I remember watching the movie Mad Max as a kid. I don't remember much about it. But I do remember asking why everything was broken and dusty, and being told that it was a post-apocalyptic world.
The world had been destroyed, civilization had fallen, and Max was wandering around being Mad or something.
I tried to imagine cities just being gone. It seemed inconceivable. I mean, small towns, sure. The kind with tumbleweed and abandoned saloons, the kind the Scooby Gang might happen upon and find a mystery to solve, some crime the villain would have gotten away with had it not been for those pesky kids and their dog.
But the concept of a huge, metropolitan area just shutting down seemed impossible. They had reached critical mass. There was no stopping them...I thought.
But over the next few years, Detroit will be demolishing 6,000 to 10,000 of 33,000 abandoned homes.
Detroit's mayor wants to tear down 10,000 vacant houses over the next four years and, with them, evict the illegal drug and weapons operations that often move in after residents move out.
The house targeted Tuesday is among several dilapidated structures along a street dotted with vacant, weedy lots, and demolition work is expected to resume later this week. The county's project is funded through federal stimulus money.
-- Article
The City of Detroit is shrinking, evaporating. And not just a little. In the 1950s, Detroit's population had surged to 1,849,568. The current estimated population is now about 900,000 or less...less than half of its 1950 population.
The City of Detroit is looking to shut down entire portions of the city, no more water, no more electricity, no more police service...just shut it down.
In 1950, nearly two million people called Detroit home. Today, the Motor City has less than half that number. So local officials are considering shutting down whole swaths of the city and moving residents to more viable areas.
-- Article
A similar situation is happening in Flint. It grew, the factories left, it shrank, and now the city must shrink to the new reality of the town.
Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.
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.
--Article
Of course a city needs to be the size it has to be.
And maybe the best option is to turn parts of Detroit into farmland.
Shutting down parts of the cities and being honest about their new realities is something I believe will be good for the cities and their future prosperity.
But.
There's a larger issue of how we engage and use our industrial centers in this nation, and the people who live there.
In the early 1940s the United States threw its entire weight and might into World War II. The nation's industrial centers where thrown into overdrive.
The City of Muskegon practically had negative unemployment at that time, and the factories worked day and night for years. They drew people in from around the nation, around the region to provide the man and woman power to make the tools and machines we needed to fight back the Nazis and Fascists.
The population boom in Muskegon meant a massive housing shortage. Every hotel was full and it was common for hotels to rent out rooms on a rotating Shift basis, as in, you sleep there, then go to work while somebody else sleeps there.
The large old buildings from the lumber era were sectioned up into as many rental housing units as possible. People bunked in large groups in small rooms. The streets were packed.
To accommodate the traffic the city needed to expand the roads to two four lane roads going down the middle of Muskegon...one four lane road going north, the other four lane road going south. The city needed to expand train service far up north to pull people in night and day from the north.
For five years the city and community worked furiously to meet the war effort's demand. And the population boomed.
Then, in 1945...it stopped.
The city was trashed. The factories had been in full production for so long they had no time to shut down for upgrading and modernizing. Many of the historic city dwellings had been parceled up and ill maintained.
The manufacturing centers had been used.
It's no coincidence Detroit's population peaked in 1950 and declined from there. The population boom of that time was helped on by the War Effort...and then declined from its peak when the volume of manufacturing was no longer needed.
Now...I don't know if there's a solution to this boom-bust cycle for America's manufacturing centers.
But I do know these communities are communities with distinct cultures and friendships and families and histories.
And I do know that these communities are also tools for the nation, whose manufacturing based economies not only deserve to be maintained with sound national and state manufacturing policy...but it's also an issue of national defense and national prosperity.
It feels at times that these cities have been chewed up and spit out and told to get off their duffs and reinvent themselves.
But some day, God forbid, America may need to turn to its manufacturing centers again. We can only hope they aren't irreparably crippled at that point.