stand?
I certainly think this idea is better then doing what we've been doing for 30+ years. Letting the urban core of Pittsburgh slowly rot while the young professionals continue to avoid the City for the suburbs. City living in Pittsburgh is on it's way back in areas that are in better shape, demolishing the buildings that are not salvageable will only accelerate this renewal!
Posting AC so my karma doesn't take the hit for this.
As to the GP, hell yeah. I have a 1 1/2 year old toddler and I can't wait to get the hell out of the city and live among those "like me".
I have a nephew who goes to the local school system. Guards with pepper spray in the lunchroom to break up the nearly daily fights the black kids get into. Metal scanners at the doors. People doing drugs on the steps before class. No supervision, no money, no nothing. The teachers have given up years ago. Nobody gets an education there. Just drugs and violence and apathy.
Fuck that.
My parents moved out of the exact same city I'm in and into the suburbs when I was a toddler for the same reasons. And my college degree, good job and already paid off house are strong evidence that they did the right thing for their son. And I intend to do the same thing for mine.
There's politically correct, then there's taking a melon baller and gouging out your eyeballs trying not to see certain things. Come live in the city a while. You wouldn't want your kid growing up to be one of these no-future degenerates, I promise you.
Can't we just bulldoze the whole city? I mean really - will anyone miss it? Anyone? At all?
I didn't think so.
that is a shame
well, at least it shows how pittsburgh's economic sectors are diverse and robust, while places like phoenix which are too economically monoclonal have a bleak future, regardless of real and potential livability differences
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Indeed. My mum always taught me that, when returning something that I had borrowed, it should be in the same condition as when I first received it. When I read the phrase "returned to nature" my first thought was, "yeah but is it in the exact same condition as when it was 'taken' from nature?"
I'm sure they'll do some clean-up - I'm crediting the people involved with not being completely self-serving idiots - but I'm equally sure that the clean-up will not quite fully 'return' this land to its pre-settlement state.
In the interests of full disclosure - and talking of self-serving - I'm not madly interested in the story so did not RTFA. Soz. =p
The headline says "US Plans To Bulldoze 50 Shrinking Cities," but I don't see any trace of "plans" to do any such thing.
If you read the article, it seems to be a piece of political scare propaganda.
Note the sub-headline: "...proposals being considered by the Obama administration"! Wow...
uh, wait, what do they mean "being considered?" The actual person quoted is "treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint." Not exactly a powerhouse of the administration. The "being considered" doesn't mean anything is "planned." It means, apparently, "hey, here's a plan that this guy is implementing in Flint, MI, and is talking about a lot."
But from that, you can sure whip up a frenzy. They're bulldozing our cities! Blame it on Obama! We knew he was going to do something evil!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Man, this just sounds like some kind of sick April Fool's joke! But it's June...
But if their 'old home' is worth next to nothing because of the neighbourhood... is the city going to buy their 'new house' and pay for their moving fees? Otherwise, I can't forsee a whole ton of people being able to afford to move 'because you're far away'.
I remember furiously bulldozing whole sections of the city in the hopes to re-arrange stuff to boost tax revenues, cut down on pollution, or even just disperse everything as a last-ditch attempt at boosting tax revenues. Sadly, it never worked, I would always get into a downward spiral of plummeting commercial/residential, which caused me to raise taxes and cut services, causing more flight, etc.
The big lesson I learned (other than the general "wow, managing a city is hard!") was that bulldozing more than a couple of tiles was a recipe for disaster.
It's about time they realised all those empty buildings owned by Scientology are better off demolished.
There are better places in Ohio to run a bulldozer. Youngstown would be a good pick. We could do without most of the East side of Cleveland too. Parts of downtown Akron where the rubber plants pulled out. Those wouldn't be missed. They'd make nice parks.
