Abstract Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in wh... more Abstract Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in what we define as strong neighborhoods; there, more than one third of homes experienced foreclosure. Before the crisis hit, these selected tracts had largely intact physical environments and higher owner occupancy, household income and property value than the citywide median. In some of them residents worked intensely to abate the neighborhood effects of mortgage foreclosures. This study examines those efforts’ effectiveness. We selected neighborhoods with the most extensive efforts, as measured, for instance, by creation of community-based plans and applications for grants, and we conducted interviews and field observations to examine those efforts. To assess strengthening of neighborhood housing markets, we applied a modified adjusted interrupted time-series approach to evaluate changes in prices as one measure of neighborhood change. We found that strong resident initiative supported by community development organizations and external assistance led to increased neighborhood housing prices, compared with comparable neighborhoods. However, when initiative, context, and support were weaker, community-based efforts could not prevent considerable decline.
States may not be getting their money's worth from development programs formulated without be... more States may not be getting their money's worth from development programs formulated without benefit of economic analysis. Minnesota's programs for its Iron Range, located in the northeastern part of the State, illustrate how analysis can get sacrificed in political tug-of-wars. The resulting programs may overlook projects with a good chance of success or encourage projects that will not achieve economic development goals.
Detroit’s experiences have long mirrored those of many cities: rising industrialization and popul... more Detroit’s experiences have long mirrored those of many cities: rising industrialization and population growth in the early twentieth century, suburbanization of industry and of white population following World War II, industrial restructuring that dismantled the region’s economic base from the 1970s on, and racial tensions throughout that hindered regional progress. Today, however, Detroit stands alone among large American cities in both the depth and breadth of its distress. Thousands of homes and many acres of land are vacant and abandoned. Residents are disproportionately poor and racially segregated. The tax base is decimated. What can scholars and practitioners learn about urban processes and planning from research on such an outlier city? We argue, based on examination of literature, that research on Detroit can advance understanding of cities and urban planning because of its extreme conditions. Researchers, for example, are able to observe phenomena in Detroit that likely exist elsewhere but go unnoticed. The magnifying effects of the city’s decline make the invisible visible. Detroit also allows researchers to untangle certain phenomena, such as gentrification, from the context of growth where they are usually observed, casting those phenomena in a new light. The large swaths of vacant urban land in Detroit are also an asset to researchers. They allow testing of hypotheses that would be difficult to assess in more intact, densely populated areas. Such research can have broad application to heavily developed urban areas elsewhere. Furthermore, Detroit research can expose the shortcomings of policies that presume strong real estate markets but do not work as expected in disinvested neighborhoods where property demand is very weak. Detroit’s extreme conditions also pose a challenge for some of the disciplines that contribute to urban planning. These disciplines have tended to focus on how and why cities and regions grow, who benefits when they do, and how to renew growth when it ebbs. Not enough attention has been paid to understanding decline. Scholars have figuratively modeled urban phenomena only across the range that variables exhibit during growth, leaving out the range during decline. The challenge that Detroit poses for urban studies is to flesh out that model – to understand the spatial, social, political and economic dynamics of change and how decline may differ from growth.
State and Regional Research Center Working Paper 88-01. Funded by the Northwest Area Foundation t... more State and Regional Research Center Working Paper 88-01. Funded by the Northwest Area Foundation through a project titled 'Policies and Strategies for Rural Economic Development.'
When owners stop paying property taxes, a government forecloses on the property. This research co... more When owners stop paying property taxes, a government forecloses on the property. This research compares outcomes after auctions, the common way governments sell tax-reverted property, with outcomes after sales from a city department and a land bank authority. Data on a random sample of sold properties came from field research and administrative sources. Auctions failed in returning property to reuse compared to other ways of selling tax-reverted property. Managed sales led to more owner-occupied homes, additions of side lots to homes and businesses, and redevelopment and reuse as well as fewer returns to foreclosure and less property flipping.
The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-... more The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-student teams who work on community development projects with Detroit's community organizations. Projects are designed to enrich students' experiential learning in community settings and to help build communities' organizational capacity. This relationship has exposed a culture clash between universities and community organizations in at least three major areas: the style of work, social justice understanding, and power relations. Further, although the COPC is committed to a community-driven planning model, the nature of the community-university relationship tends to push the work toward a consultant-driven model. Improving community-university collaboration will require restructuring of university pedagogy.
