US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive:
The government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.
Is this plan really endorsed by the Obama Administration? I suspect that some limits on urban size are necessary as tax revenues continue to drop and city services remain constant.
It costs a lot of money to run the buses, garbage collection, to maintain the roads. The flight of Baltimore’s population seen in generations past left the city with aging infrastructure to maintain despite fewer people who use – and pay – for it. Baltimore has difficulty enticing businesses and residents into the city due to markedly higher taxes (as well as a few intangibles like traffic and schools), whereas the alternative for these entities is usually a newer facility in the comparatively much cheaper counties, resulting in everyone’s favorite: urban sprawl. Should Baltimore simply be done with its large swaths of abandoned property at this point, and get rid of them altogether? Alternatively, the city could (and has in the past) offer deep tax breaks for redevelopment, which in the short term do not improve the financial picture.
But this particular plan–shrinking the city–may be penalizing the wrong player. As a matter of policy, we should be encouraging dense population centers.
[Late Update: The alternative I see is a tax policy that reverses the incentive: higher taxes in surrounding counties than in the city. Public policy is a tool for achieving socially beneficial outcomes. Breathing new life into our struggling urban centers — through taxes, high speed rail, or more football stadiums — is part of this process.]