I can think of a few malls that should go too. Rolling Acres in Akron tops that list. It looks like something out of Fallout 3. I had to go in there once last year to talk to the last remaining business in the whole place - a Jackson Hewitt office. It really did look like something after Judgement Day.
The Flats in Cleveland could go too. The Flats are as dead as Elvis. Knock them down and plant trees.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Title of article should read "US *considers* plans to raze ..." . There is a difference.
is what made him a 'real texan'. that and running a bunch of businesses into the ground.
mostly the 'ignorant as hell, and proud of it' thing.
They were bad in the last century, have they improved?
http://blog.mlive.com/flint-city-beat/2009/06/flint_takes_international_spot.html
Which is direct contradiction of TFA:
A Human Right
I liked this post in the article's comments:
"Having recently travelled around Europe, I get the feeling this is a very old idea. The only difference is nobody gave residents any compensation. People just left the houses to collapse and moved on to where the jobs were. Nature and time took care of the demolition. Population centres move, either because of politics, economics or practicality, but it happens.
In the case of the USA, these areas could be left to collapse, but if you can do something useful with the land, why not? I don't get why there is so much opposition of demolishing abandoned property. When the economics allow for it real estate developers will come in and redevelop."
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Please leave the Bronx."
I love when people talk about "homes" and use terms like "growth" and speak as if there were never any HUMANS involved. Where did these families go? Shouldnt that be more of a concern?
Why cant these people afford their homes anymore? If no one wants them, why cant they just have them back?
Did they leave cause there was no work in the area? Well... WHY IS THERE NO WORK IN THE AREA? Oh yeah.. NAFTA....
so called "Free Trade" came at some pretty fucking high costs if you ask me.
Gotta love outsourcing, and cheap slave labor.... You never have to really pay slaves much. You think the workers in China are living like middle class Americans would be if they had those jobs? hehehe...
Somewhere in there is the problem... but you dont care about me, your neighbor.... your children even. Its all about that "dolla dolla bill yall". I hate pop culture.
Building some industrial solar thermal plant and generate some 24/7 power?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait, China joined NAFTA? Did I not get a memo or something?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Detroit has essentially been doing this for years. Except they've been doing it piecemeal (tearing down homes as they become condemned). Some of the worst neighborhoods that used to be packed with houses are now only sparsely populated...
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=42.399134,-83.006119&spn=0.003549,0.008261&t=h&z=18
that is only way to be sure
Detroit a green city? Where's Omni Consumer Products? Drugs? Crime? RoboCop? I want a ED-209 to hack!
Bastards!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Pittsburgh is very much a "sprawling suburbs" area. The entire county (Allegheny) has a population of 1.2 million, of which under 300,000 live in the Pittsburgh city limits.
Actually, the Pittsburgh Metro region extends to pretty much cover the surrounding counties as well.
The area has weathered the recession very well, having not been affected much by the housing boom and not having finance as its main industry.
I was about to post the same thing. Every article I've found so far about this has referenced the Telegraph's story. It really sounds like someone across the pond heard something from a guy who heard something and then just ran with it.
From the NY Times' take on it: "Thousands of people have outlined their strategies to the president over the last 48 months, and if a junior staff member at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis asks you for a few ideas about branch banking, then you too can truthfully say that you have been âoeapproachedâ by the American government."
(Full article: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/bulldozing-americas-shrinking-cities/ )
For shame, Slashdotters! For shame!
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Do you suppose shrinking cities has anything to do with declining population?
- Don't raze *too* much. Keep in mind the refugees from suburbia who will require housing when they stream back into the cities where the resources and commerce are.
- TFA states the razed areas will be "returned to nature". I hope that doesn't mean useless parks and ornamental landscaping. Community vegetable gardens would be much better.
- BE VIGILANT of the wealthy using this turmoil as a vehicle for amassing even more wealth in the form of land acquired at fire-sale prices, or through government seizures. High concentration of wealth BAD.
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
After reading this article I had a smile on my face. I think its a magnicant idea! The line at the end, "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can once more bear fruit" was perfect.
