An Interview with Frank Popper about Shrinking Cities, Buffalo Commons, and the Future of Flint

Deborah and Frank Popper

I originally published this interview on April 14, 2010, but the concepts it explores are just as relevant today, especially if you're wondering what  shrinking cities like Flint have in common with remote grazing land in Colorado.

Frank J. Popper is just the person to answer that question. The land-use expert from Chicago is a professor at Rutger’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and teaches regularly in the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton. In 1987 he published an article with his wife, Deborah Popper, a geographer at City University of New York and Princeton University, advocating the creation of what they called the Buffalo Commons. They argued that using the drier portions of the Great Plains for farming and ranching was unsustainable, leading to environmental damage and a dwindling population. Instead, they suggested returning 139,000 square miles of the Great Plains to native prairie where the buffalo could, once again, roam. In short, they wanted to turn parts of ten western states into a vast nature preserve.

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times called it “the boldest idea in America today…the biggest step to redefine America since the Alaska purchase.” The locals in states like Kansas, Montana and Nebraska were less enthused.

In an interview with Flint Expatriates, Popper discusses death threats, the links between deindustrialization and agricultural decline, the fate of shrinking cities, and the heartless genius of capitalism.

What was the response to the Buffalo Commons idea?

It was extremely negative in the region. Everyone else from outside the region thought it was a great idea. There was a period in the early nineties when we were speaking in the plains five times a year and sooner or later it would emerge that they had hired private detectives to protect us. We had death threats at one meeting that eventually had to be cancelled. If your county is suggested as part of the Buffalo Commons, you’re not going to like it very much.

Have conditions in the Great Plains changed over the years?

The basic conditions that we described in 1987 are either still there or have intensified. But late last year we picked up our first serious editorial endorsement. Two McClatchy papers in Kansas City and Wichita suggested that two counties in western Kansas should become the core of Buffalo Commons National Park, and that elicited a lot of letters from those two counties. But I think over time it will work and we will live to see it.

The emerging ideas about how to deal with shrinking cities like Flint echo a lot of your recommendations from the eighties about how to approach the Great Plains. What’s the connection?

It’s very clear that the industrial decline as it’s still unfolding is almost exactly parallel to the earlier rural decline in the United States. In rural areas, agriculture reached a high point in the late 19th century, and then it started going through a kind of slow motion collapse that the country largely didn’t realize until the dust bowl of the depression. In the 20th century, the industrial sector likewise hits its high point and then started shedding people, only it happened in more urban places like Detroit. The U.S. had these two great cycles play out. And there is the beginning of an argument that the dotcom bust, the mortgage foreclosure crisis and the credit crunch that has now hit a number of sunbelt cities really hard indicates that the information age is beginning to shed people, too. And it’s a largely suburban phenomena so you have a trifecta of decline — rural agricultural, urban industrial, and suburban information age.

Why are cities and regions so reluctant to accept that they are getting smaller?

It’s part of American culture to believe were number one, we grow every year etc., etc. So all of this — whether its Buffalo Commons or shrinking cities — feels very un-American. A lot of people ended up describing Buffalo Commons as manifest destiny in reverse, which kind of makes sense. Shrinking cities could be described as unbuilding cities that all those late 19th-centrury, early 20th-century industrialists and laborers sought to build up. And that hurts for their descendants down the line. It also comes with another sort of sting. Good blue-collar jobs that promised upward mobility have just disappeared.

A population density map of the United States. Click to enlarge

How does America’s approach shrinking cities compare to the rest of the world?

I think the American way is to do nothing until it’s too late, then throw everything at it and improvise and hope everything works. And somehow, insofar as the country’s still here, it has worked. But the European or the Japanese way would involve much more thought, much more foresight, much more central planning, and much less improvising. They would implement a more, shall we say, sustained effort. The American way is different. Europeans have wondered for years and years why cities like Detroit or Cleveland are left to rot on the vine. There’s a lot of this French hauteur when they ask “How’d you let this happen?”

