Even before the current Great Recession, many American cities that had been home to the industrial expansion that built this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s were already in decline. Not even the boom years of the 1990s could bring about the revival of fortunes for many “Rust Belt” cities, and with the deep and long-lasting downturn we face now, some American cities seem all but doomed to practical extinction. This 24/7 Wall Street post looks at “America’s Ten Dead Cities”, but it wouldn’t be too hard to extend the list out by another half-dozen. Two of the cities on the list — Galveston and New Orleans — make the list less for sagging industrial fortune and more for the repeated devastation of those two cities by natural disasters. The recent media “anniversary celebrations” of Hurricane Katrina glossed over the continuing struggle to rebuild New Orleans, while Galveston was practically wiped off the map in 2008, which was not the first time for that city either.
In this past Sunday’s Boston Globe, this article by Drake Bennett looks at a growing interest among urban planners and hard-pressed city governments in deliberately shrinking these dying cities. There are several approaches: some cities are taking advantage of the opportunity to simply reintroduce green space into densely-developed areas. In Detroit, there is a very controversial effort afoot to move residents still living in less-populated neighborhoods into other areas of the city so that the abandoned districts can be demolished. And, such being the times, some places are looking at selling off blocks of property to private developers just to get rid of the burden of maintenance. The article cites similar efforts that were undertaken in cities of the former East Germany, which saw similar drastic declines after reunification.