Yes there are parts of any sprawling American city which would be better off if torn down and rebuilt. This sounds too much like yet another bailout (as if $13.9 trillion tax dollars thrown into banks ^H^H^H^ black holes wasn't enough.) This is simply a plan to reduce property supply, prop up property prices and therefore bail out banks and property developers (generally wealthier with more $olitical influen$e than tenants and mortgage holders.) It is exactly like the government destruction of fruit during the Great Depression in order to prop up cannerys and megafarms:
"...And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow. The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit--and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains." - From "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck 1939
I hope this isn't a ploy to force people back into the democrat-run downtowns where there is no commerce, rampant crime, and crappy schools. They've run themselves into the ground and need all that tax income back before they go bankrupt.
The city I live in keeps raising taxes on me while the high school graduation rate is less than 40% and unemployment and foreclosures are booming. Meanwhile, the suburbs of the same town have an 85%+ graduation rate, almost no crime, and great schools. Why the hell should I want to stick around to pay more taxes while they cut funding for police and my home value declines?
This could get ugly if people don't go along quietly.
I mean seriously, Buffalo NY has been doing this for years. We've already had one urban farm go in, after a major bruhaha over whether or not the land should be sold to a developer, sold to Habitat for Humanity, or let to go fallow. Habitat won the bid, but after they found out about the dirty politics that went into the bidding process to keep the farm out, they negotiated a settlement with farmers. Granted we also have an idiot mayor who keeps promoting suburban style development, and a planning department with staff who have barely read up on the past 20 years of urban planning strategies. But in spite of all that, we've also got urban areas that continue to increase in population, density, and housing values. Tearing down a bunch of sub-standard ramshackle shotgun shacks that were put up around the Great Depression (aka most of East Buffalo) makes total sense. But at the same time, we're building high end luxury condos on the waterfront. So if you can tear down and stop supporting a house you can buy from the city for $1, but replace that housing with $500k+ condos overlooking the lake, you've gained a lot and lost nothing. I've been palling around with a number of public policy wonks, housing court people, and other community activists for years, and they all agree this can be a very good thing. After all it is much more civil if you bulldoze a few dozen blocks, than let some punk kids burn it down for kicks.
Piecemeal is the key term here.
Where I live, thanks to mountains of red tape it will take you literally at least ten years to get a property demolished. This is due to extensive waiting periods written into what are, in my opinion, useless regulations. Useless that instead of expediting the process of either restoring property or recovering land, they fail in their intended goal, which is to give the land owner time to repair the property so they don't get evicted. These laws were actually intended to protect the poor by making it harder to boot them out of their houses if they let them fall apart, but the ultimate end result was that the houses were and still are allowed to stay empty and decay when low income earners could at least take up residence in them. Apparently nobody ever told city hall what enormous percentage of these properties have been abandoned, since we still live in the shadow of this extremely cumbersome legislation.
If we passed a law that said if a derelict property has been vacant for five years or more it can be taken down, and we actually had the resources to demolish the properties, a third of my city would vanish overnight and nobody would miss it. Of course, there's the other problem. Demolition costs money, and city hall here has a cozy relationship with a few construction contractors that have a history of ripping us off. No joke, a pickup with some heavy chains can do anything a bulldozer can to a wood frame (or even an old brick) house, and a lot cheaper. So it's a double problem, getting rid of unnecessary regulatory burdens and finding the resources and the quickest, safest ways possible to tear these properties down and just get it over with. Talk about a mess.
Still, I'd prefer to have the ripoff artists that run our construction racket doing the job instead of the next round of straight line winds we get. Never mind that it's not unusual to see these homes caving in on their own and allowed to sit for however long. Yep, the owner will be back any day now to fix it...
Please?
