Cleveland Real Estate News

New phrases pop up that sometimes take me aback but then sound just about right.  For years we’ve had the beginnings of a strategy.  The Planning Commission’s new master plan ideas to concentrate businesses and houses on streets like Lorain rather than expecting to populate the entire length of a street.  In other words, they stopped trying to make Cleveland into it’s 1940s and ’50s self, but started embracing what the new Cleveland could be.

While all of us want new jobs and as a Realtor® I get excited every year when people do move here from Florida and Texas and Chicago, I don’t expect to get us back to decades old population numbers.  No one does.   Because of the Boston Globe, I have a name for the new city policy: Smart Shrinking.

I think it’s a major paradigm shift. The Globe article How To Shrink A City, written by Drake Bennett, explains it this way:

“…though the trend is decades old, urban planners have only recently begun to think about shrinking not as a setback on the path to future growth but as a condition to be actively managed. It’s a radical shift….”

Planners and students of planning are (have been) focused on how to grow cities well, how to manage growth, how to bring in economic growth.  You know the mantra, and it’s probably been embedded in your brain as it has mine, ever since I was a young girl.  I’m not sure I fully embraced the idea until I read this article!  Have any of you heard of the term Smart Shrinking?  Did you come to embrace the idea sooner than I? I’m so curious to know.

The article mentions that it’s hard to find case studies (like torts in law I guess) to model for this smart shrinking.  In some ways we may be making it up organically as we go along.  There is apparently some precedent for it overseas – using East German cities as examples due to the demolishing of the Berlin Wall.  We may be tired of tax abatement here, and I’m not sure I embrace the idea of forcing people to move, but another quote from the article describes what Leipzig’s government did:

“…in the largely abandoned neighborhoods, officials came up with something else, a new kind of land-use contract in which private owners signed over control to the city for a period of several years in exchange for not having to pay property taxes….”

My own general neighborhood is a good example of how things are occurring organically.  As in many ‘hoods, there are streets that sit on flood plains; basement and house flooding is and has been a common issue.  As some homes have become abandoned due to FHA foreclosure, our development corporation has been able to reconfigure the natural landscape to make the remaining home owners happier with less flooding.  It went without saying that there was no need to keep a house because the population numbers here allowed that leeway.  I love lemonade out of lemons, don’t you?

Our land banking and urban farming fits into this smart shrinking.  It’s as if a light bulb went off in my head. If we can concentrate our efforts on things like  The Opportunity Corridor, keep strengthening our strong points of education and health care, for example, we can redesign the City to a more manageable, attractive and productive entity.  Anybody feeling this?  I’d love to know!  It doesn’t mean we stop growing jobs because those of us who live here need them!  I swear it sounds like a paradigm shift that could show up in city planning courses and books 100 years from now as the beginning of an exciting movement.

By all means, read the rest of the Bennett story in The Globe, it’s fascinating and food for thought.  A huge hat tip to Drake Bennett, because he now becomes my 2010 light bulb moment, with an article so well written it keeps me thinking and researching.