Detroit

More on Cities and Distressed Neighborhoods

Pete Saunders — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.

Here’s a quick summary. Fulton notes in his article that there are metro areas across the country anchored by core cities that have solid and successful downtowns surrounded by quickly rising close-to-downtown neighborhoods and growing suburban areas further out. However, many have struggling neighborhoods in between the downtown and suburbs, either awaiting the boom that revitalized downtown or becoming recognized as a great alternative to suburbia. Here’s how he put it, after being reminded of this while spending time in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:

“Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where I was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.

We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.

Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.”

It’s an astute observation, and one I’ve noted as well (without any cool name for it). I think it stands out as one of the most pressing issues of urban planning, policy and governance today, yet it’s almost never framed in this way. There are loud voices in cities advocating for new housing, so housing becomes more affordable. Meanwhile, the machinery that has supported the growth of suburbia continues to build more on the periphery of metro areas. Sun Belt metros, particularly in Texas and Florida, remain locked in on the suburban model. The middle neighborhoods, unfortunately, get left out of the discussion.

Why is this? Mostly because that’s where a significant chunk of urban distress is housed in American cities. These are the areas noted for high crime, poor quality schools, abandoned or obsolete housing, limited access, lacking in amenities, few job opportunities and other ills that plague cities. Residents of these neighborhoods are often looking for the kind of substantial public investment that turned downtowns around, or the private investment that boosted neighborhoods that were once very similar to them into attractive hip hotspots.

But these neighborhoods inhabit a different space than the revitalized downtown and the still-growing suburbs. Back when the term “donut cities” did make sense, cities realized the importance of strengthening the center. In came the new stadiums, mixed-use developments, institutional expansions, and a new commercial ecosystem to support them. And it worked. As I mentioned earlier, the suburban model keeps chugging along, even in weak metro economies. Without the appeal of being a metro area’s showroom to the world, or a metro area’s next shiny new thing, those in between continue to lag.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: A residential street view of a neighborhood in South Dallas. Few people associate neighborhoods like this with Dallas, choosing to focus on its revitalizing interior or booming outskirts. But neighborhoods like this exist there, and a big part of the Metroplex’s success is hiding this view from outsiders. Source: google maps.

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Cities and Economic Pivots

Pete Saunders — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Here’s something I think about a lot. I believe in that Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue”, meaning that past events serve as a good indicator of what the future may hold. Or, as AI just told me when I asked for its interpretation of the phrase, the past provides context and background for understanding the present and planning for the future.

In the context of cities, this applies to the economic histories of numerous cities across America. Throughout history cities have been founded for economic, social or cultural reasons. They are places where people initially came together to trade, to administrate, to celebrate, to defend. Later on, cities would find new reasons for their existence, often built on the knowledge gained from the city’s earlier phases.

Consider New York City. A deepwater seaport connected to a river that reached deep into the hinterlands made Manhattan an excellent location for the fur trade 400 years ago. The early Dutch and later British settlers were able to bring furs from the interior to New York Harbor and shipped to Europe. More entrepreneurs sought other goods to sell across the ocean. A link to European markets was established, and that enabled other commercial ventures to flourish. That created opportunities for banking, financing and investing to grow.

Soon, New York City and business became synonymous. Very early on, it became not just the primary physical point of entry into America, but the economic entry as well, for foreign investors interested in making money, and immigrants looking for employment. That made it easy to become a city that would be skilled in media and publishing, interpreting and explaining American events to a worldwide audience. Elite universities both within and just beyond New York City’s limits would reinforce this, making sure a steady stream of smart and ambitious people were always attracted to it. Sure, it sounds seamless, but it wasn’t. There were aspects of this that overlapped, but there were aspects that had gaps, too. Still, in retrospect New York’s economy grew something like this.

However, “what’s past is prologue” is true, only up to a point. Sometimes cities serve an economic function well, until that economic function isn’t needed anymore. When this happens, cities are often sent adrift as they ponder the next economic driver.

