Looking at a National Movement of Grassroots Renewal

by David Lepeska

Over the next couple of weeks, The Atlantic Cities is exploring America's rebuilding efforts in a four-part series. Read the first installment here.

A couple of sharp-eyed Midwestern academics spotted the first green shoots of a national urban rebuild three years ago.

In mid-2009, Chicago sociologist and photographer David Schalliol and Milwaukee-based urban historian Michael Carriere launched a collaborative study of creative revitalization efforts in urban areas across the country, particularly those hardest hit by decline. They've since visited more than 30 cities and turned up nearly 200 outfits and initiatives, creating a national map of grassroots renewal, from Albuquerque to Providence.

"We're seeing this huge number of groups, this ubiquity of DIY development,” says Schalliol, who is working toward a sociology doctorate at the University of Chicago. “We seem to have reached a new moment, where this kind of community-based and community-directed activism is playing a larger role in shaping the possibilities and facilitating a variety of new opportunities, from play to work to food to housing."

Some are sustainable businesses looking to redevelop a fallen neighborhood, while others are slapdash, activist-bred pop-ups that quickly come and go. Many are small-scale, longer-lasting efforts – such as turning a demolition site into a park, or reclaiming unused or abandoned buildings for housing or recreation activities.

A handful of other observers have also picked up on this movement. The Street Plans Collaborative, a group of urban planners, designers and activists, recently published their second volume of Tactical Urbanism, detailing efforts like chairbombing, guerrilla gardening and Open Streets. And author and community revitalization analyst Storm Cunningham is writing a book documenting the global rise of citizen-led regeneration and developing a website to help support it.

To Schalliol, these community-led efforts mark an unprecedented shift in the way people respond to local problems. “Rather than going to city officials and asking for help,” says Schalliol, “there's an understanding that a) the funds may not be there, b) the response may be too slow, and that c) the community itself has the capacity to deal with it.”

One of Schalliol's favorite examples is Sweet Water Organics, a Milwaukee aquaponics outfit that transformed a derelict former factory into an innovative urban fish and vegetable farm. “It's dealing with de-industrialization, trying to re-envision commerce and community,” says Schalliol.

Unlike the nationally-known Milwaukee outfit Growing Power, Sweet Water hopes to sustain itself without grants or foundation funding. “It's trying to chart a new path, with a profitable business arm and a non-profit, community education element,” says Schalliol.

The Borg Ward, an all-ages music venue and arts space in the Milwaukee's Walkers Point neighborhood, has been providing space for up-and-coming artists in the former Borgwardt Funeral and Cremation Services building since 2007. (2010)

Some organizations think they're accomplishing more than they actually are, while others underestimate their impact. Whatever the case, these small-scale efforts are certainly no silver bullet for the problems facing former industrial cities today.

“We're not positing that this DIY work can or will make up for the lost revenues," says Schalliol. "But I do think they provide a variety of models for which we can see new ways of engaging larger systemic problems and in the meantime do quite a bit of local good. As a result of this national critical mass, I think there's more of an emphasis on these issues -- and that can lead to policy changes.”

In Chicago, urban gardeners helped alter municipal policy in favor of urban agriculture. And last year, the city of Milwaukee awarded Sweet Water Organics a $250,000 loan (although some are now questioning that decision).

Schalliol lives in Chicago and has spent a good deal of time in Detroit. Carriere lives and teaches in Milwaukee. Thus, the two have done a great deal of work in those three Midwest cities. Schalliol's photos, which accompany this piece, reveal a handful of the hopeful new initiatives and the devastation that preceded them, offering a glimpse of a region bottoming out and hitting the reset button.

After showing some of Schalliol's photos at a small Milwaukee museum early this year, the duo is looking to mount a major exhibition. They're also talking with publishers, planning to publish a book on the project next year.



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originally ran on May 15, 2012 here

Welcome to the Rebuild Era

by David Lepeska


Over the next couple of weeks, The Atlantic Cities will explore America's rebuilding efforts in a four-part series. This is the first installment.

Speaking at a construction workers' conference in Washington in late April, President Barack Obama acknowledged that our highways are clogged, our airports overwhelmed, and our roads and bridges in need of repair.

"American workers built this country, and now we need American workers to rebuild this country," said the president. "Join us in this project of rebuilding America."

Leaders have been urging their citizens to rebuild at least since the ancient Greek statesman Pericles

Whether political point or post-downturn reality, the call to rebuild has been gaining traction among politicians, activists, businessfolk, and pundits, and it's about more than just infrastructure. If dubbing this an era of rebuilding requires some optimism, it might also be a necessity, particularly for American cities.

