Governor Embraces the wisdom of 'thinking small'
Another Voice / Upstate redevelopment
Governor embraces the wisdom of thinking small
By Robert Beauregard
With the recent launching of Gov. David A. Patersons Sustainable Neighborhood Project, the struggling cities of upstate New York can now begin to ãthink small.
For years, cities like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, as well as a host of other older, industrial cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest, have chased after growth. In doing so, they have used scarce state and local funds to subsidize high-risk and large redevelopment initiatives such as festival marketplaces, hotels and theme parks.
The results have been unimpressive. Many projects have performed poorly, with the city no better off and sometimes burdened with failed projects.
Drawing on ideas developed in Europe, a number of these shrinking cities have opted to give up the pursuit of an elusive and long-lost prosperity and instead embrace the mantra that smaller is better.
Places like Flint, Mich., and Youngstown, Ohio, have become leaders in developing programs to address the needs of shrinking cities. Rather
than hoping that catalytic redevelopment projects will spur growth citywide, they have focused on making the city more livable for the people who remain.
This means focusing on neighborhoods, addressing housing abandonment and vacant lots, and accepting the unavoidable fact that neighborhoods will be less dense. By mounting programs to demolish abandoned housing, clean up empty lots, encourage urban agriculture and create open space, the hope is that more livable neighborhoods will retain existing residents and, once the word spreads, attract new residents.
Any public (or even private) investment in these neighborhoods will be strategic, attempting to cluster where people live in order to provide more efficient public services such as trash collection. In addition, these cities have embraced land banking, whereby the government takes ownership of foreclosed properties, holding them for when the city is no longer shrinking and investors begin to return.
In his State of the State address, Paterson proposed a similar approach. He wants to concentrate state and local resources on abandoned housing and encourage affordable housing, and do so in an environmentally responsible
way that champions urban agriculture, community gardens and open space. Buffalo is where this program will be launched.
This approach to reversing the fortunes of cities like Buffalo holds out great promise. But such efforts require careful planning as well as attention to what has worked and what has not in other cities. Moreover, state and local
planners, as well as community leaders, need to ãthink small,ä aiming not for a sudden and citywide reversal of fortunes but a slow and steady enhancement of Buffalos assets its people and its neighborhoods.
Robert Beauregard is professor of urban planning at Columbia University.
