Revitalizing the neighbourhood: The practices and politics of rightsizing in Idora, Youngstown
Part of special issue on “The political economy of managing decline and rightsizing” organised by Matthias Bernt and Manual Aalbers
Dr James Rhodes
Department of Sociology
Arthur Lewis Building
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
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Revitalizing the neighbourhood: The practices and politics of rightsizing in Idora, Youngstown
Abstract
In recent years, growing academic attention has been placed upon the varied strategies of rightsizing employed by cities to address the interrelated dynamics of economic and urban decline and depopulation. Within this body of work the focus has primarily been placed on the city-level. By focusing on the practices and politics of urban revitalization within the Idoraneighbourhood in Youngstown- a neighbourhood widely heralded as a success story- this paper deepens understandings of how rightsizing is enacted within more micro-contexts. Drawing on demographic data, documentary analysis, and observation, it reveals the process to be complex in its manifestations. Placing the critical gaze upon the neighbourhood level exposesactualities of urban reconfiguration in the context of stark deindustrialization, decline and depopulation, elucidating the actors and practices involved, in addition toits politically charged and contested nature. It concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of this case study both in terms of the possibilities and pitfalls of rightsizing.
Keywords: Rightsizing, Shrinking Cities, Urban decline, Urban redevelopment
Introduction
On Youngstown Ohio’s South Western side, the Idoraneighborhood has been a hub of activity in recent years. Since 2009 the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC), a non-profit community development corporation (CDC), has acted as orchestratorof a sweeping program of urban revitalization there. With its headquarters located in the neighborhood on reclaimed land it shares with its own Iron Roots Farm, the organization, along with an active residents’ association, has been busily engaged in the material and symbolic reconstitution of place. Drawing upon funds from a range of public, private and philanthropic entities andemploying a diverse set of practices- including demolition, housing rehabilitation, greening and beautification, urbanrebranding, and the promotion of civic participation- this predominantly black, low and middle-income neighborhood has become the site of a profound transition. Vacant homes have been cleared or remodelled, surplus land converted into public gardens, and a frayed urban social fabric reenergised through the activities of local residents, new sociallyoriented programs, and the targeting of community problems.
The recent redevelopment of the Idoraneighborhood has occurred within the context of the city of Youngstown’s 2010 Plan. In 2005, the administration launched a new urban strategy, which in breaking with the conventions of urban planning, proposed that the city should embrace its smaller size (City of Youngstown, 2005). In doing so, it became the first U.S. city to enact such an approach, leading the way for municipalities like Detroit, Flint, and Rochester to follow suit. In Youngstown, as with rightsizing policies introducedelsewhere (Aalbers, 2014a; Schindler, 2016; redacted, this issue),neighborhoods were selectively deemed either suitable or unsuitable sites of resources and targeted intervention.Within this schema, Idora was identified as a place where urban revitalization strategies might be employed to “stabilize” this area of the city. Here then, both Youngstown and theIdoraneighborhood are located at the vanguard of a new form of what has variously been termed“smart decline”or most widely- “rightsizing”. The policy strategies such terms name emerged in response to the challenges faced by citiesand neighborhoods forced to wrestle with the legacies of sustained patterns of deindustrialization, depopulation and urban decline. Indeed, cities across the globe are seeking to re-imagine and remake urban terrains in ways that acknowledge “urban shrinkage” and related decline as “a durable, structural component of urban development” (Martinez-Fernandez et al, 2012, p.218).
Reflective of this emergent urban policy, a growing body of work has shifted academic attention away frommore established concerns regarding the anatomies and consequences of “urban decline”to the remedies enacted to address the resulting social and material abandonments and inequities. Here, cities experiencing extreme abandonment, such as Youngstown and Detroit, are seen as marking not only the demise of the postwar city but also its reconstruction in ways that resist and reproduce urban orthodoxies (Mallach 2012; Ryan, 2012; Dewar and Thomas 2013; Smith and Kirkpatrick 2015). Smith and Kirkpatrick (2015, p.vii) argue how in the case of Detroit, the city cannot simply be understood through tropes of “loss, decay and dereliction”, but also as a space, “containing the embryonic possibilities ofnew and/or renewed forms of social integration and economic development.”The academic interest in “rightsizing”then nestles withinurban debates both established and emergent. “Rightsizing” has been cited as evidence of the re-emergence of urban-renewal era policies of “triage” (Kirkpatrick, 2015) and “planned shrinkage” (Aalbers, 2014a), as well as the continuing and deepening of urban neoliberalizationandtheroutinizationof “urban austerity”(Akers, 2013; 2015; Hackworth 2015; Hackworth, and Nowakowski, 2015).Alternatively, it has been framed as an opportunity for the initiation of innovative, more equitable and sustainable modes of urban living (Schilling and Logan 2008; Ryan 2012; Parr 2014; Schindler, 2014; 2016).
