Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America's Shrinking Cities

Abstract

Problem: Existing planning and redevelopment models do not offer a holistic approach for addressing the challenges vacant and abandoned properties create in America's older industrial cities, but these shrinking cities possess opportunities to undertake citywide greening strategies that convert such vacant properties to community assets.

Purpose: We define strategies shrinking cities can use to convert vacant properties to valuable green infrastructure to revitalize urban environments, empower community residents, and stabilize dysfunctional real estate markets. To do this we examine shrinking cities and their vacant property challenges; identify the benefits of urban greening; explore the policies, obstacles, and promise of a green infrastructure initiative; and discuss vacant property reclamation programs and policies that would form the nucleus of a model green infrastructure right-sizing initiative designed to stabilize the communities with the greatest level of abandonment.

Methods: We draw our conclusions based on fieldwork, practitioner interviews, and a review of the current literature.

Results and conclusions: We propose a new model to effectively right size shrinking cities by (a) instituting green infrastructure plans and programs, (b) creating land banks to manage the effort, and (c) building community consensus through collaborative neighborhood planning. Our model builds on lessons learned from successful vacant property and urban greening programs, including nonprofit leadership and empowerment of neighborhood residents, land banking, strategic neighborhood planning, targeted revitalization investments, and collaborative planning. It will require planners and policymakers to address challenges such as financing, displacement of local residents, and lack of legal authority.

Takeaway for practice: We conclude that academics, practitioners, and policymakers should collaborate to (a) explore alternative urban designs and innovative planning and zoning approaches to right sizing; (b) collect accurate data on the number and costs of vacant properties and potential savings of different right-sizing strategies; (c) craft statewide vacant property policy agendas; and (d) establish a policy network of shrinking cities to share information, collaboratively solve problems, and diffuse policy innovations.

Research support: Our field work was supported by technical assistance grants and contracts through the National Vacant Properties Campaign.

Keywords:

• shrinking cities
• right sizing
• green infrastructure
• vacant properties
• land banking

Notes

1. The National Vacant Properties Campaign (n.d.) defines vacant properties as “vacant residential, commercial, and industrial buildings and lots that threaten public safety and/or have been subject to the neglect of fundamental duties of property ownership.” Neglect of ownership duty includes failure to pay taxes or utility bills, mortgage default, and failure to pay liens on the property.

2. In 2000, the City of Baltimore estimated it had 12,700 abandoned housing units, while the Census count was 42,480. Philadelphia estimated it had 26,000 vacant housing units and 31,000 vacant lots. Detroit owned about 36,000 parcels of tax reverted land in 2004 (Dewar, 2006).

3. Philadelphia is also a city with a high other vacant rate but is not listed in the top 20 based on its lower overall population percentage loss (24.2%) between 1960 and 2000.

4. A 2007 study of eight cities in Ohio estimated that vacant properties cost $49 million in lost tax revenue and $15 million in city services (Community Research Partners, 2008). City services include code enforcement, demolition and boarding, yard maintenance, and fire and police calls. Lost tax revenue creates financial hardships, particularly for school districts that rely on property taxes for a bulk of their funding (Community Research Partners, 2008).

5. The Shrinking Cities Project from Germany produced three publications: The Altas of Shrinking Cities (Oswalt & Rieniets, 2006), Shrinking Cities Volume 1: International Research (Oswalt, 2005) and Shrinking Cities Volume 2: Interventions (Oswalt, 2006) as well as an international traveling exhibit that was shown in New York, Detroit, and Cleveland. Additionally, in 2007, the Institute for Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley, held an international symposium to discuss shrinking cities, the first of its kind in the United States. Articles have appeared in the popular press as well, including in Governing (Swope, 2006), USA Today (El Nasser, 2006), and the New York Times (Lanks, 2006).

6. Through a partnership among the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, the City of Baltimore, and the State of Maryland, the East Baltimore Revitalization Initiative near the Johns Hopkins campus takes a comprehensive approach to displacement and relocation by providing job training and placement, asset building strategies, housing, financial legal and transportation services, along with counseling both before and after the move and offering residents a variety of relocation options (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2008).

