At the start of the nineteenth century, Americans left dense enclaves on the eastern seaboard to populate the empty spaces in the hinterland; at the start of the twenty-first century, Americans are moving back to cities. After a period of net losses in the second half of the twentieth century, many older cities are again experiencing population growth. But not every urban area is thriving, and many of our urban areas are a shadow of their former selves—why have some cities been able to adapt and thrive as conditions have changed, while others have not? This chapter will discuss...

Between 2000 and 2010, the population of metropolitan areas grew on average by 10.8 percent in the United States. This average masks considerable heterogeneity. Of 366 metropolitan areas, 42 lost population while 65 grew by 20 percent or more during this decade.

City decline leads to calls for a policy response. In the United States and other developed countries, a wide variety of revitalization policies have been proposed, from the construction of major infrastructure to high-tech clusters to various types of urban beautification policies to attempts to attract “talent.”

In the absence of a good understanding of what drives city...

One striking characteristic of shrinking metropolitan statistical areas such as Detroit and Cleveland is the amount of vacant land and number of abandoned buildings in close proximity to the central business districts (CBDs) of their central cities. This lies in stark contrast to growing MSAs such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Boston. Yet, in many shrinking MSAs, such as Detroit and Cleveland, one can find suburbs that do not show the same signs of decline as can be seen within the city limits of the central city. The spatial patterns of population decline observed in Detroit and Cleveland...

Over the past forty years, metropolitan areas have grown in both population and employment (see Figure 4.1), with suburban growth within metros outpacing that of central cities. This chapter examines trends in employment and population growth in cities and suburbs of the nation’s metro areas, in particular focusing on the historical deindustrialization and the loss of manufacturing jobs in cities.¹

To analyze these population and employment shifts for the four decades since 1970, we use county-level data from the one hundred largest metropolitan areas. In each metro area, we use the central county containing the largest principal city as a...

Mid-sized manufacturing cities have struggled for decades, suffering the consequences of deindustrialization and suburbanization (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Glaeser and Kahn 2001a; Krugman 1991). Some cities, however, have been able to reinvent themselves and are recognized as vital communities today. We call these “resurgent cities,” and they provide important lessons on the elements necessary to promote and sustain revitalization efforts.

Learning from the path that resurgent cities have followed is of particular importance for cites like Springfield, Massachusetts, New England’s fourth-largest city. Known as the “City of Firsts,” Springfield was for many years the center of a prosperous 200-mile industrial...

At the start of the twentieth century, the textile industry had started to shift its base from New England to the South; by the 1920s, North Carolina had become the center. At the peak of the industry in the United States, in the late 1940s, 9.3 percent of all textile jobs were located in North Carolina. Many of these jobs were in rural, small towns. Rural manufacturing was at the core of North Carolina’s economic development strategy in the twentieth century, and the textile industry has been one of the top two largest employers in rural and small towns since...

The transformation of the United States from an agrarian nation to the world’s leading industrial economy during the nineteenth century began in the small cities of the northeastern United States such as Reading, Pennsylvania, or Lowell, Massachusetts. Many of these places remained important manufacturing centers even after the growth of larger industrial hubs like Detroit or Pittsburgh. All of them, however, lost most of their industrial base in the decades following the end of World War II and have struggled since to find a new postindustrial identity and identify new economic drivers to replace their lost manufacturing base and to...

Asking a group of city planning students for measures of neighborhood health usually produces a good list of textbook answers: crime, school quality, poverty rate, number of vacant structures, price trends, and so forth.

Ask that same group of students why they choose to live where they do and another kind of answer emerges: “I like my neighborhood because it’s diverse,” “I want to be near the bar scene,” “I want a place with a yard for my dog,” “I need quiet, so I live in a neighborhood that’s mostly older people,” “I want to live near my extended family.”...

As America’s older industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh grew during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their spatial configuration followed a common path shared by most Western cities of that or earlier periods. Within the constraints imposed by water bodies or topography, their growth followed the classic density gradient model of urban form (Muth 1969), in which the highest densities were in the center, and gradually diminished with distance from the center. As the cities filled out their boundaries, or in some cases expanded them, they grew in a continuous fashion, in which nearly every property was improved...

All cities face a constant challenge of confronting deterioration of vacant, abandoned, and substandard properties. The costs of neglect—promulgated by these vacant, abandoned, substandard, or tax-delinquent properties—are real; while these burdens have long been apparent, in recent years the costs of neglect have been empirically demonstrated and verified, and they are large. To stabilize a city’s real property, these external costs must be internalized. This problem is complex, and no single approach will solve it. Each city needs a range of options tailored to its specific inventory of neglected real property.

In addressing the costs of abandoned properties...

As former manufacturing cities in the United States seek to reinvent their economies, they have engaged in several types of revitalization strategies to use their key asset, land, to attract investment in new industries. Land is a critical ingredient for revitalization because it supports activities that generate income for both the public and private sectors, which, in turn, generate additional municipal revenues by the entity occupying the land.

To attract income-producing land uses, municipalities employ such economic development incentives as accelerated zoning code approvals and/or amenity or infrastructure improvements, including open space (parks, gardens), transportation (highways, bike lanes, parking), or...

“I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs,” Jane Jacobs wrote in a rarely cited passage ofThe Death and Life of Great American Cities. “Towns, suburbs, and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities. We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of the behavior, and the imagined behavior of towns. To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound confusion” (Jacobs 1961: 16).

All too often, urban planners...

Between 2003 and 2009, the gap between the educational attainment of the population and the educational demands of available jobs (that is, “structural unemployment”) increased in all but four of the nation’s hundred largest metropolitan areas (Rothwell and Berube 2011). Given that a larger education gap between the demand and supply of educated workers is associated with a higher unemployment rate in the metropolitan area (2011), these data demonstrate the need to improve educational attainment in all metropolitan areas.

Equally troubling, educational attainment tends to be lower for demographic groups that tend to be relatively overrepresented in our nation’s metropolitan...