Yesterday, The Michigan Association of Planning met at the Detroit Historical Museum. They heard from several speakers. And they had a cross section of people listening. City Council President Charles Pugh was there. The keynote speaker was Dr. Eric Allison. He’s a professor of urban planning at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Allison said that preservation of old buildings can further political careers because it spurs economic development. Some in the audience looked to Pugh. But he didn’t show much expression.
Dr. Allison is taking the long view backwards and forwards to see how cities can rebuild themselves. All is not lost, he might say. No need for hopelessness. His new book is Historic Preservation and The Livable City. It has lessons from New York that Detroiters can learn. Chris McCarus interviewed Dr. Allison outside the Museum. Allision describes how New York hit bottom in the mid-1970′s.
Allison: The real bottom was when the state took over New York City’s finances. They couldn’t even trust them with their own budget. (The films) Blade Runner and Escape From New York looked like it was 10 or 15 years in the future at best. People wrote it off. We lost 1 million people in a very short length of time, a couple of decades. And everybody thought it was going to continue. The conventional wisdom was that cities in general were dead and New York in particular was dead..
What changed was in part the movement back to the city, people like myself started looking at the old brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan and noticing that you could buy an entire 19th century house with all wooden floors and wainscotting all that kind of stuff for the price of a mortgage that was the same as a small studio apartment rental in Greenwich Village. People were willing to take the chance to come back to the city and do that. People wanted the urban experience even when you didn’t want to ride the subway at night because you were too afraid of being mugged.
CMC: How bad did those subways look?
Allison: You couldn’t see out the windows. The system was very badly broken down. We did not use our local subway station after 8 o’clock at night because you did not want to be down there by yourself.
CMC: And now Dr. Eric Allison you’re suggesting that Detroit build a transit system as quick as it can.
Allison: Well I think a transit system is one of the things you need to be a livable city. It’s one of those things that has worked very well for a lot of people. If you’re older and can’t drive anymore in a city that is totally car oriented you’re trapped in your house, unless you know somebody who can move you around. If there’s mass transit you can get on it and go there. One of the interesting phenomena happening right now is older people are moving back into the cities because they don’t want to have to drive. They can still have all the amenities. They’re not quite ready to go into assisted living. But they don’t feel safe driving on the road. If you’ve ever been down to Florida they aren’t safe driving. But they can have a nice house in the city. They can go to the opera and the movies and they don’t need a car. That requires either fair density or mass transit. I think one of the things that a place like (Detroit) could use to tie the parts of the city that are viable and in some cases vibrant is to have some way to get around other than by car.
CMC: You’ve got a new book. What’s the name of it?
Allison: Historic Preservation and The Livable City.
CMC: You described a time in New York in the 1970′s where there was a real downward spiral in real estate. Could you take us through those 4-5 steps that typically would happen.
Allison: The real estate market crashed. Businesses were moving out of the city. At one time, almost every major corporation had its headquarters in New York City. And there was an exodus to the south. Air-conditioning made the south viable. It was cheaper. There was no union labor. And who wanted to be in New York? So businesses just moved out. One after another. The skyscrapers became empty.
CMC: Sounds very much like Detroit.
Allison: Yeah it was. Very much like Detroit. And this happened in Pittsburgh. It’s still happening in Cleveland. They’re losing 5,000 people a year in Cleveland. It happened in Cincinnati. It happened in all the rustbelt cities. New York wasn’t alone. It was just the biggest. And perhaps the most surprising for a people, for a place that had so much going for it in the theater and the arts and that kind of thing could collapse so badly and so quickly.
CMC: And if there was an abandoned building what would happen to it?
Allison: The poster child for that is the Bronx. There were lots of people who owned buildings. They needed lots of work. They couldn’t get good tenants or any tenants at all. So what they would do is hire an arsonist and then they’d get the insurance. Howard Cosell, literally, was calling the World Series and turned around and looked from the booth north into the South Bronx. And all he could see was flames. And buildings were going down night by night by night.
CMC: The Bronx is Burning.
Allison: He said: Ladies and Gentlemen the Bronx is burning. And parts of the South Bronx have never recovered. There was a huge exodus from there. There are historic neighborhoods up there that are still basically there for the taking.
CMC: There was a supposition that you couldn’t raise the value of the real estate so better to just eliminate it. What was the thinking? That seems very much like Detroit now.
Allison: Exactly what you have the problem here is that you’ve got a building. It’s in really bad shape. The amount of money it’s gonna take to repair it is greater than the building is worth. Nobody wants to buy it for exactly the same reason. So what are you gonna do with it? A lot of people just walked away. And arson tends to follow a building that’s been totally abandoned. And lots of people decided to burn the building down themselves. There were too many fires for it to have been just kids deciding to torch some place.
CMC: So then what broke that cycle?
Allison: Parts of the Bronx are still in recovery. But what broke the cycle was a change in the economy. People who moved back into neighborhoods and made them viable so that neighborhoods that had been written off like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and Park Slope in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s hard to image the Upper West Side was full of absentee landlord buildings that were crumbling. Now it’s some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The streets were dangerous around places like the Museum of Natural History just like here.
CMC: We are standing outside the Detroit Historical Museum, across from the Detroit Public Library and across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Allison: And areas like that were dangerous and not great for tourists. But people homesteaded them. Some developers saw the opportunity and started renovating and restoring buildings. At some point it tipped over. There were enough people doing that that the city began to get some hope. The government began doing things that actually worked. When a government is in complete despair you grab at anything that comes along. If there is some momentum going then a good government will try to capture that and build on it. That’s a large part of what happened in New York City.
CMC: So what suggestions for urban policy do you suggest for the new Governor Rick Snyder?
Allison: All the studies show that money invested in historic restoration and preservation gives you a multiplier effect in terms of the economy and jobs. It’s not a cost thing. You get more money back than you put in. So why shouldn’t you do it? Why shouldn’t you have historic tax breaks to encourage people to redo historic buildings that are empty rather than having an empty building there?
CMC: But Dr. Eric Allison, the way you just described it, the money it takes to fix a building up is gonna be a lot more than what it’s going to be worth when you’re done. Where does the positive accounting show up?
Allison: Because you’re creating jobs. And they tend to be local jobs. You are spending money for materials and they tend to be local materials. You’re not sending for glass from Taiwan and steel from Korea. You’re getting local people and materials. The carbon footprint of a restored building is less than that of a brand new building. The whole idea here is this is an economic generator with a heavy multiplier on it.
So you get a better looking place, which means a place people want to live. You get economic development. And what’s wrong with this? And the building is already there. Let’s use it. We’re not against new construction. But why not fix up what’s there already before you start to build more. The World Trade Center was a mistake. The Renaissance Center was a mistake at the time they were built. They were thought to be solutions to the problem. But they made the problem worse. So start small and work your way up. It doesn’t cost that much. And then you get the momentum.