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Abstract
What is the role demolition is likely to play in the future of shrinking industrial cities in the United States? The history of demolition is explored as a policy response to real or perceived problems. A balance between demolition and preservation is critical to preserving viable neighbourhoods and restoring vitality to these cities. Older industrial cities with shrinking job and population bases are the primary case under examination. Market factors are identified that are likely to prevent the preservation and reuse of a significant part of these cities' housing stock. More extensive demolition is likely to be an unavoidable part of these cities' future. Both demolition and preservation can be considered parts of a framework through which neighbourhood revitalization can be furthered in these cities. A framework is needed that emphasizes preserving viable communities rather than individual buildings, although still irresolvable dilemmas continue to face those cities.
Quel est le rôle que la démolition est susceptible de jouer dans l'avenir des villes industrielles en décroissance aux Etats-Unis? L'histoire de la démolition est examinée en tant que réponse politique à des problèmes réels ou perçus comme tels. Un équilibre entre démolition et préservation est crucial pour conserver des quartiers viables et redonner de la vitalité à ces villes. Les vieilles villes industrielles dont les bassins d'emploi et de population rétrécissent sont le principal cas examiné. Sont identifiés les facteurs du marché qui sont susceptibles d'empêcher la sauvegarde et la réutilisation d'une partie importante du parc de logements de ces villes. Des démolitions plus massives constitueront probablement un élément inévitable de l'avenir de ces villes. La démolition comme la préservation peuvent être considérées comme faisant partie d'un cadre grâce auquel la revitalisation des quartiers peut être favorisée dans ces villes. Il est nécessaire de disposer d'un cadre qui mette l'accent sur la préservation de communautés viables plutôt que de bâtiments individuels, bien que ces villes demeurent confrontées à des dilemmes encore insolubles.
Mots clés: démolition, conservation historique, marché, du logement, quartier, villes post-industrielles, décroissance urbaine, rénovation urbaine
Notes
An unscientific search of citations on Google Scholar by the author on 18 August 2010 found that 43 of the first 100 associated with ‘demolition’ (excluding those not having to do with building demolition) dealt with the treatment of demolition waste, with an additional 39 addressing either demolition technology or the environmental impacts (mainly air quality) of demolition activity. Seven dealt with the controversial Israeli practice of punitive demolition (destruction) in the Palestinian territories. Only four articles, by a generous definition, addressed demolition as such from a broader social or economic perspective. The most recent of these was written in 1980.
This figure was determined by comparing the total number of units in the 1950 Census of Housing with the number identified as having been constructed prior to 1950 in the 2000 Census of Housing.
There are few ways in which buildings are removed from the housing stock other than demolition. Even when a building is damaged beyond repair by fire, demolition is still needed to remove the remaining hazardous structure. In any event, the number of units destroyed by fire, flood, explosion or other disasters is likely to represent only a minute fraction of the total number removed. Similarly, the number of pre-1950 units converted from residential to non-residential use is likely to be more than offset by the number of pre-1950 non-residential buildings converted into residential buildings during the same period.
Sowing a city's ruins with salt, which (given the high cost of salt in ancient times) was probably carried out nominally rather than literally, was an ancient way of cursing the city by symbolically preventing its re-growth, mentioned in The Bible (Judges 9:45) and in various other ancient Middle Eastern texts. Picard was apparently in error, as the attribution of this practice to the Romans at Carthage appears to be a modern invention (Ridley, Citation1986).
That does not mean that slums were not targets of opportunity for demolition, such as Rome's dilapidated Suburra neighbourhood which was razed to build Trajan's Forum.
The term ‘slum’ is widely believed to come from the Irish ‘‘S lom é’ meaning ‘it's a bleak or desolate place’. The earliest recognized use of the term as a description of a derelict neighbourhood appears in a Charles Dickens letter of 1840, and subsequently in a letter to The Times of 1845 (Dyos et al., Citation1982, p. 131).
Le Corbusier proposed to save cultural treasures such as the Palais Royale and the Place des Vosges; as one writer describes it, ‘stripped of their ancient urban fabric, these structures would be preserved like museum pieces in the green carpet of the skyscrapers and low-rises that one would come upon while walking the curved paths of the parks’ (Shaw, Citation1991, p. 39).
The relationship between certain types of physical environment and crime, while easily overstated, is nonetheless worthy of attention, although – assuming some relationship – the question of what features of an area create that relationship is complex. Stark Citation(1987) offers a series of propositions in that respect that flow from existing social research and which could be explored further by urban planners and policy-makers.
Langdon W. Post, in his Foreword to a study entitled The Slum and Crime (Halpern et al., Citation1934) conducted by the New York City Housing Authority.
Surprisingly, despite Teaford's excellent article, and a plethora of case studies of urban renewal in different American cities, no extended scholarly or analytic treatment of the American urban renewal experience as a whole has ever appeared.
http://www.recivilization.net/307urbanrenewal.html cites estimates of 383 000 and 425 000. No official tally appears ever to have been published, although in light of the reporting requirements of the programme, it should not have been a difficult task.
The idea of the city as an artefact or museum exhibit is more than implicit in the subtitle of James Marston Fitch's Historic Preservation Citation(1982), ‘curatorial management of the built world’.
It can, however, easily be abused; Saarinen's (Citation1943, p. 144) prescription for urban change – ‘much in the same manner as the doctor acts, must even the planner act upon the withering body of the overgrown city. He must unearth the roots of the evil. He must amputate slums by a decisive surgery. And he must transfuse vitality only into those areas that are protected against contagion’ (emphasis in original) – strikes a contemporary reader as dangerously reminiscent of much 1930s Fascist rhetoric.