Except he didn't. They were both mediocre, and they went to different schools. Gore had clearly better SATs, but neither of them had clearly better grades in college. Source: http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
During a speech / Q&A, someone once asked Gore if he thought Bush 43 was 'stupid' / dumb / pick-a-synonym. Gore said "certainly not", but did describe him as "incurious":
I guess what surprises me most is his incuriosity. That's a real mystery to me because he's clearly a smart man. He has a different kind of intelligence, as everybody does. There's so many varieties of intelligence. He's clearly a smart man, but it is a puzzle that he would ask no questions about important matters.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2006/06/get-your-gore-on.html
This seems to be corroborated by other anecdotes:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/3798
I think the one fatal flaw that Bush 43 had was that he trusted those around him too much, and didn't look into matters himself enough. If he had, he would probably had found that there were a lot of things being done in his name and he may not have liked.
Grinding up paved roads is a very good idea, and not just for gravel. The paved roads are horribly expensive to keep up. When they go bad from the frost heaves every year the cost of fixing them is far more than for maintaining a dirt road. A dirt road can be easily graded and ditched. It is easy to add more culverts to control water on a dirt road. Resurfacing a dirt road is cheap. All of this is far more expensive and time consuming to do on a tarred road. Yes, on highly travelled roads and city streets, the paving makes sense. But not out here in the rural areas. Just slow down and enjoy the view.
I personally feel that the cost of demolition should be included in the purchase price of a house, and transferred during a resale.
This would ensure that old dilapidated buildings are properly removed after their time has come.
Yes, they can be restored... I get that... but why should it be at the price of a new owner? why shouldn't the previous owner (who fuqed it up) have to pay for the demolition.
just my .02
I think I recall doing this in SimCity. A lot. :S
Living in Portland, I can attest to our zeal in creating very friendly urban centers. Many young professional couples choose to live in tightly packed neighborhoods along our MAX line (public trans train).
The biggest issue with reviving urban cores, sprucing things up and encouraging people to move in to the center instead of out, is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
Home prices in traditionally low cost areas have skyrocketed. So in addition to making the property tax, home price, etc.. too much for low paid workers, you also cut off their ability to use the public transportation. They are now the ones living way outside of town and having to drive in for work.
And given that, on average, these urban renewal projects occur in pre-dominantly minority neighborhoods, makes for a pretty racially charged environment at times. This rarely takes the form of violence though. Moreso, you'll see minority neighborhoods vigorously campaigning against being the focus of a "renewal".
Sweet! They can come and take my house "for the good of all!" Nevermind its paid off!
And I can try and find one of the "new" houses they make somewhere else!
Either refurbished or totally new (though most likely just refurb'd).
Maybe get a new loan, if anyone would take me! Since these "new" homes will probably not come cheap!
Gee, it just sounds like a win/win thing!
[/sarcasm]
The towns around Chernoble have been abandoned for quite some time, which should satisfy your curiosity about how real cities decay if suddenly left alone.
Chernoble is also a great robotic testing ground because people still can't really go there for long periods, so no cheating.
The question of how cities would decay if humans suddenly died off en masse is moot. The reason is that before long, the world's nuclear reactors (especially the older designs) would start running out of coolant and going Chernoble themselves. Will Smith will not be fighting vampires 3 years later because radiation would have killed him already.
And, of course, we could use Chernoble for movie sets and kill off the god awful generation of actors that is plaguing American cinema.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Yes, actually, they are. But if you were interested, I'm sure you would have read TFA yourself.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Abandon Manhatten so Kurt Russel can finally complete the trilogy.
TFA is mostly about Flint, MI... and the big American car companies mostly relocated manufacturing to Mexico.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
"In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside."
Sounds like New Detroit and RoboCop!
Think about what you just said. Jobs are being created to remove viable living quarters to experienced people that have become homeless because they are politically disgusted to owning a house near the greater market center or simply have a different way of life yet thrown coercively by psychiatrists and para-military into sufferance into these weird areas of confinement.
