Shrinking Cities...

We live in one. In 2007, Pittsburgh had the steepest population decline outside of cities hit by Hurricane Katrina. Ouch.

Pittsburgh's population peaked in the 1950's, hitting nearly 700,000. Today, it is around 300,000.

The list of shrinking cities is not surprising...Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, Youngstown. Former industrial powerhouses that lost their livelihoods to cheaper labor markets over seas.

Pittsburgh, however, is often lauded as a shrinking city that doesn't let its shrinking status get us down. Business Week called it one of the best places to ride out a recession. We were named at the top of the list for Best Cities by Rand McNally in 2007. However, problems that plague shrinking cities are still on the forefront of our agenda, especially now that the mayoral race is heating up. Public services such as schools, police and fire have trouble adjusting when the geographic limits remain the same, but the population has changed considerably. The school system, in particular has been fighting this for a long time.

In addition, when cities shrink, certain neighborhoods tend to become blighted. Houses are abandoned, empty lots get overgrown and filled with trash. If you travel through Homewood or the Hill District you see a lot of this. I ran across this interesting article in the New York Times today about how Flint, Michigan proposes to tackle this problem...by essentially razing whole neighborhoods and returning them to their natural state.
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At first, I thought this was an awesome idea. But there are a couple of reasons why it may not work well here. First, people do still inhabit these blighted neighborhoods. And because of the blight, their property isn't worth so much. So even if you buy it from them to get them to relocate, they will have trouble finding anything they can afford in one of the still densely populated neighborhoods. Second, is it a good idea to have large woodsy areas in the city? Would these areas become more attractive to vagrants and criminals, and would they be difficult to patrol? And third, what are the environmental ramifications for letting nature take over? Alan Weisman explores this issue in his book The World Without Us.

The difference between Pittsburgh and Flint is that we may be shrinking, but we still have a lot of appeal. Pittsburgh is an affordable place to purchase a home, we have hospitals, museums, universities and an international airport. We are close enough to the beach to vacation there and close enough to New York and DC for business people to easily travel there. It may be premature to seed over our blighted neighborhoods....we may need them for the next population boom.