Leaders have been urging their citizens to rebuild at least since the ancient Greek statesman Pericles called his people to reconstruct their capital after Xerxes' burning of Athens in 480 B.C. Today, embattled European leaders invoke the better days to come. Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa recently laid out his Rebuilding Program for post-Mubarak Egypt.

Then there's the U.S. These last few years represent the country's most difficult economic period since the Great Depression. Yet our climb out of that earlier hole offers little to inform our current situation. The initiatives established under the New Deal – such as the National Recovery Administration, the Works Progress Agency, and the National Labor Relations board – focused on construction and industry and empowering American workers.

Today, Americans are struggling to recover not only from the devastation of the Great Recession, but also a loss of faith in financial institutions, housing, American manufacturing, even the very idea that hard work inevitably pays off.

Most low-skilled jobs are gone and never coming back, and in many ways, it's cities that have suffered most. Municipal governments are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and facing bankruptcy. Vast neighborhoods have been hollowed out by foreclosures and blight.

While Detroit's magnificent collapse is widely known, Chicago, for one, has suffered a subtler decline. As reported in a recent OECD study on the Chicago region, overall job growth here has trailed the national average for decades. And from 1960 to 1990, more than 96 percent of new regional jobs were created outside downtown Chicago, the de facto regional capital.

That economic shift away from cities was the root cause of America's urban collapse. Starting in the 1950s, the middle class – and the American Dream – migrated from urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. Industry and corporations soon followed.

Ester Fuchs, director of Columbia University's Urban and Social Policy program, details the fallout in the latest issue of Columbia's Journal of International Affairs:

America’s great cities were left in economic free fall, with concentrated poverty, unemployment, high crime rates, failing public schools and severely deteriorating physical infrastructure, including roads, mass transit and parks. Academics and policy makers agreed that cities were irrelevant to America’s economic future; they would become places for poor minorities who could not afford to move to the suburbs. Urban policy became code for social-welfare policy.

Power players came to view cities as irrelevant to economic vitality. The reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984, writes Fuchs, "showed it was possible to win a presidential campaign while losing the vote in America's major cities."

Now it's come full circle. Americans began returning to cities in the mid-1990s, sparked in part by Mayor Giuliani's turn-around of New York City. Today, both the U.S. and the world are more urban than rural. And just as we've come to accept that cities are the engines of the global economy, the economic downturn has pulled back the curtain on our long-festering national secret.

That explains why Chicago officials are worried that their city attracts a fraction of the information workers drawn to coastal cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, and why they've begun to focus on rebuilding.

In recent weeks, local and national observers have been debating Mayor Rahm Emanuel's innovative method of financing a city-wide infrastructure rebuild. The three-year-old Rebuilding Exchange hopes to change the way Chicagoans demolish and reuse housing stock, while the Rebuild Foundation is expanding its community-through-culture vision across the Midwest.

Of course, the local is national. At Chicago's Green Festival last weekend, Van Jones spoke about his new book, Rebuild the Dream, which lays out a vision to repair our government and renew the middle class. Similarly, Obama has made middle class revitalization a central policy goal.

A new non-partisan organization, Americans United to Rebuild Democracy, seeks to set Congressional term limits and clean up campaign financing in an effort to restore faith in elected leaders. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently acknowledged, “our country needs a renewal.”

Still, the latest jobs report shows sluggish growth nationwide, while new home construction remains particularly low in the Midwest. And construction workers, like those Obama spoke to last week, still can't find work.

Yet on the day of his speech, One World Trade Center became the tallest building in New York City. Just one small step on the way to 1776 feet, but perhaps an apt moment to mark the start of the Rebuild Era.



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originally ran on May 9, 2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/05/rebuild-era/1948/

The Roots of Detroit's Ruin

For Atlantic Cities

By David Lepeska


That the price of a house in Detroit can cost less today than a new car seems one of the great ironies of 21st century America. But no major city has been harder hit by the recent recession, or by the decades of manufacturing attrition that preceded it, than the Motor City.

It’s famously lost a quarter of its population in the last decade and 60 percent since 1950, and now sits on the brink of bankruptcy. “We are at a critical and pivotal time like none in Detroit's history,” Mayor Dave Bing said in his state of the city speech Wednesday.

