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The Inquirer has published a smart essay today about the conversion of abandoned properties to new uses, what the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Alan Hughes and Elise Harrington call “the arbitrage of legacy assets.”  They cite the Philadelphia Navy Yard as a prime example of how tapping hidden value in underutilized or abandoned sites can generate new activity and wealth. They plan to further elaborate their thesis through a conference planned for October under the title “Unlocking Value from Regional Energy Assets.”

Coincidentally, an essay has appeared in the May, 2013 issue of the Journal of Planning History calling for a parallel approach by urging the creative reuse of neglected industrial sites in Detroit. In their approach to adaptive reuse,  Brent Ryan and Daniel Campo challenge contemporary trends to either glory in the extent of these ruins—what some have come to call ruin porn—or simply to clear land without seeking to capitalize on previous investments in existing structures or their associated infrastructures.  Ryan further explores the challenges to post-industrial planners in his 2012 book, Design After Decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities.

In yet another affirmation of the promise of post-industrial redevelopment, Temple University’s Carolyn Adams has made the case for reinvestment in older industrial suburbs where previous commitments to mass transportation and waterfront access make land reuse attractive for a variety of purposes in environmentally sustainable ways. Her essay appears in the 2012 volume, Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and its Environmental Thresholds, edited by Brian Black and Michael Chiarappa.  It’s not accidental that these essays have appeared at roughly the same time.  City planners are increasingly conscious about environmental costs.  Adaptive reuse has been popular for some time, but it can be used even more creatively on industrial districts, where the challenges might be great but the returns could be surprisingly rewarding.         

The city of New Haven is trying to make up for one of the biggest mistakes to come out of the era of its own heralded program of urban renewal:  partial construction of the Oak Street Connector, intended to bring automobile traffic from the newly completed Connecticut Turnpike into the city’s downtown and to towns beyond.  The route was never completed, a victim of protests from residents who objected strenuously to the further loss of viable housing and commercial structures to the proposed throughway. What did transpire was a utilitarian roadway that nonetheless cut the Yale medical, nursing, and public health schools off from the downtown and required the displacement of 880 households—mostly in the predominately black Hill residential area—and the loss of 350 businesses. After his death, the connector, which was otherwise referred to as “the highway to nowhere”  was named for Richard C. Lee, the longtime orchestrator of renewal as New Haven’s Democratic mayor.

I experienced the visceral reaction to renewal and the Oak Street Connector directly when I was a graduate student at Yale.  At my instigation, a local Republican advisory committee offered a forum on housing in a school located in the path of the connector and slated for demolition.  We were represented by a staff member from Senator Charles Percy’s office that night. His role was to speak about Percy’s support for expanding home ownership.  The crowd which jammed the meeting room that hot summer night was in no mood to discuss how they might gain access to home ownership. They were angry about displacement that was accompanying the city’s ambitious redevelopment plans.  The Republican candidate for mayor attended the session, and although he made something of a fool of himself by not connecting with his audience, the anger was so great, one of the Hill residents who accompanied me back downtown after the meeting said he would vote for the GOP candidate if he only were not barred from doing so because of a past felony. Critics charged that the Hill area was not the slum the redevelopment agency depicted, but a vital area containing a good deal of viable housing stock as well as active businesses., many of which were bulldozed to make way for the highway (as shown below).

Months later the city was engulfed by days of civil disorder.  An open letter addressed to Mayor Lee in the aftermath of the August, 1967 riots charged the redevelopment agency with perpetuating violence daily on local residents and naming the Oak Street Connector as a primary agent  for blotting out an entire neighborhood.  “The Redevelopment Agency is an invading army. The recent rampage was only a desperate attempt by those with no economic or political power—of whom Negroes are the most desperate—to demonstrate their plight,” the circular proclaimed.

The controversy generated for new plans to modify the connector  may seem modest in comparison, but it nonetheless suggests the distance planning still has to go in the city.  Utilizing a $16 million Tiger II Department of Transportation grant, the primary vision behind Downtown Crossing is a series of cross streets intended to make the area east of the downtown more accessible by connecting it back to the city’s existing grid. It would also create 10 acres of new, developable space, intended to host restaurants, shops, and parks.  Like the original plans for the connector, this initiative is being advanced in the name of boosting the city’s tax base, a goal that has been initially confirmed with a commitment by Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which left the city for the suburbs in 2000, to occupy a new 11-story $100 million building at the edge of the proposed redevelopment.  The company is to receive up to $51 million in state subsidies to make the move.

A number of critics have charged that the plan does not go far enough in restoring pedestrian amenities in place of an existing highway.  While access to the Yale facilities will no doubt be easier, and new ventures should follow this investment, there is no mention at all in the plan about the possibilities of enhancing residential life in the area to the east.  It’s almost as though the Hill and its residents have been consigned to a forgotten history.

Now that Michigan has stepped in to take over the city of Detroit, we can expect even more commentary on the city and its dismal condition.  In that process, there is bound to be further comment about Charlie Leduff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy, which quickly ascended onto the New York Times bestsellers list after it was reviewed in The Times in February. One of the early comments on Detroit native-turned newsman Leduff’s book came from Fred Siegel, a frequent contributor the conservative Manhattan Institute’s publication, City Journal.  Siegel called the book “marvelous,” choosing to blame “the intersection of unprecedented prosperity and cultural liberation” for wrecking havoc  on LeDuff’s “once-solid working-class family”: the murder of his  sister turned prostitute, the death by overdose of his “stoner niece,” and a brother lingering “in a crack den.”