This is easy to think about when looking at river cities that supported freight shipping activities until railroads made barge traffic irrelevant, or the manufacturing centers of the Midwest that couldn’t compete with global low-cost labor. Yet this is also true of Southern cities that served the 19^th century plantation economy, either through slave importation (Charleston, Savannah) or the shipping of products coming from plantations (New Orleans, Memphis). In all cases, one economic reason for being ran its course, but another one had yet to be identified.

As a Midwest native who’s seen the region’s economic diminution up close, I wonder about how those opportunities to reset happen.

When are new ideas or opportunities presented? How did city leaders, business elites, major institutions react to a possible reset? The answers to these questions can tell you a lot about how today’s thriving urban areas got where they are, and others are still lagging.

Consider the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically Silicon Valley. From an historical perspective, it’s pretty well understood that San Francisco rose to prominence as the financial capital of the West, spurred on by rapid growth due to the California gold rush in the 1850s. Across the bay, Oakland’s position as a deepwater port and the terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad allowed it to become an industrial and manufacturing center. To the south, however, the areas that would become Silicon Valley (San Mateo and Santa Clara counties) were probably best known as “the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world up through the 1960s”.

That changed shortly thereafter, as “past as prologue” took over in the Bay Area. The region became a military research and technology hub, driven by the U.S. Navy, beginning in the early parts of the 20^th century. Stanford University’s role in nurturing faculty and graduates to start their own businesses led to the creation of the Stanford Research Park in 1951. Numerous tech businesses got their start there, and by the 1980s a global technology center was born.

Silicon Valley, however, wasn’t the only region that had a shot at this kind of reset. It could’ve been Detroit.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: detroithistorical.org.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Rust Belt Expatriates And The Diaspora

Pete Saunders — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

So the Super Bowl is set, and the Detroit Lions are not in it.

It was tough watching my Detroit Lions go down two weekends ago to the Washington Commanders in the NFC divisional round of the playoffs. However, the Lions, historically one of the National Football League’s sad-sack teams, had a spectacular season. The team had an explosive, high-scoring and entertaining offense, and could make a case for being the nation’s most popular team during the 2024 season.

That kind of popularity isn’t something that Detroiters are accustomed to, but it’s something that played out over the course of this season, and last season as well. The Lions’ success meant fans were willing to pack visiting stadiums across the country. The picture above shows Lions fans cheering their team in Glendale, AZ, but there were similar takeovers at games in Houston and San Francisco as well.

I noticed this, and it got me thinking. Yes, there are plenty of Detroiters who love traveling to follow their winning team. For the first time in a generation, the Lions are playing well enough for their fans to follow them. But there are plenty of former Detroiters in the country who moved away and proudly retained their fan cards. What’s more, there are children of former Detroiters who inherited their fandom from their parents, and religiously follow them today.

Take my brother, 14 years younger than me. He was barely two years old when our family moved from Detroit. Since then my brother’s lived in central Indiana, Chicago and New York City over the next 40+ years. He’s a New Yorker now, having been in Brooklyn for 17 years. He married a Brooklyn native. They have a child together. But my brother’s a die-hard Detroit sports fan.

My point is, Detroit ex-pats and the broader Detroit diaspora is out there. There’s a Detroit diaspora because there are so many Detroiters who left for other places. In 1970, Detroit’s six-county metro area had 4.4 million people. Fifty years later in 2020, Detroit’s six-county metro area had… 4.4 million people. There were plenty of people who were born, lived and died there, and people who migrated there as well. Yet the only way that an entire metro area can go 50 years with virtually no change in population, without a substantial decrease in births or increase in deaths, or both, is for there to be a huge net loss in migration.

Members of the Detroit diaspora can be found anywhere.

This leads to an interesting proposition for Rust Belt cities like Detroit. From an economic and social standpoint, the narrative around the Motor City is perhaps better than at any other time in my (long) lifetime. And as the narrative about the city continues to improve, it’s conceivable that there’s a portion of the diaspora that might be willing to return. If they did, they could figure prominently in Detroit’s long-term revitalization prospects. The same can be said for Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and other Rust Belt cities.