Within this body of work, studies have overwhelmingly focused upon rightsizing policies at thecity-level(Wiechmann and Pallagst, 2012; Akers, 2013; 2015; Hackworth, 2015; Hackworth and Novakowski, 2015). What a detailed excavation of the case of Idora enables instead, isto focus the critical gaze upon the neighborhood itself, providing insights into the practices and politics of rightsizing as they materialize in more micro-contexts. This is particularly important given that ‘right-sizing’ is implemented unevenly and inconsistently both between but also within cities. Occupying positions at the heart of an urban plan identified as pioneering in its approach to ‘rightsizing’, both the Idora neighbourhood and the city of Youngstown are important sites through which to analyse these trends. Indeed, in Youngstown and beyond, the revitalization of the Idora neighbourhood has been seen as evidence of successful approaches to urban shrinkage and decline, with Idora attracting visitors from other US cities and as far afield as Japan and Germany, from those eager to see the work that the YNDC has undertaken there.
The paper draws upon a combination of analysis of key strategic documents relating to the revitalization of the Idora neighbourhood and local media coverage, as well as observations made on a series of visitsto the neighbourhood between 2010 and 2015. Itadvocates a view of ‘rightsizing’ as an urban project hybrid in its formulations and enactments; a reactive but also a productive set of techniques, which does not simply respond to new urban realities but also remakes neighbourhoods in specific ways.The argument proceeds via the following structure: firstly, the paper is situated in relation to the emergent academic literature exploring ‘rightsizing’ and the particular focus on the neighbourhood-level is justified. Secondly, an overview of the Youngstown 2010 Plan is offered, explicating the position of the Idora neighbourhood within these plans and the role of the YNDC within such policies. The remainder of the article considers the “rightsizing” activities in Idoraarguing that this work represents a hybridized project exhibiting a combination of what Hackworth (2015; 2015a) has termed, “market first”, “managerial” and “non-market activities”. These activities are driven by two underpinning logics: firstly, a desire to re-marketize the Idoraneighborhood as a “neighborhood of choice” for both residential and commercial investors; and secondly and relatedly, to ‘re-socialise’ Idora through an active process of social and cultural re-integration and engagement, albeit in ways that operate to marginalise poorerresidents. Such attempts cohere arounda privileging of homeownership and values of propriety, responsibility, and civic engagement as a means for neighbourhood stabilization, revitalization and effective “rightsizing”. The article concludes by considering both the pitfalls and possibilities represented through “rightsizing” strategies, situating the Idora case within the wider politics of urban redevelopment in the context of urban shrinkage and decline. It is argued that this particular example of ‘rightsizing’ is indicative of an emergent approach to urban citizenship, in which neighborhoods deemed saveable are subject to new forms of social and economic integration, working to further entrench uneven urban geographies.
Urban Decline, Shrinkage, and ‘Rightsizing’
In recent years, there has been growing interest in processes of urban depopulation, decline and abandonment. While these processes are established features of urban environments and urban studies, cities variously identified as “shrinking”, “declining” or “abandoned”, have come to be seen as urban forms in need of both practical and theoretical intervention (Hollander and Nemeth, 2011; Mallach, 2012; Dewar and Thomas, 2013; Smith and Kirkpatrick, 2015). Historically, cities have been conceptualized and approached as sites of growth(or potential growth) with “shrinkage” seen as a largelyanomalous and temporary phenomenon. However, sustained patterns of deindustrialization, suburbanisation, urban decline, racism and segregation, are defining features of increasing numbers of cities, present not as discrete, atypical events within arcs of urban expansion but as pervasive features of contemporary urban spaces (Pedroni, 2011; Beauregard, 2012; Martinez-Fernandez et al, 2012; Mallach, 2012).
