Beware, young Homesteaders

SO there’s a NYT article on Mayor Bing’s plans — and those of Design Ecclesiasts — to consolidate services in Detroit. No one really knows how this is going to occur, but the first demolitions will start in the winter.

I got to thinking plenty of midwestern cities had cheap land and boomed after the automobile; why aren’t we talking about consolidating services and forcible relocation elsewhere?

Right now, Detroit is roughly the same size as Columbus — nearest estimates put it at 1.2 Columbuses. Detroit is always referred to in the press as sprawling, spread-out, unruly — it is about 150 sq mi., half the size of Indianapolis, one-quarter the size of Houston. Columbus peaked in 2006 at 226 sq mi. — it has a fair amount of 1970-to-present expansion, but, like Detroit, has some typically derelict 1940s inner-suburbs. Also like Detroit, it spreads its people far and wide, in little clusters. Columbus’ city center was actually built to be empty, viz.:

Above, core office space is beside the river, in light grey, buffered against the rest of downtown by a “parking-intensive” area. A few enterprising homesteaders remain in the present parking lagoon; I had always wondered if Cols.’ parking had been planned or had emerged through market forces — it looks like government shocked the ground, and the market swept in.
 
Flash forward to Bing’s plan: an urban homesteader gets a tax break to move to a plot of brownfield unhooked from the city sewer or electrical grid. With so many city schools closed, homesteader children will go to for-profits. Low taxes, deregulation, privatization. Clean slate for the Friedmanite wet dream.
 
Thing is, cities don’t work like that. You don’t minimize a city’s consumption of resources by preserving low population density; under the urban homestead, you just open a space for private enterprise to gouge the populace. Like a set of teeth, cities only work by density. You don’t pull teeth without getting fitted for a bridge. Philadelphia went on a condemn-and-destroy binge under John Street, and pretty quickly found that destruction without infill kills the rest of the block. Literally. A row house is like a set of teeth — you pull one and the rest shift on their foundations, lose insulation and lose water pressure. Pretty soon you need a whole set of dentures.
 
So why is Detroit in crisis and Columbus not? The Capital City is as large, less dense; it is as full of design gurus as razable housing. Why isn’t city council shredding the map, preserving neighborhoods it can, laying waste to the rest?
 
One more statistic: the white population of Columbus — 66%; Detroit — 12%.
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