In his forthcoming book, Detroit: A Biography, journalist Scott Martelle details how the city – felled by one of the great innovations of the industrial era, a grave lack of official foresight and swirling poverty and prejudice – has come to redefine urban collapse.

Martelle starts his story at the beginning, with French naval officer Antoine Laumet de Cadillac beaching his canoe on the north bank of the Detroit River in July 1701 and establishing Fort Pontchartrain.

Economic boom-times arrived with the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal, a key shipping link to the East through which boatloads of iron ore, copper, coal, and lumber from the Lake Superior region passed.

• • • • •

Detroit's population neared 300,000 at the turn of the century, just as Ransom Olds, David Buick, the Packard brothers and Henry Ford began their battle for automobile supremacy. By 1914, Detroit was making half the country's cars. By 1929 it was the fourth largest city in the country, with a thriving economy, a population of 1.6 million (nearly 160,000 working in the auto industry) and impressive new roads and skyscrapers.

Yet it was built on sand. Martelle points to Henry Ford's great innovation, the conveyor belt-driven assembly line. “It was the first critical step in the dehumanization of manufacturing work,” he writes. “Skilled craftsmen lost out to unskilled laborers who performed a single task, day in and day out.”

The line became standard across the industry and wages fell, leading to protests and ultimately the creation of the United Auto Workers union. Yet by providing decent-paying jobs to the least skilled, the assembly line dictated that future Detroit workers would rarely need more than a high school education or any skills that might help them find work beyond the most menial jobs.

“It drew to Detroit the relatively uneducated, made Detroit a magnet for the lower economic strata, from the South and other parts of Midwest,” says Martelle. “Obviously you need laborers, but this skewed the balance.”

And in a free market those jobs would constantly seek out the cheapest labor. General Motors sniffed the changing winds long before most, opening factories as far afield as Europe, South America and, in 1929, that godhead of outsourcing, India.

The Great Depression hit Detroit hard. Auto production fell by three-quarters in just three years, forcing tens of thousands of layoffs and countless foreclosures. Major banks faced insolvency.

By 1940 the industry had rebounded, converting plants to build tanks, planes and various other vehicles and spare parts for the war effort. Detroit's economy hummed again, and half a million people arrived looking for work, mostly African-Americans from the South.

After the war, the big automakers went back to their old ways. Cars sold in record numbers, driving a booming local and regional economy. Depression-era troubles had failed to convince Detroit officials to diversify.

“It was a lack of imagination,” says Martelle. “The leaders saw people buying cars again, and thought, ‘making cars, that's what this city does best.’” That decision, Martelle argues, played a major role in the city's eventual collapse.

“It's hard to imagine Detroit would be in its current condition if the post-war economy had diversified significantly beyond auto-making,” he writes in the book.

• • • • •

Later opportunities to point the city in a better direction came and went. Martelle chronicles the 1949 election of Mayor Albert Cobo, whose anti-integration, slum-clearing policies helped spur the exodus of whites to the suburbs, the devastation of the 1967 riots and the years of crime, drugs, and gang violence that followed.

Along the same timeline, the Big Three were busy decentralizing their operations. By the early 70s, one out of every three dollars invested in the major automakers was heading overseas.

The 1973 oil embargo, the subsequent race to increase fuel efficiency and the rise of Japanese automakers like Honda proved the straw that broke the city's back. Within two years, U.S. auto production had fallen nearly 30 percent, and Detroit was well on its way to becoming a byword for urban decay.

Martelle intersperses his narrative with a handful of telling resident bios. Michael Farrell buys the century-old, long-neglected Taylor House mansion in Brush Park for $65,000 in 1981. He hopes to revive the neighborhood and achieves modest success until the financial crisis steals his momentum. With no grocery store or retail of any sort, today the area is known mainly for its Victorian “ruins porn.”

“When you lose the commerce, you lose the city,” Farrell tells Martelle in the book. “Detroit has no commerce.”

• • • • •


Yet encouraging signs have appeared. John Thompson grew up in rough-and-tumble Cass Corridor, where he opened Honest ? John's Bar and Grill in 2002. An independent bookstore, a creperie and an art movie house have since followed, along with a trickle of new residents, providing what Martelle calls “a little shoot of new urban intensity.”

A modest uptick in the auto industry has meant new jobs, but mostly outside Detroit. Companies like Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans and Blue Cross Blue Shield have begun reinvesting in Detroit's downtown, creating thousands of jobs and incentives to new residents. Nonprofits like Skillman Foundation and Kresge Foundation work to rebuild and preserve neighborhoods via education and engagement.