Sound crazy? It’s not.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Detroit Lions football fans at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ, September 22, 2024, via facebook.com

I'm Not an Urbanist. I'm an Urban Sociologist.

Pete Saunders — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

I’ve written a lot about how growing up in Detroit was instrumental in my desire to improve and revitalize cities. Watching a city being hollowed out and disgraced in the ‘70s and ‘80s can have that impact. Yet, ever since I can remember I’ve always felt slightly out of step with the people most interested in improving cities. I think I now understand why.

I’m not an urbanist. I’m an urban sociologist. I believe cities are first and foremost social creations, not economic ones, and I ascribe city changes, positive and negative, to the social infrastructure that establishes the city itself. I think this differentiates me from the urbanist contingent.

Here’s how I arrived at this.

As a teen, I thought Detroit’s problem was violent crime and the aggressive police response. It was, and still is, a major factor. However, I began to view crime as something that wasn’t the cause of the city’s decline, but a symptom. Intuitively I realized that aggressively attacking crime, treating the symptom, might lead to a better city, but it was no guarantee.

Like conventional wisdom at the time, I thought Detroit was being failed by an auto industry that was falling behind foreign automakers. The city needed a rejuvenated auto industry that could once again excel and dominate the auto market, at a minimum, or perhaps a new, more diversified economy that would deemphasize auto dominance. But that didn’t happen either.

I also saw Detroit as a city that lacked visual appeal. People were leaving, in my mind, because it wasn’t a beautiful city. The city was becoming disposable. I thought a city that became more attractive would bring more people; an incredible skyline, great open spaces, colorful neighborhoods would naturally attract newcomers. But when the city did things to improve the look of commercial districts, it hardly moved the needle.

I saw Detroit as a city that needed the right governmental policies to incentivize revitalization. However, it’s clear that the federal government and all 50 states were incentivizing the suburban explosion through highway extensions, infrastructure improvements, and financing policies that favored homeownership. It was working for those who could afford it, and that wasn’t changing, either.

But I’ve come to the realization that what fueled Detroit’s decline was none of those things, at least singly or directly. Crime? New York City’s crime began falling under the Koch and Dinkins administrations, before Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order campaign brought him into office. Economy? It took quite a while, but eventually the Big Three automakers were able to close the quality gaps that plagued them for decades. Unfortunately, the Big Three still ceded their mid-century dominance over foreign automakers as the auto-buying public had widely expanded options. Automation played a big role in closing the quality gap, but came at the expense of tens of thousands of auto worker jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: L Walck, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Envisioning Rust Belt Success

Pete Saunders — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:28:38 -0400

My Defining Rust Belt Urbanism piece three weeks ago, in which I discuss the themes of what would drive Midwest urban rebirth, prompted a great question. Bloomberg Opinion columnist, CSY subscriber and avowed Sun Belt enthusiast asked me on X (formerly Twitter) – what does Rust Belt success look like?

It’s a good question, because there are lots of people who don’t think there is much of a path to success for the urban centers of the nation’s heartland. Most of today’s urbanists seem to believe the templates have been set already. One is to get with the program forged by the coastal cities, leaning into a winning economic sector you’re uniquely suited for, or continue to fall behind. Another other option is to get with the program touted by Sun Belt cities. Market lifestyle, climate and affordability, and watch the people roll in.

In reality, urban rebound is much more complex than either of those examples would imply. Yet the fact remains that the path to success has to be tailored to the place. Before going into the ways that Rust Belt cities can turn around, let’s dig a little deeper into how coastal and Sun Belt metros reversed their fortunes and made economic leaps. (A parenthetic comment: I’m using the term “Rust Belt” here, but really writing about the largest metros within the twelve-state region most people generally call the Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. I often use the terms interchangeably.)