Although evaluations show that state and local economic development programs have few effects on ... more Although evaluations show that state and local economic development programs have few effects on economic growth or redistribution of economic activity, explanations for the failures are incomplete. Technocratic explanations have dominated economic development research but cannot account for many program activities. Based on evidence from a Minnesota program, the best explanation emphasizes a perspective of bureaucratic and political imperatives. Economic development programs are not designed and implemented in ways that can achieve their goals, principally because of important politicalforces. Administrators must run a program to garner support of legislators, a governor, and opinion leaders for program survival. State and locally elected officials need economic development programs to deliver quick, visible projects in their efforts to solve their districts' economic problems, manage business climate politics, and achieve other aims. Achieving implicit goals means that program...
Expert groups such as the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness see innovation... more Expert groups such as the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness see innovation in manufacturing processes as vital to strengthening mature American manufacturing. At the same time, management experts largely ignore such innovation as a way to improve a firm's competitiveness in a declining manufacturing industry. Economists' research offers insights into the effects of technological innovation and suggests that management experts underestimate the importance of new technology. The research suggests that early innovators in a declining industry can profit from innovations in manufacturing processes, although later innovators may only reduce their losses. The profits are a function of time required for the innovation to diffuse through the industry, size of the firm's market, and initial reduction in costs. Many factors, in turn, influence an innovation's diffusion rate. Process innovations can also make declining industries more competitive in inter...
The population of the United States will likely grow by 40 percent by 2050 with the growth concen... more The population of the United States will likely grow by 40 percent by 2050 with the growth concentrated in eight to ten megaregions, connected networks of metropolitan areas. Planners in the United States have begun to plan for these large regions. Their work raises four persistent questions: what is a megaregion, and how does one determine where a megaregion exists? Why plan at the scale of megaregions rather than at metropolitan, state, and national levels? What are appropriate methods and useful data for megaregion planning? When is the megaregion a useful scale for policy and planning?
Morckel (2020) and Sadler and coauthors (this issue) represent two sides of one of the major deba... more Morckel (2020) and Sadler and coauthors (this issue) represent two sides of one of the major debates in urban planning in cities that have lost a large share of their peak populations and have few ...
CLOSUP Working Paper Series Number 10 February 2009 Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities:... more CLOSUP Working Paper Series Number 10 February 2009 Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities: Learning from Cleveland and Detroit ... Page 2. Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities: Learning from Cleveland and Detroit Margaret Dewar, University of Michigan ...
Abstract Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in wh... more Abstract Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in what we define as strong neighborhoods; there, more than one third of homes experienced foreclosure. Before the crisis hit, these selected tracts had largely intact physical environments and higher owner occupancy, household income and property value than the citywide median. In some of them residents worked intensely to abate the neighborhood effects of mortgage foreclosures. This study examines those efforts’ effectiveness. We selected neighborhoods with the most extensive efforts, as measured, for instance, by creation of community-based plans and applications for grants, and we conducted interviews and field observations to examine those efforts. To assess strengthening of neighborhood housing markets, we applied a modified adjusted interrupted time-series approach to evaluate changes in prices as one measure of neighborhood change. We found that strong resident initiative supported by community development organizations and external assistance led to increased neighborhood housing prices, compared with comparable neighborhoods. However, when initiative, context, and support were weaker, community-based efforts could not prevent considerable decline.
States may not be getting their money's worth from development programs formulated without be... more States may not be getting their money's worth from development programs formulated without benefit of economic analysis. Minnesota's programs for its Iron Range, located in the northeastern part of the State, illustrate how analysis can get sacrificed in political tug-of-wars. The resulting programs may overlook projects with a good chance of success or encourage projects that will not achieve economic development goals.
Detroit’s experiences have long mirrored those of many cities: rising industrialization and popul... more Detroit’s experiences have long mirrored those of many cities: rising industrialization and population growth in the early twentieth century, suburbanization of industry and of white population following World War II, industrial restructuring that dismantled the region’s economic base from the 1970s on, and racial tensions throughout that hindered regional progress. Today, however, Detroit stands alone among large American cities in both the depth and breadth of its distress. Thousands of homes and many acres of land are vacant and abandoned. Residents are disproportionately poor and racially segregated. The tax base is decimated. What can scholars and practitioners learn about urban processes and planning from research on such an outlier city? We argue, based on examination of literature, that research on Detroit can advance understanding of cities and urban planning because of its extreme conditions. Researchers, for example, are able to observe phenomena in Detroit that likely exist elsewhere but go unnoticed. The magnifying effects of the city’s decline make the invisible visible. Detroit also allows researchers to untangle certain phenomena, such as gentrification, from the context of growth where they are usually observed, casting those phenomena in a new light. The large swaths of vacant urban land in Detroit are also an asset to researchers. They allow testing of hypotheses that would be difficult to assess in more intact, densely populated areas. Such research can have broad application to heavily developed urban areas elsewhere. Furthermore, Detroit research can expose the shortcomings of policies that presume strong real estate markets but do not work as expected in disinvested neighborhoods where property demand is very weak. Detroit’s extreme conditions also pose a challenge for some of the disciplines that contribute to urban planning. These disciplines have tended to focus on how and why cities and regions grow, who benefits when they do, and how to renew growth when it ebbs. Not enough attention has been paid to understanding decline. Scholars have figuratively modeled urban phenomena only across the range that variables exhibit during growth, leaving out the range during decline. The challenge that Detroit poses for urban studies is to flesh out that model – to understand the spatial, social, political and economic dynamics of change and how decline may differ from growth.
