Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City; and Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation, and Urban Planning in the Sunbelt

Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation, and Urban Planning in the Sunbelt. Justin B. Hollander. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. xvi and 176 pp., maps, tables, figures, images, notes, references, index. $44.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-415-59212-3).

Growth is the relentless task master fueling the urban planning profession. From population to land use projections, to master planning, growth is the underlying purpose and assumption undergirding the profession. Even in the absence of growth, planners are tasked with the job of reigniting growth through revitalization, economic development, or support of gentrification. Planners are not often prepared to manage persistent decline. The profession typically assumes that with the right economic development tools in place, growth will follow in the right proportions.

Yet significant areas within the United States, particularly older industrial sections of the Midwest (or “Rustbelt”), have seen a decades-long downturn with faint glimmers of hope despite the best minds and herculean efforts concentrating on revitalization. Detroit, the subject of John Gallagher's book, is often crowned the urban decline poster child and serves as an object lesson on how traditional urban planning techniques have fizzled. Slowly, planners and scholars are realizing that some cities and much of rural America might never again see population growth.

On the other side of the coin, what happens when growth occurs at a dizzying pace? Even with growth controls in place, discouraging the so-called right kind of growth rarely happens, particularly when political will and zoning waivers prevail. In fact, it could be argued that planners often do not know what the “right kind of growth” is until the economy tanks and we are able to reflect on what went wrong during the good times. Furthermore, planners cannot predict accurately when a metropolitan area's decline is merely a stall or a free fall.

Rather than reinforcing the uncertain fates that come with mainstream planning practice, an emerging group of planners and scholars has begun to challenge mainstream planning practice. The approach, referred to as “shrinking cities,” focuses on creating a better quality of life for the city as it is now after its population and economy decline rather than hopelessly promoting the growth treadmill. The two books reviewed here are part of this newer way of thinking about what to do when the reality sinks in that it might not be possible to incentivize your way out of decline.

Reimagining Detroit by John Gallagher, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, begins this perspective by recommending that we should not bother with trying to figure out why Detroit is in the mess it is in today, but that that we simply start over. That is, he wants to answer “Where do go from here?” in Detroit, use it as a model for other cities on the same trajectory, and incorporate best practices from other cities in the same boat. The first couple of chapters, however, recount some of the events leading to Detroit's current status in the context of both past and contemporary experiences of other U.S. and international cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Turin, Italy.

A significant point of the book is that a smaller Detroit might someday be considered a great place to live because, as the author argues, when most people think of smaller cities, they think they are better places to live in terms of community involvement and even affordability. Gallagher argues that the deeper the urban crisis and dysfunction that a city experiences, the better the potential is to experiment with alternate ways of being a city: “A smaller city creates the canvas to become a better city” (p. 11). It is easy to see how he came to this metaphor considering the broad swaths of open space and the thousands of vacant properties dotting the landscape.

Gallagher is also on empirically secure ground in that a host of U.S. cities are decades past their peak population and yet are considered more livable and successful today than they have been in the recent past. Consider cities such as Providence, Rhode Island, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, which are less populous cities than they were in 1970, but both are seen as vibrant and much improved places today. Population growth per se is not the sole determinant of vibrancy or livability. On the contrary, at times it might detract from quality of life. The problem in some Midwestern cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, however, is that population loss has been so deep and widespread that abandonment feeds a downward cycle that is hard to manage.

Gallagher spends considerable time describing how residents and officials are coping with the dramatically smaller city and its desolate landscape. Central to the difficulties with abrupt change is the realization that there is an excess of “city,” as evidenced by massive amounts of abandoned properties and vacant lands. Mitigating strategies include reducing infrastructure needs by putting the city on a “road diet” or “daylighting” streams buried by urbanization. Much vacant land has turned to urban farming or has just been allowed to return to wilderness. The deurbanizing transformation of Detroit has been so profound that satellite land inventory data have reclassified parts of the city as natural resource areas. The new “habitat” includes species of predators that were chased from the city as it emerged as an urban center in the nineteenth century.

Not all efforts to manage Detroit's reimaging come from Detroit's government. They often arise from volunteers and civic organizations in concert with the city. For instance, there is an effort to stabilize vacant lots in areas that still have residents by simply cleaning them in concert with some plantings. Many of the interesting approaches detailed in the book sound more like bandages rather than comprehensive solutions, but Gallagher offers a modicum of optimism for how to deal with a dramatically shrinking city. Given Detroit's current bankruptcy status, though, it is hard envision that the city will fully reinvent itself. Rather, it is encouraging that there are policies in place that buffer some of the worst impacts of decline and offer creative opportunities to at least partially stabilize distressed neighborhoods.

Justin Hollander's book, Sunburnt Cities, although dealing with the concept of shrinking cities primarily in the Sunbelt, seems to be focused on the wrong cities. Hollander's stated theme that the Sunbelt cities that face depopulation and disinvestment have much to learn “from the experiences of the Rustbelt” (p. 6) is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. First the Rustbelt's economy disinvestment and depopulation results from a completely different economic organization than the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt's economic base derives from a wide range of service and tourist activities and not the heavy manufacturing characteristic of the Rustbelt. The Sunbelt's economic structure is advantaged over the Rustbelt because of the place-specific nature of these activities that cannot be easily exported to other countries. Further, the Sunbelt still enjoys retirement and migratory population flows of people and money because of the warm weather, unlike the Rustbelt. The Sunbelt's economic condition might also look worse at the beginning of a recovery because tourism, for instance, would lag due to its reliance on discretionary income.

