A Tale of Two Cities?
Youngstown, Ohio is not Windsor, Ontario and Windsor, Ontario is not Youngstown, Ohio…yet.
On September 19, 1977, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company closed its doors putting 5000 employees out of work. By the end of 1980 U.S. Steel and Republic Steel had also closed. In all 40,000 people lost their jobs.
Fast forward to the early 2000’s and more plant closures around the region resulted in 24,000 more job losses. The worst in 2006 when WCI Steel, General Motors and Delphi combined cut 5,000 positions.
Youngstown, Ohio is a city that went from being the fourth largest steel producing region in the U.S. to the poorest mid-sized American city with a median income of $21,000 in the 2006 census. In 1960 Youngstown had a population of 166,688. In the 2000 census the population of the city had dropped to 82,026. People didn’t just move away from Youngstown - they fled. The city has 8,400 vacant housing units, almost a quarter of the entire housing stock.
If you have Google Earth take a look at Youngstown, especially the older neighbourhoods with the distinctive grid pattern streets closest to the downtown. You will see how the city is dealing with its surplus of housing stock - demolition. So far, over 1000 buildings have been leveled. It costs the city about $3,000 to demo a home. It rationalizes the savings in fire service response savings (many abandoned homes are burned, many more than once), savings in policing and a general improvement to the neighbourhoods. In some instances the city has torn up streets and closed off the water and sewer services once all the homes on a block are gone. This is radical stuff.
It certainly does not work to make the city more compact or more walkable but, they have gone so far down the spiral that it is necessary to more-or-less start over.
This “street-scaping” is part of Plan 2010. Plan 2010 has some interesting ideas and concepts that could be useful in a discussion about our city. Youngstown 2010 has four major Vision Principles:
1. Accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city.
2. Defining Youngstown’s role in the new regional economy.
3. Improving Youngstown’s image and enhancing quality of life.
4. A call to action.
The plan itself is about 150 pages, highlights include:
- City History - Why we need a plan. Even after the collapse of the steel industry the city continued on a plan calling for growth and expansion. The population declined even as the city’s official boundaries were expanded.
- A comparison of the 1951/74 offical plans and the present realities.
- Planning Districts - the city was divided into five planning districts and subdivided into 127 identifiable neighbourhoods. Planning is ongoing at the district and neighbourhood levels.
- Assets to build on - transportation connectivity. Youngstown is between Pittsburg and Cleveland on major highway routes. Originally Youngstown became the steel centre it was because of the Ohio/Erie Canal and later railroad connections to the ports at Cleveland.
- Implementation - is dealt with at the city/district levels with stages called; Cleaner, Greener and Better Planned and Organized.
Youngstown, Detroit, Flint, Cleveland - all of these cities, their trials and tribulations are very important to the conversation here in Windsor. They are important because Windsor does not want to become like them. For Youngstown the writing was on the wall thirty years ago but they continued on business-as-usual thinking that something big would come along to replace steel. It didn’t, in fact things actually got worse.
For Windsor, now should be the time that we stop and decide what we want to be instead of pushing forward, status quo until there’s no time, money or land left and we have to tear down half our city and start over again.
Articles on Youngstown, Ohio
Plan 2010 find the maps of vacant properties and look at Google Earth, yikes.
Youngstown Vindicator feature section of local newspaper
Tags: economic development, Official Plan, planning department, statistics, Urban Design, urban sprawl
Post Feedback
Is it the norm in single-industry rust-belt cities to wait until we’ve hit the very bottom of the barrel before investigating alternatives? That seems to be the precendent set before us.
Why is it that the head-space that coastal decision makers live in are, for the most part forward thinking and diverse? We look to cities on the west coast for innovation and to the east coast for historic preservation and related industrys (tourism).
YIKES is right James! But I’m not surprised, I read in detail about Youngstown before sending the links to the two stories I sent Chris the other day and he used in Shrinkage. Can it happen here! Is it going to happen here and I just don’t mean Windsor alone but the surrounding bedroom communities that relied on those of the Big Three employees living in their communities.
If so, our city has been caught napping as usual to the other world around them. I think shrinkage is a fair bet. This city was built and run on huge unrealistic wages by all those employed by the Big Three and the feeder plants, that is now disappearing. It was a huge workforce for any one city, with billions of dollars flowing into it over 80 plus years but it is gone now and I suspect will never come back the way it once was. Can we sustain a city and region that we have now without that huge workforce and their pay cheques, only time will tell. But we are running out of time but not out of law suits!
I think that a great part of our population are in denial, along with our mayor and city council to the emerging facts around them and I include the CAW in that denial. When all the infrastructure finally gets built, and tie ups at the border are smoothed out to increase flow and get rid of choke points, Windsor will become just a whistle stop on the road to somewhere else. Boy wouldn’t be nice to have a Tim Horton’s on that whistle stop with a huge gigantic drive thru!!!
Citizens are now talking of car pooling, driving less, spending less to afford gasoline, accepting a job with lower wages and no or some benefits, paying higher utility bills, more for water even more to get rid of it, it is hard to plan, if the city is planning at all for diminishing returns. Shrinkage is all ready occurring it is just not quite visible yet but it is there.
Minimum wages or wages just above that that the Big Three will be demanding soon in contract negotiations won’t buy all those abandon homes in the region or that CAW retirees were hoping that their children will buy to ease into retirement. Are our sub-urbs the next slums?