7. Groundwork USA, modeled after Groundwork UK, works in cities across the U.S. such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, San Diego, and Providence, in partnership with the EPA Brownfields Program and the National Parks Service Rivers & Trails Assistance Program to build sustainable communities by engaging local people, businesses, government. and other organizations. Projects seek to improve the environment, economy, and quality of life, as Groundwork USA believes “people, places and prosperity are inextricably linked” (Groundwork USA, n.d.).

8. Through a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia's Neighborhood Information System (NIS) provides city officials and community groups with current and comprehensive real property information ranging from code violations to properties with active building permits. The university acts as a data intermediary to ensure compatibility among the various databases, facilitates data sharing among government agencies and community organizations, and converts this information into maps (Schilling, Schamess & Logan, 2006).

9. While most brownfields redevelopment still happens on a site-by-site basis, New Jersey and New York have enacted legislation and regulatory guidelines to facilitate local areawide revitalization plans (Schilling, Schamess, & Logan, 2006; Van Hook et al., 2003).

10. Atlanta, Louisville, Cleveland, and St. Louis have some of the longest-running land-banking programs in the nation (Alexander, 2005). These programs vary in capacity depending on government support, market conditions, and community demands. Michigan has the nation's most comprehensive land-banking legislation coupled with fast-track tax foreclosure processes for vacant properties. Currently 10 Michigan counties have adopted special land bank authorities. The state also operates its own land bank that now owns or manages more than 6,000 properties (D. Kildee, personal communication, February 15, 2008; see also State of Michigan, 2008).

11. The researchers examined profits from the sale and redevelopment of GCLB properties, the financial assets retained in the community by helping keep habitable properties out of foreclosure, and the subsequent increase in the value of adjacent homes and land (Griswold & Norris, 2007).

12. The GCLB received an initial grant of $250,000 from the C.S. Mott Foundation to design and pilot test its programs (D. Kildee, personal communication, February 15, 2008)

13. Through the National Vacant Properties Campaign, we made a study visit to Youngstown, OH on June 9–11, 2008. These observations reflect our opinions.

14. Oswald Mathias Unger's 1977 plan for West Berlin called for a restructuring of the city into urban villages surrounded by green space (Cepl, 2006). Leinefelde, a former East German city, is planning for shrinkage by deconstructing areas at its edge and concentrating modernizing improvements in its core; it has also planned for a green corridor from its center to outlying areas (Steglich, 2006).

15. Unlike conventional zoning, form-based codes elevate urban design and its relationship to adjacent public spaces to the primary means of regulating land use (Katz, 2004). New urbanist architect, Andres Duany, devised the Transect as a continuum of zones stretching from urban to rural areas. Each Transect zone's built environment has its own density and character, reflecting its location in that continuum. Within new urbanist circles the Transect serves as the design and policy template for the comprehensive plan and its code.

16. The Trust for Public Land tracks the number of land conservation bonds voted on, approved, and the funding consequently generated. In 2007, 65% of open space and conservation bonds voted on were approved, providing $1.9 billion in conservation funding (Trust for Public Land, 2008).

17. In Onondaga County, New York, where the county executive decided to forego the construction of a controversial sewage treatment facility in favor of a more holistic approach incorporating the use of green infrastructure, a subsequent project will use vacant properties to help manage storm water runoff. Various organizations are using state and local funds to create rain gardens and reforest vacant lots owned by the City of Syracuse in an effort to mitigate the combined sewer overflow discharges contributing to the pollution in Onondaga Lake (Mariani, 2008).

18. A smaller network is already emerging linking Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown. With assistance from the Surdna Foundation, Kent State's Urban Design Center and the Cleveland-based nonprofit Neighborhood Progress, Inc. organized a one-day learning session to facilitate the sharing of shrinking city strategies among these three rust belt communities (Janko, 2008).