I wanted to share this article with you. Detroit and Flint have been the canaries in the coal mine with regard to industrial collapse and de-urbanization. I’ve been watching with interest what role urban agriculture will play. Mayda and I have talked about how cool it would be if the Mock Park area of Columbus/Mifflin Township were declared an urban agriculture zone as an economic development initiative, but Detroit’s going about it all the wrong way.
Essentially, Detroit is now a sprawling, sparsely populated city. It can’t afford police and fire services for the whole area without the tax base to support it, so it wants to concentrate the remaining population into a few neighborhoods. Some of the people don’t want to go. The city is talking about eminent domain to take these people’s homes away from them.
I have mixed feelings about this. I think shrinking is a good plan for Detroit, but I dislike heavy-handed authoritarianism, especially about something as severe as uprooting people from their homes and seizing something that’s such a major investment for most people. I’m cool with eminent domain for the abandoned houses, but I think the people still residing there should be given the option to stay with the understanding that services will no longer be provided to that area. Disincorporate those areas. Put them under county control. Rezone them as agricultural.
Moreover, give the residents first option to buy the surrounding properties, perhaps with the stipulation that they have to demolish or re-purpose unoccupied houses. If they want to further require that agriculture be practiced there, I suppose they could do that, too, though that might be pushing the envelope just a bit. Why should residents be penalized for hanging in there for so long? If they like living in a less populous place, why should they be forced to live in a densely populated neighborhood just because they used to live in one? It’s ridiculous for them to presume they can tell people where to live just because their treasury has shrunk.
Can you imagine Columbus ordering people in Westerville and Gahanna to move downtown and start paying Columbus taxes so the city can pay for the police budget next year? Maybe Detroit could start snatching people off the interstate highways and forcing them to live in these new communities. Really, what’s the difference? They’re talking about conscripting people to live in their new, smaller city, and coercing them into it with the threat of homelessness. “We’re gonna take your house now. You can come live downtown and pay taxes, or you can beat it.”
That really is what it comes down to, because fair market value–what a government is supposed to compensate a landowner when they exercise eminent domain–is not enough for them to buy a home anywhere else. Detroit will probably offer them a break on a house in the new dense parts of the city, maybe even an even swap. If they don’t take it, well, here’s your fifty bucks (or whatever a house in Detroit is worth these days–I’d heard they were going for as low as ten dollars in some auctions where lots were bundled together).
Let’s see if Detroit can manage to create an appropriately sized, well-designed city that incorporates agriculture without resorting to Machiavellian tactics.