The Coastal Cities Template

There’s one key difference between coastal cities and Rust Belt cities that is rarely recognized. Through the middle of the 20^th century, coastal cities indeed had strong manufacturing economies cities like those in the Rust Belt. Yet they also grew and developed with stronger corporate and service economies. Using the three-sector model of economic activity, from their beginning coastal cities were able to develop a blend of primary (resource extraction), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (sales, transport and distribution) economic sectors. That allowed coastal cities to build on their assets from tertiary economic output (universities, hospitals, financial services, media and publishing) that formed the foundation of the knowledge or creative class economy that drives them today. With a weaker tertiary sector that didn’t produce quite the same output as that of the coastal cities (and probably an implicit acknowledgement made by people throughout the country that the coastal outputs were better than those in the middle of the country), Rust Belt cities lagged.

Coastal cities were then ready for a period in which the global economy leaned in their favor. That economic shift allowed them to stabilize local economies more quickly. It allowed them to focus more on quality-of-life improvements that led to reduced crime, improved schools and other public services. Coastal cities were ready to appeal to a demographic that was increasingly demanding what they offered.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Chart:courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Big Beats Small, New Beats Old

Pete Saunders — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

I came across a couple of interesting pieces in the last week that had me thinking about the past, present and future of American cities again. After reading them, I felt somewhat upbeat and validated, but also concerned.

The first piece was a research paper by the Brookings Institution's William H. Frey. Frey, a senior fellow for the Brookings Metro research program, conducted an analysis of U.S. Census American Community Survey population estimates for metro areas between 2020 and 2023. He found that large metro areas (those with more than one million residents) have seen a rebound since the peak Covid pandemic period in 2020-21.

According to Frey:

“(t)his includes reduced out-migration and smaller population losses in major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as shifts from sharp losses to gains in urban core areas such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C. While natural increase (the excess of births minus deaths) has improved almost everywhere, changing domestic migration patterns and especially a rise in international migration served to benefit population change in large metropolitan areas and their urban core counties.”

That’s great news for people who may have thought the so-called "urban doom loop" was an existential threat to American cities. I’d like to be on record as saying the urban doom loop phenomenon was overblown, because cities had adaptive and experiential advantages that would always make them attractive. Adaptive, in the sense that our largest and oldest cities have generally gone through multiple phases of development in their histories. Experiential, in the sense that cities increasingly have the economic and social infrastructure that appeals to today’s global movers and shakers. Good news for the nation’s biggest metro areas.

Unfortunately, the news is not so good as the places get smaller. Frey’s analysis includes a review of annual growth rates for small (with between 50,000 and one million residents) as well as non-metro areas (fewer than 50,000 residents) between 2010-11 and 2022-23. Smaller metro areas saw a boost in growth rates beginning in 2019-20, at the expense of the largest metros. That boost leveled off during the 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 periods, as larger metros rebounded. Non-metro areas, places with fewer than 50,000 residents, followed a similar trajectory as did smaller metros. However, overall they did not fare as well, because they were already witnessing population loss or minimal growth at the start of the analysis period.

Another trend was noted in the analysis as well. Generally, larger metros rely heavily on immigration and natural increase for population growth, and far less on domestic in-migration. Smaller metros and non-metro areas rely heavily on domestic in-migration for population growth, and far less on immigration or natural increase. That gap widens as places get smaller. The trend was accelerated during the peak pandemic years but appears to be returning to previous levels. But, in a nation with falling birth rates and a increasing reliance on international immigration to fuel economic as well as population growth, what does this means for smaller metros and even smaller non-metro places?

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard. (now at Substack)

Photo: Postcard depiction of Cairo, Illinois, circa 1940.

Rethinking the Housing Affordability Crisis, Part 3

Pete Saunders — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Back in 2018, I attended and participated in an event called “Tools Toward Market Restoration”, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The event was held in Detroit. At the event I got a chance to meet Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, a fantastic book about government-sponsored segregation in America. The book garnered quite a bit of attention at the time for reintroducing the phrase “redlining” to the public, but truly explored all of the segregation tactics (racial covenants, public housing policy, urban renewal, Interstate highway development, white flight, blockbusting, and mob violence, among others) utilized in this country. It’s a wonderful book that blows up the myth of any distinction between de jure and de facto segregation – each type feeds the other.

