Shrinking Cities
A lawsuit, allowed to proceed by a Wayne County judge, reveals some of the difficulties of blight removal.
Detroit Free Press
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan made a splash this week by pronouncing a vision to create a Detroit that is 'one city for all of us.'
Detroit Free Press
Not only are suburbs growing, many of the larger, older cities that had reversed decades of population decline, are now losing population, again. The biggest losers: counties with the greatest population densities.
Governing
In a piece for CityLab, Richey Pipparinen argues that trigger-happy city officials need to slow down their push to demolish homes.
CityLab
The city of Akron has lost 93,000 residents since 1960, so it has room to grow. Now it has a draft housing plan that uses a tax abatement program modeled on examples in Cleveland and Cuyahoga Falls.
Akron Beacon Journal
Jason Hackworth argues that demolition has come to be seen as a good, in and of itself, in rust belt cities like Detroit; giving rise to policies that are wrong-headed and dangerous.
London School of Economics and Political Science - American Politics and Policy Blog
Geographers publish results of a two-year study on declining cities around the country in a new book, "Shrinking Cities: Understanding Urban Decline in the United States."
Next City
Cleveland is a thought leader in bulldozing houses, according to a recent op-ed on Cleveland.com, but it's time to imagine a new paradigm.
Cleveland.com
WBUR's Here & Now ventures outside the Quicken Loans Arena to see a distressed part of the city and region, similar to parts of Detroit and Flint. Residents want abandoned homes demolished. Take the audio driving tour of East Cleveland.
Here & Now
In May, the documentary film "Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City" was made available in full on YouTube.
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Erie, Pennsylvania and Canton, Ohio have faced the challenges of shrinking populations and fewer job prospects, but new comprehensive plans in each city may provide a pathway to resurgence
The Canton Repository
Why are folks fleeing from the city and the state in record numbers? Is domestic migration to blame for the Chicago region's population loss last year of over 6,000 and the state's loss of over 22,000 people?
Chicago Tribune
Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne and leading New Urbanist planner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk squared off in a debate about the future of Baltimore.
ASLA The Dirt
It's almost like the Great Recession and the Great Urban Renaissance never happened, as Americans are moving to the suburbs and the Sunbelt than to the nation's urban areas.
Jed Kolko
By using the data provided by millions of Twitter users, two researchers discovered surprising insights into public sentiment in shrinking cities.
At Lincoln House
The strategy of Iowa's Department of Transportation chief, Paul Trombino III, for maintaining the state's "25,000 bridges, 114,000 miles of roadway, and more than 4,000 miles of rail" is not to do so. In a word, "shrinkage" is part of the solution.
KCRG-TV9
A new book by Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss examines the glory years of Detroit.
Detroit Free Press
Germany has reformed building codes in a marshaling of political will known as the "Culture of Welcome" for an expected one million refugees. German cities, many of them shrinking for decades, see the refugees as an opportunity and a responsibility.
The Globe and Mail
According to analysts like Aaron Renn, the exodus of educated Millennials from what some perceive to be less-glamorous cities shouldn't signal impending doom. For one thing, brain drain might not be happening at all.
Next City
Earning negative press as a put-America-back-to-work campaign stop, the Ohio city also suffered from reported connections to crime. Now private developers are working alongside Youngstown State to bring people back.
New York Times
