What can cities like Dayton do to stop shrinking?

Organizers look for ideas on how to form federal, state policy to help these cities.

Frozen yogurt shop offers frenzy of flavors, toppings
5:58 p.m.
Wright-Patterson relatively unscathed in Obama defense budget
4:55 p.m.
Dayton Mall shoe store moving
4:32 p.m.
Cracker Barrel manager accused of embezzling $2K
3:38 p.m.
Is your “unlimited” data being throttled?
2:32 p.m.
> More headlines

By Ken McCall, Staff Writer 10:31 PM Tuesday, December 15, 2009

DAYTON — This city isn’t alone in its continuing population loss, and the trend is likely to continue for years. So what can the “shrinking cities” like Dayton to do about it?

That was the question that close to 60 government officials and policy experts from across the Midwest and Northeast gathered on Tuesday, Dec. 15, to consider.

The daylong event at the Schuster Center was sponsored by the nonprofit Greater Ohio in cooperation with the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution to bring the experts together to share ideas and possible solutions.

“We’re not talking about shrinking in the sense of a short-term blip,” said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We’re talking about cities that have sustained population loss over an extended period.”

Mallach, an expert in housing and urban planning, showed a map of the 21 largest shrinking cities, including Dayton, that runs in a tight cluster from Michigan, through Indiana, Ohio to upstate New York.

The cities, he said, have not only lost between one quarter and 60 percent of their peak population, but they also have much higher poverty rates and have experienced an “explosion” of vacant land.

The organizers are looking for ideas on how to shape federal and state policy to help these cities.

Local governments are facing a “crushing problem” in the next two fiscal years, said Bruce Fisher, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at Buffalo State College.

“The first round of the stimulus money has run out, and local governments, specifically cities and counties, don’t know quite how 2010 and especially 2011 are going to work,” Fisher said.

It’s also hard for city officials to deal with the idea of downsizing a city, said Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, Mich.

“It almost seems un-American to even embrace the concept,” said Kildee, who lives in the shrinking city of Flint. “It seems to work against the very DNA of this nation, which is built on the notion that growth is always good, bigger is always better.”

He challenged the participants to think of success differently.

Success, he said, will be designing a city “built for the population that the economy can actually support and sustain.”

Share this article