Do shrinking cities have any advantages over agricultural regions as they face declining populations?

The urban areas have this huge advantage over all these larger American regions that are going through this. They have actual governments with real jurisdiction. Corrupt as Detroit or Philadelphia or Camden may be, they have actual governments that are supposed to be in charge of them. Who’s in charge of western Kansas? Who’s in charge of the Great Plains? Who is in charge of the lower Mississippi Delta or central Appalachia? All they’ve got are these distant federal agencies whose past performance is not exactly encouraging.

Why wasn’t there a greater outcry as the agricultural economy and the industrial economy collapsed?

One reason for the rest of the country not to care is that there’s no shortage of the consumer goods that these places once produced. All this decline of agriculture doesn’t mean we’re running out of food. We’ve got food coming out of our ears. Likewise, Flint has suffered through all this, but it’s not like it’s hard to buy a car in this country. It’s not as if Flint can behave like a child and say “I’m going to hold my nose and stop you from getting cars until you do the right thing.” Flint died and you can get zero A.P.R. financing. Western Kansas is on its last legs and, gee, cereal is cheaper than ever.

In some sense that’s the genius of capitalism — it’s heartless. But if you look at the local results and the cultural results and the environmental results you shake your head. But I don’t see America getting away from what I would call a little sarcastically the “wisdom” of the market. I don’t think it’s going to change.

So is there any large-scale economic fallout from these monumental changes?

Probably not, and it hurts to say so. And the only way I can feel good about saying that is to immediately point to the non-economic losses, the cultural losses. The losses of ways of life. The notion of the factory worker working for his or her children. The notion of the farmer working to build up the country and supply the rest of the world with food. We’re losing distinctive ways of life. When we lose that we lose something important, but it’s not like The Wall Street Journal cares. And I feel uncomfortable saying that. From a purely economic point of view, it’s just the price of getting more efficient. It’s a classic example of Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, which is no fun if you’re on the destruction end.

Does the decline of cities like Flint mirror the death of the middle class in the United States?

I think it’s more the decline of the lower-middle class in the United States. Even when those jobs in the auto factories paid very high wages they were still for socially lower-middle-class people. I think there was always the notion in immigrant families and working-class families who worked in those situations that the current generation would work hard so that the children could go off and not have to do those kind of jobs. And when those jobs paid well that was a perfectly reasonable ambition. It’s the cutting off of that ambition that really hurts now. The same thing has been true on farms and ranches in rural parts of the united states.

The basic premise of shrinking cities resonates with a lot of people, but there’s not a lot detail in the plan. Is this a concern?

The shrinking city approach is really the core of what’s needed to improve these places. I guess what I see is an emerging movement that’s improvising every step of the way, often under extreme political pressure. My sense is that it’s sort of like Boris Yeltsin in the ‘90s, making it up as he goes along because he has no other options. That’s not meant as a criticism at all. Cities like Flint and Detroit have gotten so desperate that a lot of policy Hail Mary’s are necessary. And it’s hard in an era of budget shortfalls, but part of the process will be figuring out what does and doesn’t work. The shrinking city [concept] is sufficiently new that things will be discovered on the fly. And this is not uncommon. My impression is that that’s how the Civil War was fought; that’s how the New Deal was created. It’s how NASA operated in the 1960s, which is thought of as a sort of golden age. This is not an unusual situation.

What about the prospect of a single business or industry moving into a shrinking city and reviving it?

In none of these cities — including the Southern and European ones — is there any hope whatsoever of a serious new industry coming. I think I can say that categorically.

Will relocating residents to a more viable central urban core work?

When you’re talking about many of these neighborhoods, you’re talking about really poor people who are not likely to move. We’ve tried this at different times and different places in this country, and I don’t think any of them were shining points in American history. It evokes all that 1950s urban renewal stuff which didn’t work, but we keep trying to do anyway. More likely is that you’ll get this reversion to a more rural feel to parts of the city, maybe even a suburban feel. That could provide some form of stability for the city. It could even be a retirement option for some people.

