How can we revitalize american cities?

Question

most wealthy people in cities go to live in suburbs. what is left behind is the poor and high crime areas of an inner city. most commerce takes place in the outskirts, near strip malls and shopping malls which are miles away from the actual city. How can we bring people back to the city and revitalize what was once the heart of a bustling commerce center?

Answer 1

Having or creating a good, strong redevelopment agency or corporation to oversee, plan, and expedite revitalization is key to getting and maintaining good results.
You need to bring in more economic activity to the city center. Provide incentives and make it worth it for companies to locate jobs downtown rather than in suburbs. It's cheaper and easier to build an office park out in the suburbs than in a downtown and therefore office space is cheaper to rent out there. You would need some policy to discourage suburban office development and encourage downtown development such as property tax rate based on how much land you develop; high rises use much less land. This is just my idea, I've never heard of any type of policy like this before but something with the same purpose might exist.

Once you got more jobs you want to make sure workers stick around downtown after 5pm. So you need to bring in retail, restaurants, bars, clubs, theatres, ect... and make it a destination for entertainment and shopping. Professional sports venues like a stadium or arena will help attract business and development.

Another very important component to urban revialtization is bring in people to live there. You want to make the downtown a 24 hour destination. Encouraging dense residential contstruction will help bring new middle and upper class residents to the urban core. Usually they tend to be young professionals or empty nesters. If you want to bring families back to the city you have to make sure the city has good education options. If you can't fix every public school then make sure good charter and magante schools are available too. Grocery stores and other commercial services need to be close by too for these new urban residents; many times cities forget that component at the beginning stages of residential redevelopment in downtowns. Try to build affordable housing too so people that work in the service inducsty downtown can live near their jobs. Many times cities concentrate on luxury condos and that limits how many residents will move there. Crime, or lack there of, is key component to making sure people will want to downtown. Wealthy and middle class people do not want to live where there is crime.

And all of this development hinges upon how good of a transportation network there is. Land use and transportation planning go hand in hand. If you are going to have a dense city center good public transit will be key. Pretty much light rail, heavy rail, and even commuter rail are all essential to make sure people can get downtown w/o a car and in a reasonable amount of time. Relying on buses alone w/o rail will limit how much development can occur. In addition to good public transit, having enough parking for those who drive is important too. But make parking expensive to encourage transit usage.

There are many cities that have done these or similar measures aand have reviatlized their cores, I'll use my location, San Diego, as an example. After the city center declined for 20+ years the City Center Redevelopment Corporation (CCDC) was formed in the late 70's, which started and continues to this day to revitalizing downtown SD. In 1986 Horton Plaza, an open air shopping mall, opened and that basically started downtown redevelopment. They took and restored the Gaslamp quarter, took out the strip clubs and porn shops and filled historic building with restaruants, clubs,movie theathers, ect.. Since then they built new high rise condos, a new convention center, a new ballpark which is even attracting more development. The trolley (light rail) opened in the early 80's and brought people downtown. If you want to see a downtown that is kind of just past the beginning of redevelopment look at Los Angeles, there starting to bring more residents in and add more restaurants and entertainment venues.

Alright that was probably more than you needed or expected. I miss studying this stuff so that's probably why I got carried away. anyways hope that helped.

Answer 2

That's only true in some American cities, however. Manhattan and San Francisco certainly does not need "re-vitalizing", they're doing just fine attracting businesses and wealthy people, thank you very much.

I think density matters if you want a lively city center. The more mix-used developments and highrises you can squeeze in, the better. But then, urban planners like Jane Jacobs have been saying this for over 40 years, and the government still doesn't get it.

Answer 3

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