Finally, there are two more important dimensions of the Sunbelt that cannot be compared to the Rustbelt. One is that the Sunbelt has newer housing and infrastructure that still retain value despite the recent foreclosure crisis. The second is a principle that Jacobs (1961) teaches us: People still choose to live here. Jacobs points out (although she was talking about slums, the principle is arguably applicable everywhere) that population thinning out might be the first indications that an area is on its way back, as long as there are a sufficient number of people who want to stay. We are seeing this phenomenon in many places where foreclosures have been particularly devastating, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, and California, where there has been an uptick in population in the last couple of years. In fact, Las Vegas, the metropolitan area that saw the largest percentage drop in house prices of any major U.S. market from 2006 to 2010, actually gained about 50,000 residents between 2010 and 2012 according to census data.

Hollander seems to have prematurely declared the Sunbelt dead and as such, his suggestions for managing what he terms “smart decline” seem inappropriate at this point. It is somewhat surprising that he does not consider a potential economic resiliency to Sunbelt areas that urban economic development experts such as Florida and Glaeser would argue would continue to be attractive to younger and more educated workers. And although we agree that planners should consider other models for city development rather than relying on the “growth” model of planning, Hollander's focus on what he considers the dire situation in the Sunbelt diminishes the argument.

Hollander focuses much of his attention on Orlando and Phoenix, two Sunbelt boomtowns that went bust in the national recession that began in 2007. Since the middle of the twentieth century, both regions had been among the fastest growing major metropolitan areas in the United States. Phoenix and Orlando were modest-sized cities following World War II. Changes in technology such as home air conditioning and jet aircraft cooled these warm-weather metros and linked them to the rest of the country. The rise of interstate highways also provided critical connections to what were once relatively remote and inaccessible areas of the United States. Finally, the rise of defense contracting in Phoenix and theme parks in Orlando placed these two regions squarely in growth sectors that fueled metropolitan expansion.

When the bust came, the once high-flying metros of Orlando and Phoenix made national and even international headlines as a kind of “man bites dog” story theme. It was newsworthy to see abandonment of homes in brand new subdivisions. The great American dream of new homes and easy living in the Sunbelt had become the new American nightmare due to high rates of foreclosure on loans that were risky and highly leveraged. Indeed, a big storyline during the Great Recession was that such loans—often in the speculative Sunbelt markets—had lead the U.S. economy into a severe downturn. Like many ideas that gain traction, the charge against speculation in these places was at least partly correct and the pain of lost jobs and homes was very real. The claims that vast subdivision ghost towns were created in the process and that Phoenix was now Detroit with warm winters and sunshine were vastly overstated, however.

Yes, there were plenty of homes in both Orlando and Phoenix where homeowners simply walked away from properties, but there was a critical difference between abandonment in the Rustbelt and Sunbelt—the number and location of vacated properties in the Sunbelt were fewer and less concentrated than in the Rustbelt. The difference is equivalent to the destruction left in the wake of a tornado versus a hurricane. In a tornado, destruction is selective, so one house might be wiped out and the next house remains intact. In hurricanes, vast swaths of urban space are lost where whole neighborhoods and even whole cities are equally impacted. The metaphor applies to Detroit in comparison to Phoenix. Detroit has seen abandonment on such a large scale that satellites detect the return of nature. In Phoenix, vacated homes appear throughout the region—some blocks might have several homes abandoned, whereas others have a house or two absent residents. The policy implications are critical: Whereas Detroit saw a cascading effect where abandonment in one block triggered the vacating of neighboring blocks, Phoenix has most of its housing distress play out at the individual lot level. Most of the personal losses in Phoenix simply failed to reshape the urban pattern in the region and translate into a city-wide trend of mass abandonment.

Finally—and this is especially critical in refuting Hollander's assertion of “sunburnt cities”—the losses have stopped, and Orlando and Phoenix are growing again. Whereas the Detroit metropolitan area has actually lost population since the 2010 census according to the 1 July 2012 census estimate, the Phoenix region has added nearly 70,000 residents per year from 2010 to 2012. In fact, Detroit and Phoenix have swapped places on the ranking of the most populous U.S. metropolitan areas. In 2010, Detroit was the twelfth-ranked metro and Phoenix ranked fourteenth. In 2012, Phoenix ranked thirteenth and Detroit ranked fourteen. In twelfth place stood Inland Empire in California (Riverside–San Bernardino), another sunburnt city where foreclosures ran high. Orlando grew at a faster rate than both Phoenix and Inland Empire since 2010 and now ranks as the twenty-sixth most populous U.S. metropolitan area, up from twenty-seventh in 2012.

Why is the Sunbelt still growing? There are several reasons: There is a higher rate of natural increase, as migration to the region continues to see its economy recover and diversify. According to data available from the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, Orlando is becoming less reliant on tourism and expanding in sectors such as health services and information technology. Phoenix, meanwhile, has a remarkably diverse economy that has expanded well past tourism and home construction—tech manufacturing, aerospace, and green energy production are leading the region out of recession and filling abandoned homes with new residents. The bottom line is this: The Sunbelt is no longer “sunburnt” and thus policies borrowed from the Rustbelt are not especially relevant to metros in a region that should see millions of new residents in the next several decades.