Demolition Funding for Flint and Other Michigan Cities

Much needed funding is headed to Flint and four other Michigan cities to demolish abandoned property.

"Today's announcement that Michigan will receive $100 million in federal funds to clean up blight in communities across the state is welcomed news," said Congressman Dan Kildee (D-Flint). "Freeing up federal money to revitalize and invest in cities, including both Flint and Saginaw in my congressional district, will strengthen neighborhoods and unlock greater opportunity for all homeowners. Since being sworn into Congress, one of my top priorities has been to secure this money to ensure cities and towns have the resources necessary to remove and repurpose abandoned homes. I'm pleased that the partnership between my office, the State of Michigan and the Treasury Department has resulted in millions of dollars in much-needed funds."

Kildee Seeks Funds for Demolitions

 

U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, who was instrumental in creating land banks in Michigan, has introduced legislation that would free up $1 billion in federal funds to demolish abandoned property in Michigan and several other states. Todd Spangler of The Detroit Free Press reports:

Kildee's legislation, which he plans to introduce today, would give the 18 states and Washington, D.C., that were promised funding under a foreclosure mitigation program the ability to spend up to 25% of that money on demolitions. Under the original interpretation of the program, which dates to 2010, the $7.6 billion in funding could not be used for razing buildings.

The legislation, which Kildee is sponsoring along with Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Dayton, Ohio, wouldn't change any of the existing allocations or spend more, it would only give states the flexibility to move up to 25% of their total awards into demolitions if they chose. The original program was intended to target programs that helped homeowners pay back taxes, make mortgage payments, or otherwise avoid foreclosures.

Kildee and his approach to "shrinking cities" like Flint and Detroit is profiled extensively in Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young. The book is forthcoming from the University of California Press in June.

Dan Kildee Wins

A Kildee will still be representing the Flint area in Congress. This time it's Dan instead of Dale.

The Era of Managed Decline

Noreen Malone has a cover story in a recent edition of New York magazine about coming of age in post-hope America. It's an interesting look at what it's like to be young in today's economy, but I couldn't help thinking a lot of the concepts also applied to Flint in an era of shrinking cities. Malone writes:

Another phrase I now can’t get out of my head is “managed decline.” It’s been batted around in the context of Europe; George Soros splashily said it about the U.S. dollar a few years ago; and Ken Layne, the Wonkette Cassandra, used it when we spoke. It also strikes me as a fairly good way of describing the process of getting older. That’s what we’re doing when we decide that we can be okay with having more unpredictable careers and more modest lifestyles, if that’s what’s in store: Even as we hold out hope that something will reverse the trajectory, we are managing our decline, we are making do.

It's Time to Think Small

An anonymous reader responds to the post on nature returning to Buick City:

While we debate the future of this once bustling city, time marches on and deterioration sets in. It will be difficult to create much of anything positive in the midst of so many abandoned and dangerous inner-city properties. Word is out that anything goes in Flint; the police are obviously out numbered and out gunned. I would sure hate to be the last law abiding citizen to leave town.

I would never, ever, ever, allow any of my children/grandchildren to live anywhere close to this kind of chaos, nor would most of this blog's readers. I have no doubt there will be small success stories, but by and large, businesses aren't looking for an abandoned factory in an abandoned crime riddled city, to relocate their workforce to. My thought is; what isn't being regularly used today will rather quickly fall down or burn, speeding the complete absorption of these properties into a somewhat natural condition. The result will be less costly to clean up and maintain by those few who remain and have Flint based livelihoods that are worth the effort. At some point down the road, there will be a reason to build up the city again, with new ideas, new structures and fewer thugs.

For now, Flint citizens should think small. The name of Flint swells my heart with longing for a city that once was, but we should avoid this sentimentality, it doesn't help us do the right thing today.

How to Shrink a City

Neither of these examples come from cities losing population, but they do give concrete examples — literally, in the case of Portland — of the steps you can take to make a city more livable by removing some of the things people typically associate with thriving urban areas. Portland and NYC are doing this by choice. Cities like Flint and Detroit need to do it out of necessity.

Giving Up on the Borderlands?

The city of Flint hasn't officially endorsed the shrinking city concept, but budget woes may help make it a reality.

Ron Fonger of The Flint Journal reports:

The city says it can't afford to help pay for fixing one of the most deteriorated sections of Carpenter Road, Flint's northernmost border, leaving the Genesee County Road Commission saddled with the full bill for the local share of the job.

