Is It Time for the Flint City Council to Shrink?

Does it seem odd that Flint still has nine City Council members representing nine wards given the city's dramatic population drop over the past few decades? With a population of roughly 100,000 and falling, each Flint City Council member represents about 11,000 citizens.

By contrast, San Francisco has 11 districts and a population of approximately 800,000. That means each member of the Board of Supervisors represents about 73,000 residents. Chicago has a population of 2.7 million represented by 50 aldermen. That works out to one elected official for every 54,000 citizens.

Given Flint's ongoing budget woes, this would be a drop in the bucket, but there's certainly money that could be saved by reducing the number of wards and city council members. Given the low voter turnout at many of the city's 61 precincts, it might make sense to consolidate those as well.

In case you're wondering, the 2011-2012 City of Flint budget allocated $899,922 to the city council. You can find a pdf of the budget here.

Please note that this is not some Tea Party inspired post that reflexively endorses smaller government in all circumstances. It's also not a reflection of the City Council's performance, although I'm sure that's open to debate. This idea is more a reflection of Flint's reality. The current ward system was established when Flint had a lot more people and a lot more money. Maybe it's time to make an adjustment.

Any thoughts?

Layed Off But Not Leaving

There's a sit-down strike, of sorts, taking place in Chicago, except this time the workers have already lost their jobs.

Monica Davey of The New York Times reports:

"Scores of workers laid off from a factory here that makes windows and doors have refused to leave, deciding to stage a “peaceful occupation” of the plant around the clock this weekend as they demand pay they say is owed them.

"Workers at Republic Windows and Doors, which laid off about 250 people, said they were notified Tuesday that the plant, more than four decades old, would close Friday. They said they were given insufficient notice and were never paid for vacation days or severance.

"The workers, many of whom were sitting on fold-up chairs on the factory floor Saturday afternoon, said they would not leave.

"'They’re staying because the fact is that these workers feel they have nothing to lose at this point,' said Leah Fried, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, who said groups of 30 were occupying the plant in shifts. 'Telling them they have three days before they are out on the street, penniless, is outrageous.'"

Urban transformation

Alan Ehrenhalt has a great story in The New Republic on the momentous "demographic inversion" happening in cities across America. It's a mixed blessing. And while it's not happening in Flint, it's possible the trend could spread to smaller cities.

Here's some of the story:

"In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be 'demographic inversion.' Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

"Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us....

"We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability."

Surreal Estate

Check out the "field dispatch" on the Archinect website by Wes Janz, author of the forthcoming book One Small Project, and colleague Olon Dotson as they undertake what they called the "Midwest Distress Tour."

"Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago, East St. Louis, and Cincinnati are worlds where most if not everything we know as architects is wrong, or useless. Everything we know, all architectural knowledge, becomes secondary, or disproved, or of little or no use. From almost any perspective—sociological, economic, political, and architectural—these are abnormal places that are now normal. There are problems so deep, lives so destroyed, neighborhoods so defunct, buildings so deteriorated, that one comes to understand that nothing can be done. Nothing. And this is normal."