While such cities are not confined to any one country or region, they are shaped by the specific economic, political and institutional contexts in which they are located. In the United States, it is the former industrial cities of the northeast and Midwest that have been hit particularly hard. Here, throughout the “Rust Belt”combinations of profound job losses, recession, housing and foreclosure crisis, racism, state retrenchment, and the flight of public and private capitalhave produced landscapes of striking abandonment and disrepair(Pedroni, 2011; Beauregard, 2012; Mallach, 2012; Dewar and Thomas, 2013; Hackworth, 2015).
Recently, academic focus has shifted away from exploring the roots and consequences of decline to instead investigating the urban strategies employed to ameliorate and redress these conditions. This developing interest has been piqued by the emergence of urban strategies that have purportedly eschewed a commitment to ‘growth’ and instead planned for- or in the context of- shrinkage. Here cities facing marked depopulation and related patterns of decline, such as Youngstown, Detroit, and Buffalo,have embraced “rightsizing” policies. Although not everywhere conceived or performed in the same way, such interventions seek to stabilize cities in economic, infrastructural, environmental and demographic terms, through the consolidation of resources, remediation of vacancy and blight, stabilization of the population, improved services and quality of life, and renewed economic investment. The aim of places enacting such approaches is to emerge as “smaller, healthier cities” (Mallach, 2012).While these policies consist of diverse actors pursuing a range of different practices and operate in a variety of ways, “rightsizing” approaches tend to be based upon a number of key components: “community development in salvageable parts of the city, administrative restructuring for sustainable public services, democratic initiatives that encourage citizens to contribute and direct the form of their city, and unbuilding or reshaping the city physically.”(Hummel, 2015, p.401).
Within the burgeoning academic literature, rightsizing strategies have been treated in a number of ways. In its most benign rendering, “rightsizing”has been seen as representing a pragmatic response to observable urban realities of vacancy, blight and depopulation. Here it is a strategy identified by some as an opportunity to remodel urban spaces in fiscally and environmentally more efficient and sustainable ways(Schilling and Logan, 2008; Kildee et al., 2009; Hummel, 2015). Others have pushed this further, seeing such spaces as offering a more equitable reorganisation of urban life. Parr (2014) for instance, suggests that the retraction of capital may provide a context in which a new commons may emerge, where urban spaces are less shaped by and bound to the dictates of capital markets (see also Schindler, 2014; 2016).
However, much emerging academic work has come to view “rightsizing” through a more critical lens. Political economists have instead focused on such policies as marking the intensification of exclusionary urban processes, underpinned by the dual logics of urban neoliberalization and austerity(Akers, 2013; 2015; Aalbers, 2014; Hackworth, 2015, 2015a; Hackworth and Nowakowski, 2015). Hackworth and Nowakowski, (2015, p.529) for instance, have pointed to the way in which market-oriented rationalities have dominated ‘rightsizing’ policies in the United States as “a multiscalar, multidimensional set of forces and impulses…produce and reinforce a market-led approach to land abandonment within many American cities.” Particularly significant here has been the relative lack of federal and state resources available to citiesaccentuated by the recession and housing crisis, which compelurban administrations to pursue more market-oriented responses to urban depopulation and decline (Peck, 2012; Rhodes and Russo, 2013; Hackworth, 2015; Hackworth and Nowakowski, 2015).
While this body of work has been pivotal in advancing our conceptualisations of “rightsizing”, it has tended to exhibit a number of obfuscations, which this paper seeks to productively exploit. Firstly, as (redacted) argue in this issue, there are often discrepancies between planning ideas and actual forms of implementation, with existing work tending to say more about the intentions of ‘rightsizing’ policies than their actual manifestations. There is a need to examine not simply what policies assert but what they are used to do.A related issue is the concentration of existing analysis at the city-level, which often obscures the complexity and heterogeneity of “rightsizing” policies as they come to be enacted. Within such analyses, both city planning policies and cities themselves are accorded an intelligibility, a coherence that they rarely possess in practice. In trying to account for or develop typologies for cities as a whole, the varied nature of “rightsizing” within cities is suppressed. “Rightsizing” strategies consist of a series of diffused urban projects, initiated and practiced by a range of different actors characteristic of the shift from central “urban government” to more collaborative “urban governance” (Elwood, 2002; Lake and Newman, 2002; Bernt, 2009; Pedroni, 2011; Schatz, 2013). This is particularly important in the United States context given the relative weakness of city administrations and planning departments (redacted). In Detroit, for instance, Detroit Works, which brings together city administration, philanthropic organisations, and CDCs, has been central to the orchestration of the city’s rightsizingstrategy (Schindler, 2016; redacted, this issue). Similarly, in Youngstown, much of the actual implementation of the 2010 Planwithin the Idoraneighborhoodhas been ceded to the YNDC, rather than being overseen and implemented by the city administration.