Dan Kildee: Addenda, Extras and Outtakes

There's never enough space to use all the material you gather on a story, and my profile of Dan Kildee in Slate was no different. If you enjoyed reading about the pied piper of the shrinking city movement, here is some additional info about Kildee, Jane Avenue, H.U.D., and unofficial White House tours, along with some of the photos I took along the way.

Addendum: Jane Avenue Memories

"I have a lot of memories of Jane Avenue," Kildee writes in an email. "That street, to me, was my grandmother. She lived there for 60 years, from 1934 until she died in 1994. Even then, many of the families on the street had been there for decades. That neighborhood in my early years seemed like a collection of families more than a typical neighborhood. The family names were familiar across generations — the Kildees, the Wests, the Lotts, the Beauchamps, the Griffins. Jane Avenue and the whole 'old east side' was a neighborhood in the way we don't see anymore. It reached across generations.

"Going to my grandmother's house was like going to the family museum — it actually felt like we were going back in time. Of course, inside her house was this treasure of family pictures and other reminders of our family history — like her furniture which never changed throughout my whole life. But even the neighborhood was a reminder of past decades. The neighbors knew me even though I didn't know them — I guess the grandmothers kept one another informed. When I started running for office and would campaign in that area — even though I moved to the west side at age four — I had to plan for long conversations on the porches of east-siders, and they told me stories of my family. Of course many of those stories were the ones I never heard at home or at Grandma's house. I learned a lot about my grandfather, who died before I was born.

"For me the saddest part of being there now is not so much that the houses have deteriorated or are gone. I miss that connection to my own past."

Addendum: Federal Influence

Kildee has found a receptive audience at the federal level as well. After he helped draft a transition memo for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Kildee was offered a H.U.D. job shortly after he got Community Progress up and running. He turned it down. As a politician who won a school board seat when he was 18 and had been in public office ever since, he welcomed his new-found freedom.

“It was pretty clear to me that I’d quickly gotten used to being able to speak my own mind and follow my own policy instincts at Community Progress,” he says. “It would have been hard for me to do that in a relatively senior position at H.U.D.”

You don’t have to spend much time with Kildee for him to illustrate this point. He calls a local state senator who opposes his views a “moron” and describes Van Jones’ speech at the Michigan Summit as “sort of interesting but kind of like something you’d hear in eighth grade.” Despite the unenthusiastic review, Kildee still found time to snap a photo of Jones with his smartphone and post it on his Facebook page.

Not that Kildee’s outspokenness is hurting his access. He mentions that Derek Douglas, the special assistant to the president for urban affairs, summoned him to the White House in May to talk shop for a couple hours.

“That’s like going to Carnegie Hall for me,” Kildee says. “I lived my whole life basically doing recitals, and now I have a chance to be in a place where really important policy is being made.”

After the session, Kildee realized he wasn’t going to be escorted out of the building. He had a security badge, so he decided to go on a random 20-minute self-guided tour. “I’m just this kid from Flint but here I am at the White House,” he says. “I just walked around like I knew where I was going.”


Addendum: Working with Other States

Local and state governments are embracing Kildee’s approach. He assisted the Ohio legislature on a land bank bill that recently passed with bi-partisan support. Similar legislation is expected to be approved in New York with Kildee’s help. Pennsylvania State Rep. John Taylor, a Philadelphia Republican, is currently sheparding a land bank bill through the state legislature after working closely with Community Progress.

“You can’t understand land banks without talking to Kildee,” says Christine Goldbeck, executive director of the Pennsylvania House Urban Affairs Committee. “He paved the way for Pennsylvania and other states to implement these laws.”

Addendum: A Certain Irony

There’s a certain irony in the notion that a former high school hockey player from Flint — a factory town that practically invented the concept of planned obsolescence and grew prosperous on General Motors’ rapacious lust for an ever-expanding market share — might successfully export the notion that cities can save themselves by repurposing land and accepting negative growth.


Addendum: Feuding with Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh even took notice, lambasting the shrinking city concept for several minutes of air time last summer. “I'm seeing things happen in this country that I thought I would never, ever see,” Limbaugh declared. “These are the kind of things that happen in totalitarian regimes.” Kildee was delighted.

“Rush went crazy for a few days, but it was the best thing to every happen to me because a couple million people heard it,” says Kildee, who admits he soon grew weary of the mocking calls to his home and office from Limbaugh’s “dittoheads.”