Care to make a prediction of how this approach will play out in cities like Flint?

I think a few neighborhoods will benefit and things will turn around precisely because the upside of the shrinking city plan — the green economics, the growth of small retail — will work. But the really poor places, the worst neighborhoods, they’ve got real problems, as they always have. I would worry about the really poor ones. I don’t know what will happen to places like that, and I’m not of good conscience about it.



This is the second in a series of interviews with urban planners and land-use experts. Go here to read the Flint Expatriates interview with Terry Schwarz, interim director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at Kent State University.

An Interveiw with Urban Planner Terry Schwarz about Shrinking Cites, House Flippers and the Future of Flint

Urban planning has traditionally been all about growth. As cities grew ever larger, planners figured out ways to manage increasingly complicated streetscapes, infrastructures and housing grids. But the shrinking city phenomena has changed everything. What happens when a place like Flint or Detroit or Cleveland has too many houses and not enough people or jobs? How do you gracefully and humanely downsize a city? Terry Schwarz, interim Director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at Kent State University and creator of the Shrinking Cities Institute, has been grappling with those questions for most of her career. In a wide ranging interview with Flint Expatriates, she discusses the death of cities, house flippers, the Genesee County Land Bank and more.

Why does Europe seem to have a head start in dealing with shrinking cities?

In Eastern Europe, they experienced a dramatic population exodus and shift in demographic and economic strength, but they experienced it in about ten years whereas throughout the post-industrial midwest and northeast in the U.S. these trends have been in place since the 1960s. The speed with which the population shift took hold in Germany after reunification [in 1990] made the trend rise to the forefront as an urgent priority. If the population is dwindling away over a long period of time you don’t notice it in such an acute way.

Are other regions looking at the problem?

Right now in Japan there’s actually this whole growing field of study around shrinking cities as well. It’s for population loss that hasn’t exactly happened yet. Demographically they’re looking at trends that show a very low birthrate combined with strict immigration policies. They see their population sliding off the edge of a cliff in the next 30 years.

How is the shrinking city situation in the U.S. unique?

In Europe and Japan, you’ve got shrinking cities and shrinking countries. While here in the United States you’ve got shrinking cities and a growing country. The U.S. population is expected to grow at a really rapid clip. So the dynamic we’re working with is fundamentally different. And it’s spatially different because a lot of American cities — especially Cleveland and Detroit — were lower density to begin with. You really notice the physical ramifications of population loss very immediately here. The cities just feel very different.

Do smaller cities like Flint and Youngstown face longer odds as they try to reinvent themselves compared to bigger cities?

Here in Cleveland, we still have one operating steel mill, but compared to what it was a hundred years ago there’s virtually no steel production. On the other hand, from a biomedical standpoint, the Cleveland Clinic is ascendant. So even though sometimes it feels like the downs outweigh the ups, the city has multiple things moving up and down at the same time. I don’t want to say it but in a city like Youngstown or Flint, where you’ve got less to work with from the get go, it may not be possible to begin to put a more restorative process in place. And there are examples of cities nationally and globally that just sort of stopped and ceased to exist. I think it’s rare though.

What role does eliminating or repurposing vacant properties play in the overall recovery of a city?

This is one tiny little element of helping cities recover. Locally and nationally when people look at the shrinking cities concept it seems logical. A smaller city. Smaller infrastructure. Reduce the city’s footprint. Green this place up. But if you push on any of those things very much, you realize it’s just very complicated.

Let me guess. It all starts with the economy.

Job loss is what’s hurting these cities. People are not going to move to a city just because it has a good green space system. It’s an amenity and it will affect the decision, but you go to a place where you can work in a way that generates enough income that you can support yourself and your family. That’s why people choose a city. So we can make Cleveland heaven on earth with urban design strategies, but if there’s not something for people to do here, if there’s not a functioning economy, it’s all for nothing.