Just because someone calls their "home wherever his heart is" has become the new allowance of unlawful activity by law enforcement and courts to decide their future. It's absolutely bullshit. Unhinder everyone from exercising their RIGHT TO PUBLIC VEHICULAR TRAVEL on the ROADS and the economy and homeless will fix itself by a PRODUCTIVE OUTLOOK replenished to their freedom and liberty.
Of'course, none of you Slashdotters have been violated enough to consider USA an unsafe place, so blog-on you ignorant f*cking hippies. Go make your anti-freedom and anti-liberty opinions. Force a responsible traveler into your responsibility-diverting scehemes of INSURANCE and DRIVER LICENTURE, because you know those are as sound as the void of space that echos to your primitives of life.
How about unhanding one's freedom of association inherint in the Consitution and Bill of Rights, just because some of us think your playing Bumper Cars with some egg-shell accordion import Car to an American-made tank deserves recompensation of damages beyond livelyhood because the art of aesthetic craftmanship demands repair?
Get off my lawn, and drink your Latte', McCafe', and Commune' elseware.
Wall these derelict cities off, and sell hunting licenses to the militia types who'll go in and thin out the criminal hoodrats who stayed behind.
And now, the Administration is taking cues from TV shows. Kinda sad.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In the UK, city councils have an obligation to provide land for allotments - garden plots - for their residents. These are always hugely oversubscribed and there are never enough to go around. They're an excellent idea, provide urban green spaces, allow people to grow their own fruit & veg and are a big net win all round. Why not do that with this reclaimed land?
... Redmond, Washington. Or at least one part of it.
Have gnu, will travel.
There are places all over South Carolina where there used to be towns...big towns at the time, just gone with nothing but an historical marker. It's very interesting to think about the fact that even in the short history of this country, influential towns have simply been abandoned, and now, not even 250 years old, they're talking about razing whole cities.
America is done.
Not enough is done for community education on this matter.
Anonymous Coward
Who do you think are going to own the few estates on the edge of or in the middle of these 'nature areas'?
Thus, they will push up the price of abandoned buildings and lots. The new owners will fight the city's taking-over of their land via eminent domain laws. The politically-connected will win.
that there's enough money to throw around for pie-in-the-sky socialized healthcare and bailouts of the corrupt and incompetent.
You do realize that all of you are significantly more open minded and probably more educated than the average population in the US? Some of you even agreed about their own city being on the list. I think it's a very rational idea, but what are the chance of this happening?
Isn't it interesting how the only "good" state to be in is growth? Lets think about this... the Earth is finite. That means, eventually, growth has to stop. If we want to continue to advance civilization, we have to replace, but maintain stability.
... the SimCity (SNES) theme song?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
TFA is mostly about Flint, MI... and the big American car companies mostly relocated manufacturing to Mexico.
And the American car buyers relocated their dollars to Japan. And that's not an indictment, but a statement of fact. The American car companies have been having a serious decline for 50+ years, and have never once "fixed" it. That's the problem. NAFTA, Mexican/Canadian cars, etc. still have nothing to do with the pure American leadership that drove them slowly and stedily into the ground.
Learn to love Alaska
Let me say this is exactly right! Oregon is an awful, horrible state. For anyone thinking of moving here, I promise you'd hate it. Everything, without exception, is born of a stinking hell-pit of wretched flaming mildew covered misery!!
So, um, don't move here. Definitely the worst state in the Union. Far worse than wherever you are right now, most assuredly. So there's absolutely no reason at all -- NONE -- to move here.
Don't move here. OK?
Thanks,
(Oregon)
I don't like this idea for three reasons. First, as I see it, it's beyond the purview of the federal government. What's next? They going to run our cities for us? The city government already is responsible for these types of decisions. We don't need the highest level of government intervening in stuff that frankly is none of their business. Second, I see this as a perverse economic incentive, like paying farmers not to farm or paying rich people to build expensive beachfront houses in the way of hurricanes. Now we're going to pay considerable public funds to destroy valuable property? Come on, it's monumentally stupid.