State and Regional Research Center Working Paper 88-01. Funded by the Northwest Area Foundation t... more State and Regional Research Center Working Paper 88-01. Funded by the Northwest Area Foundation through a project titled 'Policies and Strategies for Rural Economic Development.'
When owners stop paying property taxes, a government forecloses on the property. This research co... more When owners stop paying property taxes, a government forecloses on the property. This research compares outcomes after auctions, the common way governments sell tax-reverted property, with outcomes after sales from a city department and a land bank authority. Data on a random sample of sold properties came from field research and administrative sources. Auctions failed in returning property to reuse compared to other ways of selling tax-reverted property. Managed sales led to more owner-occupied homes, additions of side lots to homes and businesses, and redevelopment and reuse as well as fewer returns to foreclosure and less property flipping.
The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-... more The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-student teams who work on community development projects with Detroit's community organizations. Projects are designed to enrich students' experiential learning in community settings and to help build communities' organizational capacity. This relationship has exposed a culture clash between universities and community organizations in at least three major areas: the style of work, social justice understanding, and power relations. Further, although the COPC is committed to a community-driven planning model, the nature of the community-university relationship tends to push the work toward a consultant-driven model. Improving community-university collaboration will require restructuring of university pedagogy.
Although evaluations show that state and local economic development programs have few effects on ... more Although evaluations show that state and local economic development programs have few effects on economic growth or redistribution of economic activity, explanations for the failures are incomplete. Technocratic explanations have dominated economic development research but cannot account for many program activities. Based on evidence from a Minnesota program, the best explanation emphasizes a perspective of bureaucratic and political imperatives. Economic development programs are not designed and implemented in ways that can achieve their goals, principally because of important politicalforces. Administrators must run a program to garner support of legislators, a governor, and opinion leaders for program survival. State and locally elected officials need economic development programs to deliver quick, visible projects in their efforts to solve their districts' economic problems, manage business climate politics, and achieve other aims. Achieving implicit goals means that program...
Expert groups such as the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness see innovation... more Expert groups such as the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness see innovation in manufacturing processes as vital to strengthening mature American manufacturing. At the same time, management experts largely ignore such innovation as a way to improve a firm's competitiveness in a declining manufacturing industry. Economists' research offers insights into the effects of technological innovation and suggests that management experts underestimate the importance of new technology. The research suggests that early innovators in a declining industry can profit from innovations in manufacturing processes, although later innovators may only reduce their losses. The profits are a function of time required for the innovation to diffuse through the industry, size of the firm's market, and initial reduction in costs. Many factors, in turn, influence an innovation's diffusion rate. Process innovations can also make declining industries more competitive in inter...
The population of the United States will likely grow by 40 percent by 2050 with the growth concen... more The population of the United States will likely grow by 40 percent by 2050 with the growth concentrated in eight to ten megaregions, connected networks of metropolitan areas. Planners in the United States have begun to plan for these large regions. Their work raises four persistent questions: what is a megaregion, and how does one determine where a megaregion exists? Why plan at the scale of megaregions rather than at metropolitan, state, and national levels? What are appropriate methods and useful data for megaregion planning? When is the megaregion a useful scale for policy and planning?
Morckel (2020) and Sadler and coauthors (this issue) represent two sides of one of the major deba... more Morckel (2020) and Sadler and coauthors (this issue) represent two sides of one of the major debates in urban planning in cities that have lost a large share of their peak populations and have few ...
CLOSUP Working Paper Series Number 10 February 2009 Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities:... more CLOSUP Working Paper Series Number 10 February 2009 Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities: Learning from Cleveland and Detroit ... Page 2. Disposition of Publicly Owned Land in Cities: Learning from Cleveland and Detroit Margaret Dewar, University of Michigan ...
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