Downsizing Flint … on purpose

Abandoned building in Flint - Colors by Derek Farr ( DetroitDerek)
Abandoned building in Flint - Colors by Derek Farr ( DetroitDerek)

The New York Times has a great report titled An Effort to Save Flint by Shrinking It that begins:

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

With 75 neighborhoods over 34 square miles and the immense challenge of trying to maintain infrastructure and deliver services over too large an area to too few people, it's clear that Flint - and other places in Michigan - will need to think deeply and creatively about our use of space.

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This entry was written by farlane and posted on April 28, 2009 at 8:51 am and filed under Articles, Community, Dig Michigan, Flint, Government, Homes & Real Estate, Michigan, Real Estate & Development, The Michigan Pages, The Michigan Pages: Build Michigan!. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Comment

  1. farlane
    Posted April 29, 2009 at 7:18 am | Permalink

    There is a discussion about this on Exposure.Detroit that you may want to join in on. I posted this over there:

    I was talking with someone yesterday about this being a model for Detroit and in some ways, the whole state.

    In Michigan we have the very difficult challenge of providing a level of services that were developed at a time when our economy was a lot bigger. As a school board member, I can see the equivalent of urban blight creeping across our public services as we continue to try and do the same job without the same money.

    I would love to see a big block of stimulus money go to "downsizing grants." With $50,000,000 you could do 1,000 grants of $50,000 to nonprofits, governmental agencies and businesses to take a fresh look at all kinds of vital things that we do and figure out how to do them with the resources and users that we have now instead of what we had when we thought them up.

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