these three articles recently from the nytimes are both good and bad. they all deal, mostly, with how small and/or former industrially-based cities can survive. to get the bad part out of the way: it is sloppy journalism to report on these issues with so heavy a contextual frame as the recession. yes, the recession exacerbates these problems. but the problems that they, especially flint and braddock, face would occur with or without a crumbling global economy.
the article about beacon deals mostly with how the town went about reinventing itself from making hats to selling “geegaws.” of course it’s difficult to be resilient when you are selling things that people don’t actually need.
the flint story documents the usual suspects: mostly-vacant blocks, decaying infrastructure, plans to shrink. this story is the worst about conflating the recession and flint’s problems. anyone that has seen “roger & me” (which came out 20 years ago) knows that flint has been in a bad way for some time. addressing how once prosperous mid-sized cities can shrink is necessary, but unfortunately unsexy.
my favorite story is about braddock, a town that has literally been falling into itself for a long time. it still is, but the mayor (this story is primarily about the mayor) is an unconventional dude with ideas that would be provocative if his town weren’t falling apart. please also watch the video accompanying this article.
the tie that binds these three articles is economic sustainability. beacon is suffering because it shifted from an industrial economy to one based on knick-knacks and an eco-hotel that lost its financing. flint has been a mess for years because of declining industrial capacity. and braddock was a former steel town that just got fucked. the de-industrialization of america has been happening for a long, long time now. some regions were fine with this: the south, which had no industry to speak of, and the west coast, which shifted to a different and better-positioned industry decades ago. the problem with the south (and florida is a microcosm here) is similar to what happened in beacon: tourism and development (and especially development premised on never-ending suburban growth) are unsustainable. i wish the article about flint had talked more about how it should shrink. there’s too much wasted infrastructure there. becoming more compact and making itself attractive for economic development need to go hand-in-hand. and braddock, well, you really should just read the story.
