(This is the third in a series of articles addressing urban housing in America)
The list of US cities that lost size and luster due to de-industrialization is long and includes once shining US powerhouses like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore and Buffalo. The list of ideas how to fix the problems arising from the decline is even longer than the list of shrinking cities.
The main problem is the significant surplus of houses, the direct result of a shrinking population, which itself was the result of the loss of jobs. Many houses stand vacant and have fallen in disrepair. Baltimore alone is said to have somewhere between 16,000 or over 30,000 of them, depending who does the counting. Some of those are close to ready for move in, many others have open roofs and collapsed floors and walls and are seemingly beyond repair.
Last week we tried to figure out why even cities with a large housing surplus still have an urgent need for affordable housing and why those surplus houses do little to provide affordable housing.
This article will discuss what to do with those vacant houses, which are clearly a problem. According to a widely cited statistic by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Initiative, a community has no chance to grow and attract new residents when it comprises more than 4% vacants.
It’s hard to decide if the vacants are the cause or the effect of the inability to grow. While they are certainly unattractive and sometimes dangerous, they are hardly the main factor preventing people from moving to a neighborhood. More plausible is that the vacant houses are result of people having left the neighborhood for independent reasons. Read the full article by clicking the link below:
Community Architect: Growing the Shrinking City with Demolition?
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Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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