And, judging from Vitruvius' language in his De architectura libri decem (first century BC), bk 1, ch. 2, adapted by him from earlier, particularly Greek, writers on architecture.
That does not mean that those spatial features are not desirable outside of societies that have similar practices. Where piazzas and pedestrian promenades have been introduced elsewhere, they have often come to be seen as valuable features of the urban landscape, and are actively used in different ways.
The latter is often not given adequate attention by preservation advocates; it is often much easier to raise the one-time funds needed to restore a building than to raise the funds year after year to keep it in use in the absence of a strong market-driven function for the building. Many preservation and reuse projects around the United States have foundered on this problem.
Data from the 2008 American Community Survey suggest not only that the trend has continued since 2000, but also that the rate of increase in vacancy and abandonment since 2000 in all the cities shown in the table has been significantly greater than during the 1990s, except for Scranton, which showed only a modest increase in vacancies.
Sales data are for single-family properties, including townhouses and condominiums. Sales-available properties, which represent an estimate of the properties within the geographic area that could potentially be available for purchase, are defined as the sum of (1) all owner-occupied properties and (2) all non-owner-occupied single-family properties. Data for computing the number of sales-available properties have been drawn from the 2005–2009 five-year American Community Survey.
No even remotely reliable data source that attempts to measure the distribution of buyers by homebuyers and absentee buyers exists in the United States.
Recent articles that criticize current efforts to recognize and address urban shrinkage by drawing an analogy with urban renewal or the planned shrinkage of the 1970s (Gratz, Citation2010) are fundamentally flawed in that they either fail to recognize, or deliberately ignore, those differences.
It should be noted that many cities hailed as ‘success stories’, such as Baltimore or Atlanta, still contain large areas of weak demand and widespread abandonment, untouched by the revival taking place in other parts of the city. Other success stories, such as the revival of the South Bronx, were made possible by massive investments of public subsidy at levels unlikely to be replicated in the foreseeable future.
Although rents are not as significant an indicator of market activity as sales prices, they are also quite low in most shrinking cities. With rare exceptions, median rents in these cities are consistently affordable to households earning at or below 50% of the Area Median Income as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
At least one commentator has pointed out that housing continues to be built at the exurban fringe of many of these regions, and has suggested that urban abandonment, and thus demolition, could be averted by simply preventing further sprawl from taking place. This is not only all but inconceivable from a political standpoint in the states where these cities are located, but also is unlikely to have that effect, since the demand for exurban houses is not likely to be fungible with urban housing demand. In all likelihood, such measures would have the effect of accelerating out-migration from the region as a whole.
A Reuters report from the 2010 American Economic Association meeting summarized the consensus as follows: ‘a dismal job market, a crippled real estate sector and hobbled banks will keep a lid on U.S. economic growth over the coming decade, some of the nation's leading economists said on Sunday, … experts from a range of political leanings were in surprising agreement when it came to the chances for a robust and sustained expansion: they are slim’ (Nicolaci da Costa, Citation2010).
Abandoned buildings can, under some circumstances, become found objects of artistic value. A Detroit artist, Tyree Guyton, has taken a cluster of abandoned houses along Heidelberg Street in Detroit's ravaged East Side and over 24 years has used ‘everyday, discarded objects to create a two block area full of color, symbolism, and intrigue’ (http://www.heidelberg.org/what.html). The Heidelberg Project, as it is known, is a powerful creative achievement, but not one likely to be replicated on a large scale.
The many deleterious effects of having a vacant building in a neighbourhood, including the diminution of the neighbours' property values, have been well documented (National Vacant Properties Campaign, Citation2005).
Many different treatments are available for lots resulting from the demolition of buildings, some of which may not only mitigate the effect of removing the building, but also add value to the community in their own right (Haefner et al., Citation2002; Wachter, Citation2005; Carnegie Mellon University, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Citation2006).
Realistically, it will also be powerfully affected by the extent to which the neighbours want to see the property demolished, and the amount of political pressure being generated to that end. Unfortunately, but understandably, that often trumps rational balancing criteria in many cases.
While in theory some such properties could be rehabilitated for low-income occupancy with public funds such as federal HOME (a federal block grant program for affordable housing) or CDBG (the U.S. federal Community Development Block Grant program) funds, from a fiscal and housing policy standpoint it would be blatantly wasteful to spend US$100 000 or more per low-income family housed, when perfectly acceptable homes selling for far less than that are finding few takers.
An important factor in their market strength is the extent to which both cities, as well as many other older cities in strong market regions, are drawing significant immigrant populations in contrast to most older industrial cities in the Midwest.
Of 21 American cities that were in the top 100 cities in population in 1950 and which have lost 25% or more of their peak population since then, 13 continued to lose population between 2000 and 2007 at a rate of 1% per year (relative to the 2000 population) or greater. Six, including Youngstown and Flint, lost population at a rate greater than 2% per year during this period. There are a larger number of smaller cities – such as Chester, Pennsylvania; Camden, New Jersey; or East St. Louis, Illinois – that are also losing population at equal or greater rates.
In this programme, initiated in the late 1990s, the city of Richmond, Virginia, designated six target neighbourhoods (out of 49 citywide), and identified six to 12 block areas within each of the targeted neighbourhoods, to which it then allocated roughly 80% of the city's discretionary federal housing and community development funds. The designation of the target neighbourhoods was preceded by an extensive programme of community engagement coupled with rigorous data analysis (Reid, Citation2006).
This is a variant of Foot's trolley problem, which she initially posed as follows: ‘A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?’ (Foot, Citation1978, p. 24).
One hesitates to say that these cities will never fully regain their historic population. Rome, which lost nearly all of its population over the centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, ultimately regained the population of 1 million it had when it was the capital of that empire. That milestone was reached in 1931, or roughly 1600 years later.
