Mon Feb 13 2012
A plan soon to be revealed by its mayor, former basketball great Dave Bing, recommending shrinking Detroit by 25 percent by transferring people from blighted neighborhoods into stronger ones and returning the abandoned neighborhoods to green space, sounds good to us.
One of America's least liveable cities, Detroit has fallen from its preeminent position as an industrial powerhouse to a collection of pathetic neighborhoods in which a person walking the streets takes his life in his hands. Surrounding this wasteland are fairly substantial suburbs that stand in stark contrast to inner city Detroit.
The Bing vision is realistic. It would enable Detroit to become a smaller, much more liveable city. To financially fund it, however, substantial influxes of cash, much of it coming from the federal government, may be required. We would hope the plan recognzies some of the historically significant buildings in the city that are worthy of preservation and adaptive reuse.
Actually, the Detroit plan is a bigger version of the plan being implemented under Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams, who along with the experts, has basically told his city to get over the loss of its steel industry 30 years ago, which is not coming back. Under the Williams administration, the city is tearing down abandoned homes at the rate of a few hundred a year.Youngstown is accepting its status as a smaller, but still potentially very nice, city along the banks of the Mahoning River and making the most of it.
Cleveland appears on the verge of taking the same moves, its population once having approached 1 million, but now having sunk into possibly the low 300,000-range as people sprawl into the suburbs or simply move away in search of employment opportunities elsewhere.
All three of these cities -- once among the pillars of the industrial Midwest -- are coming to terms with their future after realizing that there is no way they can change the past.
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