That was a surprise!! Asusual i check out SD with my morning coffee then go over and check out Planetizen to see what else is going on in the world, as Windsor naps. (zzz…zzzzz….) And what do i see? http://www.planetizen.com/node/30854
Windsor! front and centre!.. man.. this city’s got a long way to go …..
Wow. Planetizen! Wow… I’m tongue-tied. Thanks for that heads-up, Sporto!!!!
Branding at its best and cheap to! It was one blog I didn’t hit this morning! Thanks for scooping it for us Sporto! Planetizen is a very, very influluentual blog, read the world over!
Who’s your city!!!!!!
YAY !! WINDSOR !!!! …opps! ….sshhh… yay, windsor(!) ….zzzz…zzzzzz
Interesting post. I’m from Youngstown and yes the 2010 plan is radical, however I think the fact that we have moved beyond denial and recognize that we are a shrinking city is a great leap forward. We are now starting to create a new reality one that includes a lot of green space something that is going to be in increasing demand as we deal with global warming. Not onlyl are we shrinking and creating more green space but we are doing urban reforestation and hope to grow our own food, ultimately creating green jobs and sustainability. Check out http://www.youngstownmoxie.blogspot.com
“It certainly does not work to make the city more compact or more walkable but, they have gone so far down the spiral that it is necessary to more-or-less start over.”
I drew this conclusion based on the images I viewed on Google Earth. By eliminating residential units and effectively reducing the density of the built areas of the city goes away from the ideal of closely spaced homes in walkable neighbourhoods.
IMO if the people that live in the least walkable areas of the city could be transplanted into neighbourhoods closer to the core or areas of highest employment the city could be compacted into walkable communities and be made more in the human scale. The vacant land at the furthest edges could be returned to natural areas or agriculture. You still get the “green space” and the ability to grow crops along with higher density where it matters most.
Hi Debra, thanks for stopping by and introducing yourself.! I’ve been on your blog reading here and there, sure hope Youngstown’s 2010 Plan is working for your city, our city hasn’t gotten to a real state of denial yet but it is slowly sinking with the people here. The 2010 Plan has some great radical ideas and lord knows we need trees in this city and surrounding county. A city growing its own food has been an idea of mine for many years and with the rising cost of imported food these days, growing our own might be a way of easing the pain.
I’m not the owner of the website nor a contributor, just one citizen that posts here. Did you find us through Planetizen?
It is always great to hear from other cities and the citizen involvement.
Cheers!
Hi everyone,
English is my 2nd language, so I apologize for grammar.
I’m found this web site 3 weeks ago in search for something different about our city. I’m almost every day on this blog and I would like to say, keep up good work.
I would like to add a comment regarding current economic and let’s call “political” situation in our City.
I was excited when they announced plan for Ice Track in Tecumseh. I thought finally something good for us, but…yea…BUT, instead building something that everyone would be proud of, well our CH (City Hall) didn’t like it. Who cares if people will get new jobs, who cares if economic situations will jump for 2-5%. It is not acceptable to have positive and energetic suggestion, we simply MUST go down.
It is the time to do some staff cutting in City Hall, but start from up to down, than you will see fresh and new ideas born every minute.
Zee, I agree that we must demand some change at the top, ’cause they’re not meeting the challenges that our current situation has left on our doorsteps.
We only have another 932 days until the next municipal election, so we had better decide what dierection we want to see our city head and work towards that! Oh - don’t worry about your grammar, it’s actually really good compared to what passes for communications nowadays! Good to have you involved.
Hmm… 932 days… there wil be a lot of council seats+mayor up for grabs. I suspect i’ll see some new names on the front lawns when the time comes. If anybody out there has considered giving it a try, remember, you couldn’t do any worse than what we see today! Seriously! Just imagine a hole new slate of councilors that actually give a crap about this city, and like Zee says - - will see fresh and new ideas born every minute. Things are so stale now it stinks!!! … hmm just 932 days….
..oh ya… –’Vote for Sporto!!’
Three cities now! From the Economist via the Toronto Star.
Cities: In tough times, inventing ways to shrink gracefully
http://www.thestar.com/article/418816
Something odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany.
“City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis: the collapse of communist-era industry, which sent workers, especially young women, fleeing westwards; and a sharp decline in the birth rate.
Saxony-Anhalt, cradle of the Reformation and of East Germany’s chemical industry, lost a fifth of its 2.9 million people in the 16 years after Germany’s unification in 1990. By 2025 it expects to lose nearly half a million more.
In Köthen, where Johann Sebastian Bach composed the Brandenburg Concertos, so many young workers have left that “the population pyramid has become a mushroom,” says Ina Rauer of the town’s building department….”
“…The infrastructure that served now-defunct factories and empty apartment buildings must be ripped up, too.
“Streets cost an unbelievable amount of money,” not to mention water pipes and electric cabling, says Klaus Bekierz, who works for the building department of Dessau, a half-hour’s drive from Köthen. Since the early ’90s, its population has shrunk by a fifth to 76,000. “We can’t pay for infrastructure for 100,000 people,” he says.”
Could it happen that they are talking about Windsor, or Windsor’s future?
Border Delays-
I heard on the news today that the border guard union has decided to
take their lazy fight for more money by causing slow downs at the
border crossings…Just another reason why Windsor and their union
identity hinders any chance of this city to become the innovative and
cool city that it actually could become with its diverse ethnicity and
gateway location…..Reason I left the city years ago, the union will
always have Windsor in shackles….so sad and cheers to the thousands
of border travellers who have to deal with these idiots.