The focus beyond the city-level is important given the uneven and inconsistent nature of rightsizing, as even within cities, neighborhoods are conceived of and acted upon in different ways. “Rightsizing” is imagined and enacted in ways that both reflect and refract fragmented geographies. Indeed, while work has identified the different fates assigned to variously classified neighborhoods (redacted; Aalbers, 2014; 2014a), less has been said about the actual processes of “rightsizing” in these areas. Where research has looked at this it has tended, for instance, to focus upon the prevalence of demolition within the most marginalised neighborhoods (Hackworth, 2014). What the case of Idora presented below allows for is an investigation into how “rightsizing” operates within a neighborhood identified as a target for deeper redevelopment and investment. This is important as altering the focus of analysis challenges some of the assumptions present within existing literature. To see “rightsizing” as being solely characteristic of the deepening of urban neoliberalization, of urban austerity- or indeed of more sustainable and equitable forms of living- misses the complex ways in which all of these processes and qualities are simultaneously in evidence in cities like Youngstown and neighborhoods such as Idora, albeit to differing degrees. What the focus on Idora reveals is the competing logics that underpin rightsizing policies, and the need for a conceptualisation of “rightsizing” as an urban strategy replete with multiplicity. Indeed, while the analysis below remains minded of the embeddedness of neighborhoods within wider social, economic and spatial arrangements, a focus on the more micro-practices of “rightsizing” adds an important dimension to existing analyses.
Idora, Youngstown and the 2010 Plan
The Youngstown 2010 Plan
In 2005, following an extensive process of planning and civic engagement, Youngstown introduced its citywide 2010 Plan. The policy represented the first comprehensive planning document the city had formulated since 1951- a strategy amended just once when it was updated in 1974. The city that the 2010 Plan was oriented towards was very different from that of the early 1970s. Since that time, the precipitous collapse of the city’s steel industry occurred alongside ongoing flight of public and private capital as both residents and businesses left the city foradjacent suburban areas and beyond. Once one of the nation’s leading steel producers, the industry dramatically collapsed from 1977 onwards as within the space of roughly a decade, the city lost 29,000 manufacturing jobs (Ott, 1987). These losses have been compounded more recently as between 2000 and 2008, an estimated 24,000 jobs were lost within the Mahoning Valley in which Youngstown is located (Schmidt, 2008).Paralleling this, between 1950 and 2010, Youngstown’s population fell from a high of approximately 168,000 to just under 67,000, representing a loss of over 60 per cent of its total inhabitants. The collapse of the city’s tax base along with diminished state and federal resources served to intensify social and physical decline.
The outcome of these processes is a city scarred by diminishing services and amenities, a degrading of infrastructure, and a litany of social and economic ills including high unemployment, crime, vacancy and poverty. 2006-2010 American CommunitySurvey(ACS) population estimates suggested that Youngstown had 7,041 vacant units, amounting to 19.8 per cent ofthe city’s total housing stock[1]. Similarly, for the same period the percentage of city families living in poverty was 27.2 per cent[2].Indeed, in 2011, a Brookings Institution report identified Youngstown as possessing the highest rate of concentrated poverty in the nation as between 2000 to 2005-09, the proportion of residents living in extreme-poverty tracts increased by over a third, to 49.7 per cent (Kneebone et al, 2011). As with other Rust Belt cities such inequalities are not evenly distributed but are reflective of deep racial cleavages, as the poorest and most disinvested neighborhoods within the city are disproportionately black (Pedroni, 2011; Safransky, 2014; Hackworth, 2016).