Ryberg-Webster Stephanie - Legacy cities: continuity and change amid decline and revival

STEPHANIE RYBERG-WEBSTER AND J. ROSIE TIGHE

Legacy cities, also commonly referred to as shrinking, Rust Belt, or postindustrial cities, are places that have experienced sustained population loss and economic contraction. Although legacy cities exist around the globemost notably in former manufacturing powerhouses in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan, this book focuses on the US context, with a particular emphasis on Cleveland, Ohio. While research on cities that have sustained considerable population decline resulting from economic change has been happening for decades, a surge of scholarly work in the United States began in earnest in the twenty-first century. Coined by the American Assembly in 2011, the term legacy evokes these cities positive heritage and assets as well as their continuing burdens and challenges. This volume explores the multiple, complex, and, at times, competing legacies of legacy cities and the ways in which those legacies shape contemporary urban policy, planning, and administration. We emphasize the continuity and tensions between the past, present, and future of legacy cities, addressing their definitive cultural, historical, physical, social, environmental, and economic conditions. This volume builds upon a scholarly and popular interest in legacy cities (Farley 2000; Galster 2012; Binelli 2012; Maraniss 2016; Dewar and Thomas 2013; Leduff 2013; Ryan 2012). We focus primarily on Cleveland, a prototypical legacy city that has received significantly less attention in the legacy/shrinking cities literature compared to the more extreme case of Detroit.

This volume explores not only the commonalities across legacy cities in terms of industrial heritage and population decline but also their differences. Much of the popular and scholarly discussion focuses on the ongoingchallenges and distress facing cities like Detroit and Cleveland; other cities (Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, for example) have had modest population increases, and many are experiencing some level of renaissance in their downtown cores and select neighborhoods. And while the specific future of legacy cities is uncertain, their contribution to the development of the nation is unquestionable, and their resilience through the sustained and severe distress they have experienced perhaps demonstrates the ability of cities to evolve, adapt, and reinvent themselves over time. In its entirety, this book poses these questions: What are the legacies of legacy cities? How do these legacies drive contemporary urban policy, planning, and decision-making? What are the prospects for the future of these cities?

We have organized the contributions into three broad categories, beginning with chapters that provide an overview of conditions and prospects across multiple US legacy cities. The remaining two sections specifically focus on the legacy of decline in Cleveland and associated local, regional, state, and federal policy responses.

THE RISE AND FALL OF US LEGACY CITIES

As powerhouses of industrial production, legacy cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Buffalo boomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cleveland, situated on the south shore of Lake Erie, rose to prominence as an industrial center first associated with oil and gas production via John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil Company and later as a center of steel and auto production. Waves of immigration and migration further fueled its rapid growth (Souther 2017a). In 1840 Cleveland had a mere 6,071 residents, making it the forty-fifth-largest city in the United States. By 1920 the city had grown to 796,841 residents and claimed a spot in the top ten largest cities in the United Statesstaying there for the ensuing five decades. During the first half of the twentieth century, legacy cities grew rapidlydeveloping manufacturing districts, related infrastructure (roads, bridges, and rail lines), arts and cultural facilities, downtown centers, mixed-use neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic and racial/ethnic composition, inner-ring/streetcar suburbs, and all of the other common elements of early twentieth-century American cities.

Legacy cities were among the largest in the nation in 1950, when eight of the ten most populous cities saw their population peak. Since then, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and others have steadily declined. After reaching its peak population (914,808) in 1949, for instance, Cleveland began a decades-long slide that continues today. The forces of economic restructuring, deindustrialization, and suburbanization have resulted in Cleveland losing more than 55 percent of its population (ECH 2017). Today,Cleveland is once again the forty-fifth largest city in the nation with a population just under 400,000, and was recently named the most distressed city in the country (Holder 2017).

Decades of decline, disinvestment, population and job loss have resulted in severe urban distress that manifests physically via vacant land and buildings (Immergluck 2010; Pagano and Bowman 2000), deteriorated infrastructure and deferred maintenance (Hoornbeek and Schwartz 2009; Mallach 2011; Schilling and Logan 2008), and socially via high levels of concentrated poverty (Dewar and Thomas 2013), racially segregated neighborhoods (Tighe and Ganning 2015), and extreme jurisdictional fragmentation (Adhya 2017). In Cleveland vacancy and abandonment plague neighborhoods, homes, industrial sites, warehouses, and offices. A population decease results in an oversupply of buildings, depressing market values. The recent foreclosure crisis exacerbated the situation, and now about 20 percent of the citys housing stock is vacant (Ellen et al. 2014; Hall et al. 2014). Waves of demolition have permanently altered the citys landscape as well. During the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland had more land dedicated to federal urban-renewal projects than any other city in the nation, resulting in large swaths of demolition (Souther 2017a). In response to escalating decline, demolition continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s and escalated in response to the recent foreclosure crisis.