How do you differentiate between a city that is having temporary economic problems and one that is fundamentally shrinking?

There are cities that experience dramatic ups and downs in response to the micro economies that impact them. Then there are cities that have had this long, slow meltdown. I met Robert Beauregard — one of the pioneers in the ways cities decline and respond to population loss — a few years ago. He used this phrase that years later still smarts. He called a few cities the perennial losers. He didn’t mean to be insulting. He was just pointing out that sometimes even as the economy of the nation grows, certain cities shrink. No matter what’s happening at the national and international level, there are cities that have persistently lost population and lost economic activity and become increasingly distressed. St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia…the cities of pain.

How do real estate investors and speculators play into this equation?

They buy the property thinking they can’t lose when it only costs $500. Then they discover that they’re going to have to spend $10,000 to demolish it or $20,0000 to rehab it, so they walk away and then it gets foreclosed again. So there are all these properties across cities that are in total limbo and every time a property changes hands somebody makes money. And it’s not the right somebody. I’m not against the private sector making a profit, but flippers are predators. They’re trying to bleed whatever value is there and take it away from a place like Flint rather than investing in it.

Dan Kildee has attempted to break this pattern with the Genesee County Land Bank by using the tax foreclosure process to acquire property. What role do land banks play in helping shrinking cities?

Dan’s model is nothing short of a regional land use strategy, even though they never call it that. Dan’s found a way to get this chaotic real estate turmoil under control and in the process managed to develop a revenue stream that would slowly and incrementally and progressively begin shifting resources to where they are most needed. With Dan’s model, whatever value is left in the properties stays in Genesee county, instead of letting those properties waste away into private hands. So Dan has inserted the public good into this equation and the value that comes from properties changing hands gets put back into the property.

In a lot of discussions about shrinking cities, the idea of relocating residents to a more viable central core is the ultimate goal. How feasible is this concept?

There’s a huge amount of uncertainty. The American Institute of Architects did a study in Detroit, and they made these diagrams that made it all look so clean and neat. You push these people over here, and then you push those people over there and then decommission all the infrastructure. Well, it’s not so easy. We don’t know for sure which neighborhoods are going to stabilize and which ones may tip one way or the other. The complexity of it is stunning.

Along with relocation is the idea that cities will save money by removing unnecessary infrastructure. It seems like a logical idea.

But you have to spend capital dollars now to remove infrastructure with the hope of an aspriational savings sometime down the line, maybe 20 years later. I defy you to find the public service director who would be willing to make that bet. If you weren’t 100 percent sure, or pretty close, that the neighborhood is not going to need that power line, water main, sewer line anytime, ever, you wouldn’t take it away because then if market demand starts to bubble up around that spot again you have to put it back in. And that’s really expensive. And with powerlines, my gosh, there are easements and once you give up the easement you don’t get it back. So you have to be sure, and I’ll tell you that very few people are sure about anything in terms of the changing urban morphology of declining cities. That’s my soap box about infrastructure.

One of the appealing aspects of the shrinking city plan for may people is that it seems to provide a bold, easy-to-grasp master plan for dealing with decay. But once you get past the obvious need to eliminate vacant properties, the process gets very complicated.

It comes back to city planning traditions. Not to blame my people, but we feel like we have to make these big moves. But the work I’ve been advocating for here in Cleveland is more parcel based. You develop a citywide or regional strategy for the repurposing of vacant lots and then you implement it as those properties become available and we have this great luxury in Cleveland of the city land bank and the county land bank. These are tools we can use to get some control. We’re never going to — at least in the near term — have these giant, several hundred acre parcels of land to work with where we can put a big thing in place. Instead of erasing parts of the city and moving people around, what we’re really trying to do is implement a vacant land strategy that integrates and sort of insinuates itself around anything viable that remains.