Following Rothstein’s presentation I remember asking him if he thought cities that were deeply segregated like Detroit had suffered most acutely from segregationist policies and actions. When he said no, the nation’s been impacted equally, I disagreed. My thinking was that certainly places that were on the front line of divisive policies, such as mid-century manufacturing centers like Detroit, bore the brunt. Intuitively, I reasoned that segregation was an exercise in property depreciation for some, but property appreciation for others.

Turns out that we were both right. Cities like Detroit did suffer far more from deep segregation as the nationwide decline in manufacturing took hold in the 1970’s and beyond. But all cities suffered because all levels of government, the real estate industry and homebuyers and renters all employed the same practices to maximize value. And all of us are paying for it as a result.

In the last entry into this series, I wrote about Yonah Freemark’s study of upzoning's impact on Chicago property values from a few years ago. He found that the act of upzoning and any resulting new housing construction could produce a short-term boost in property values, rather than a decline, because property owners see an opportunity to recoup their investment. There’s even a name for it – housing exuberance.

But if we want to place blame on NIMBYism (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) for today’s affordable housing crisis, I suggest starting with studying the OG of NIMBYism causes, Black/White segregation in American cities.

How NIMBYism became learned behavior

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Andre Perry has done exactly that. Perry has written extensively about the devaluation of homes in majority Black neighborhoods across the country. In a study he conducted in 2018, Perry found that home values in neighborhoods with a Black population of 50 percent or more were valued at 50 percent less than homes with few or no Black residents. When adjusted for homes of similar quality and amenities, Perry found that homes are still worth 23 percent less in majority Black neighborhoods, or about $48,000 per home on average, when compared to neighborhoods with few or no Black residents.

When Perry’s study was published, he estimated that the cumulative loss of wealth to Black homeowners was about $156 billion. Perry noted that the study found “a positive and statistically significant correlation between the devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods and upward mobility of Black children in metropolitan areas with majority Black neighborhoods.”

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Photo: courtesy Corner Side Yard Blog

I Used to Believe Planning was R&D for City-Building

Pete Saunders — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:28:58 -0500

Frequent readers here may have seen me write about my experience growing up in 1970s Detroit. I’ve often said that seeking ways to improve the city and not abandon it, is what propelled me into a career in urban planning. I wanted to be a change agent for cities. Today, more than thirty years into my career, I’m proud of the stature cities have gained over that time; I’m proud of my contribution to it. However, I feel as if cities have risen in prominence in spite of the efforts of planners, not because of them.

When I finished grad school in 1990, there were two things I generally believed about urban planning and its role in saving cities. First, I believed that urban planning was the primary professional vehicle for creating change in cities, at least the change I was looking for. Planners were thoughtful, introspective advisers to elected officials who devised policies to make cities better places. Planners were the ones who knew the inner workings of cities and sought to maximize their unique strengths to make them stronger and more equitable places.

Second, I believed that the practice of true urban planning policy innovation and development happened in the private sector. I believed there was a symbiotic relationship between the private and public sector by which private planning consultants would independently develop ideas, and later get hired by local governments to implement the ideas as new urban planning policies. I viewed public sector planners as limited in their ability to push innovative policies forward because planners had a broad time horizon to consider (comprehensive plans look 20-25 years into the future!). Elected officials and the voting public have much shorter time horizons – the election cycle or just day-to-day living – and couldn’t always be concerned with broader, expansive policies that didn’t promise immediate impacts.

I crafted my career plan with those principles in mind. I would start my career in local government so I could learn the ins and outs of planning policymaking (I started at the City of Chicago). I’d eventually transition into the private sector and pursue a “best practices” approach to what I’d learned at the local level (I stopped at a handful of private consulting firms, most prominently Camiros, Ltd.). Then I’d ultimately start my own consulting practice and promote my own brand of effective planning policymaking. In other words, I viewed urban planning as the research and development arm of city-building.

Is that a valid view of the role of urban planning today? If not, should it be? Or has urban planning simply become the public interface of private actors in city-building?

A look at recent trends in urbanism might give us some clues.

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Photo: A scene from the game Cities: VR. Source: vrscout.com