The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.
Utica, NY, the town in which I spent my teen years, had about 100,000 people at the time. I just read a newspaper article about the fact that the city is taking out some 30% of their street lights, since their population has gone down to about 60,000. They don’t need to control the traffic any more.
People are voting with their feet. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind moving into New York state (or Michigan either).
This is a fascinating and rather innovative idea. As long as it does not violate property rights, which the article implies are being respected, I am all for it. It will cut city government expenses vastly, allow for consolidation of services and it’s environmentally friendly. That’s a triple win from my POV.
Tamsf, I was born in Utica and grew up in Barneveld. I remember when back in the 50s, Utica’s population was close to 110,000, but when the cotton mills closed down, and Chicago Pneumatic left town, along with other companies, people left along with them. In my opinion, what happened to Utica, and now Rome, was probably a good thing. Griffiss AFB is now an industrial park.
Utica has always been known for its parks…..particularly for Roscoe Conkling Parkway…..and its educational and cultural institutions, and it would be great to see the spread of concrete stopped dead in its tracks, and the outlying land revert to nature. One more thing……and maybe you remember this: Utica’s theme is “the Gateway to the Adirondacks.”
There are a number of cities that are shaped like donuts with rotting urban cores that do not have the tax base to be self-supporting.
Why not turn the urban cores into parks and recreation facilities and build low cost and easily maintained transportation systems that make movement in the donut surrounding the inner core easy to use and self-supporting?
Such a transportation system could consist of concentric rings of movement centered on the core and radial lines of movement radiating out from the core. This would make it convenient to walk almost anywhere and large parking lots could be placed around the outermost ring to serve commuters and visitors to the city.
North Carolina is one of the few states that permits cities to annex areas adjacent to the city without requiring the residents of the area annexed to approve. Those involuntarilly annexed don’t like it and can deay it by lawsuits for a year or more but eventually get to pay city taxes and enjoy city services. This is a hot political issue in Asheville now, but it has meant that the city has been able to grow as people move here.
get to pay city taxes and enjoy city services.
Texas has, or had, an arrangement similar to that. In many cases, those annexed got the great privilege of paying city taxes greater than the user fees they got for better services. There were exceptions in some areas and for some services, but every annexation gets greeted with howls from the annexed.
I haven’t heard the howling lately, so wonder if the law changed.