Finally, I see this as a gimmick to raise the price of real estate by destroying part of the supply. It's even worse than the Broken Window fallacy since no real economic activity is being spurred by this destruction.
You can't just return land that has utility pipes and lines in to nature.. it's not going to be real nature. And despite what eco-nuts would have you believe... a patch of green grass on the top of a high rise is actually about like pissing in the ocean.
I didnt say it was NAFTA alone, it was the entire mentality that believed it was wiser to employ foreigners rather than our citizens.
Its the mentality of get rich by maximizing profits, exploiting the economic system by going outside of the circle of cash flow within our country. The idea that bleeding us dry was some how a good thing... was ridiculous and ultimately damaging.
You cant keep buying when you run out of money to buy things with. Its pretty simple, but that was never a concern for those who have the power. They were more concerned with maximizing profits in the short term, getting stinking rich and ultimately saying "fuck you" to everyone because they were set for life 50x over.
Here's my complaint that I was talking about above. To summarize, urban blight is none of the federal government's business, paying to destroy wealth is a perverse and colossally stupid idea.
Just like Sim City, you doze the high crime areas.
I know what you mean. Everyone saying they ought to nuke California, push California into the Pacific Ocean, etc. It's a f*cking desert. In contrast, I wouldn't doubt this is how politicians try to hide nationality behind the limited liability of Statehood, which is why there seems to be a New York, NY; California, CA...ad infinitum.
They're always erecting strawman corporate city-states to conceal the nationality. Bunch of Jews...
Where will the history channel go for new footage for "Life After People"?
The Great Depression as caused by protectionism. Everything I have seen that actually looks at numbers says that NAFTA actually caused an increase in jobs in the U.S..
One of the mistakes people make is that they think that if fewer people are employed producing a particular thing, then we must be making less of it. There are fewer people working on farms in the U.S. than in the past, yet the U.S. produces more food today than it did in the past. Why? Because much of the process of farming has been mechanized/automated.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
>There are trade-offs, yes, but I think the suburbs sort of need to die. People don't realize that
>they're a relatively recent invention (suburbs arguably didn't exist until about half a century ago),
>and I think it's a social experiment which has failed.
People with money are always going to pay to move away from the riff-raff. And you can bet the parts of town being torn down are not the areas where the people with money live.
Do you think the people with money are going to tolerate all the riff-raff moving next door to them, so they can let THOSE houses go to shit, too?
Nope.
The people with money are going to go buy up those nice, new, "back to nature" parts of town and build nice houses on them once again.
In 50 years we'll be tearing down the houses that the people with money are living in today.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"You can leave your hat on."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
But, in an ironic twist, the leading Japanese car manufacturers (Honda and Toyota) do a lot of their manufacturing in the US, to get around import tariffs (instituted at the behest of the American car companies). My 2002 Accord was built in Ohio.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
"Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves."
My gut feeling is this might be true though I'd like a reference if you have one.
Also true is that hunter gathers in the pre-agriculture past lived much shorter and probably much more brutal lives than us. Fine if you're happy with dying from many things that only need a short trip to the doctor, living til you're 40 if you're lucky, being happy facing the world with flint as your cutting tools and animal skins as your clothing, delivering babies and trying major operations without anaesthetic or sterile environments, and being at the mercy of a climate you can't predict.
I'm guessing some of those other hours in the week were spent in survival activities as well as cultural activities. For sure it is clear that some hunter gatherers led nice lives and a few small remnants today still do but I don't buy this "primitive happy savage" idea.
Boring pragmatic things like "I wouldn't want to live in a world where an infected small cut on my little toe could kill me" put me off that as being better to what I have...
The extra hours of work brought some useful advances, medicine, more constant food supplies, metalworking,etc. Guess it's a trade off.