One suspects LeDuff, had other targets than cultural liberation in mind.  His is a grim tale of government incompetence and stunning indifference to the consequences of the collapse not just of the private but the public sector. 

The book opens with the discovery of a body frozen over a number of weeks in the shell of a building that was accumulating enough water in its basement to afford iceskating within its walls.  It turns out that the body, which was fully encompassed in ice except for two protruding feet, had been sighted some time earlier but not reported.  LeDuff calls 9/11 only to be told they couldn’t be bothered, and it takes even more time before the body is finally removed.

LeDuff relishes the kind of hardnosed reporting he conveys in this book. His language is blunt. His observations are not analytical. Indeed, he is not able to escape the ill effects of his beloved dying city on himself.  But like so many of the hardscrabble people who remain in the city, he’s  willing to fight the bad odds.

In one of the few bright threads in the book, he recounts the winding path that finally brings to justice the man responsible for setting a fire in an abandoned building that is responsible for the death of one of the firemen called to extinguish it.  “People often ask, where is the hope in Detroit?” he writes. “I had just watched it. Society had functioned properly in this case because we all wanted it to. The firefighters, the cops, the judge, the jury, the reporter.”

In essence, LeDuff had done his job, by prodding an investigation by authorities who otherwise might have let the whole matter go. It will be a lot harder  for  the state’s fiscal officer to right the city for the longterm.  In the meanwhile, I can recommend LeDuff’s book. While it does not point the way to solutions, it serves as an important reminder of how deep the city’s malaise has become.  There’s no guarantee the state will act responsibly or effectively, but LeDuff’s book helped convince me, as I’m sure it will others, that further inaction was not an option.   

Sick of hearing about Detroit?  The city is everywhere, in the news, in two shows at the National Building Museum in Washington, now featured in a best-selling book out only a

Courtesy Camilo Jose Vergara

few weeks. We’re heard about the city’s decline forever. Shouldn’t we just forget it?  I don’t think so.  What happens in Detroit in the coming months will tell us a lot about whether we’ve learned anything about addressing the structural issues of post-industrial cities. Right now, the prospects for real progress are not encouraging.

Last week Republican Governor Rick Snyder announced a financial emergency in the city as a step towards appointing a financial manager to oversee the overwhelmingly Democratic and overwhelmingly African American city.  As critics have pointed out, under state law, once a financial manager has been appointed, the state will have powers to tear up existing union contracts and to sell city assets to meet serious budget shortfalls.  It’s easy to imagine Wisconsin all over again. A former businessman, Snyder has sounded the traditional GOP theme, of altering “job-cutting” taxes and fighting “entrenched special interests,” which translates easily enough into unions defending their contracts.

Pension liabilities are a good part of the problem, Snyder points out, eating up as much as 30 percent of the city’s budget every year. No doubt these obligations will bear scrutiny should the state take effective control of the city. Before jumping to the conclusion that this could become another ideological battle, however, consider Snyder’s description of the situation: a structural deficit that keeps on growing, not the least because of the continuing loss of population, down over a generation from 1.8 million to 730,000 people. The city has declined by 25 percent over the past decade alone.  Snyder is careful to say he is not placing blame, and he is not forgetting the people who continue to live in the city.  They deserve adequate services, he claims, so don’t expect immediate efforts to eliminate services.

What is it then, that he promises from “reform?” A reversal of population decline, which he suggests came happen only after the budget deficit is addressed.

This is an early stage in the process of appointing an emergency financial manager, but already there are reasons for concern. In his comments to the media last week, Snyder never mentioned the nature of the region, with its long history of suburban exclusivity.  If poverty is a problem in Detroit, it did not grab his attention, especially the cumulative effects of concentrated poverty on attendant needs, for public safety and other social services. The city needs a coordinated investment strategy, in people as well as place, and that does not yet appear to be even a part of the conversation.

Today’s New York Times cites the anomaly of new businesses coming into Detroit. What it and the governor both fail to report is any strategic partnership aimed at growing the city’s tax base and lifting the economic prospects of its residents.

Some years ago Pittsburgh faced similarly daunting prospects in the aftermath of the collapse of the steel industry.  I was surprised to learn last spring that employment in the city had fallen to about half the national average. Clearly the city recovered, in part due to a vital partnership between the city’s chief medical and educational institutions, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.

In some ways the situation in Detroit parallels the nation: Republicans focus on rolling back entitlements, Democrats want to protect hard-won union concessions for municipal workers, a prime vehicle for growing a middle class. If the Detroit situation deteriorates into an argument over the issue of entitlements alone, it will get us nowhere. If, however, its spotlight in national attention forces consideration of what has worked elsewhere as part of a regional investment strategy, then we might see the city turn the corner and serve as a beacon for the many other post-industrial places burdened by structural deficits.  Don’t count on it, but don’t ignore the process in the Motor City either. It matters.