Still, these are tiny slices in a vast city of 140 square miles. With about $40 million left in the bank, Detroit is essentially bankrupt, and facing a deficit of $200 million. Since taking office in mid-2009, Mayor Dave Bing has cut nearly a quarter of his workforce and enacted a 10 percent pay cut for the rest, cut garbage pick-up and police patrols in large swathes of town and recently asked for a $150 million loan from the governor. As if that weren't enough, the Detroit public school system is considering closing half its schools.

Pittsburgh, another single-industry city that collapsed in the 70s and 80s, has in recent decades begun to rehabilitate itself. In 2010, more than one in five jobs in the region were in education and healthcare, nearly a 20 percent increase from 2000. The focus on these sectors as well as finance and technology has drawn a new wave of immigrants.

Martelle sees the legacy left by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in that city as crucial. Carnegie Mellon University is a top research and academic institution, while the Carnegie Institute operates four respectable museums. Together they establish strong educational and cultural roots.

Henry Ford, on the other hand, created the Ford Foundation, which has been based in New York for decades. “That's a lesson for other urban areas,” says Martelle. “Try to draw corporations into creating institutions that could sustain the community in the future.”


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Ran December 2011:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/03/historical-roots-detroits-ruin/1461/

The Best Solution for Shrinking Cities?

by David Lepeska
for TheAtlanticCities.com

Going from blight to blots, that's the latest DIY solution for shrinking cities.

Across a handful of troubled Midwestern cities, homeowners in failing neighborhoods are snapping up adjacent vacant lots for their own use, creating block-lots, or blots. The term was coined by the Brooklyn-based urban planning and design firm Interboro as part of a winning entry into Archplus "Shrinking Cities" 2006 International Ideas Competition.

Blotting, previously known as sideyard expansion, is an opportunistic response to urban decline that has been around for decades. The city of Chicago launched its adjacent land purchasing program in 1981; Cleveland did the same a few years later. But it has gained traction in recent years as cities have been depopulated and residents, planners and policymakers have sought redevelopment solutions.

Today, Cleveland and Chicago both have thousands of abandoned buildings and tens of thousands of vacant lots. Large swaths of New Orleans were emptied by Katrina. Yet no place is more ideal for blotting than Detroit, where the basic building block is the single-home lot. The city's population has fallen 60 percent since 1950 and nearly a third of its 139 square miles are vacant.

Residents like Jean and Michael Anderanin refused to wait for the city to launch a redevelopment plan. From 1992 to 2002, the mother and son purchased five lots adjoining their home, creating a six-lot garden blot that is enclosed by a fence and furnished with a gazebo, basketball court and several bird houses, according to Interboro's study, Improve Your Lot!

The result, according to University of Michigan urban planning professor Margaret Dewar, is a better, safer neighborhood. Vacant lots are breeding grounds for crime and illegal dumping. They place a strain on city police and fire resources and reduce surrounding property values and public safety.

"When people take over another lot they put in a patio, a garage, play equipment, a swimming pool—this improves quality of life because the lot is cared for," says Dewar, who published the first academic study on adjacent lot purchase in 2006. "It's become more and more common."

Blotting dovetails with a plan Detroit Mayor Dave Bing outlined to reduce population density in neighborhoods that have failed. Detroit planning director Rob Anderson recently told Changing Gears reporter Kate Davidson that the city's program to sell lots, for $200, has sold more than a thousand adjacent vacant lots.

In Chicago the price is $1,000, while in Cleveland lots go for as little as $1. A spokeswoman for Cleveland's Community Development Department had no readily available data on blotting, but said the practice had been increasing.

That would be a good thing, says Dewar, though she cautions against visions of urban paradise. In reality, blotting is one-part redevelopment and two parts de-urbanization, remaking the city as more green and less dense: a neo-suburb (it's the "new suburbanism," according to Interboro). Blotting won't create idyllic New Urbanist neighborhoods or return shrinking cities to their former glory, but it will reduce crime, add green spaces and improve safety. It's smart shrinkage for the recession-era Rust Belt, among the best of a handful of poor options.

Next June, New Orleans will host the Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference, following Louisville, Pittsburgh and Cleveland as previous host cities. Among speakers and attendees, blotting is likely to be a hot topic. "This is a good way to approach the re-use of vacant land," says Dewar. "I think officials in cities where there's been a lot of this loss should think 'How can we encourage this and celebrate it?'"