Depopulation Plan Needed For Windsor To Survive

By Alan Halberstadt
City of Windsor Councillor
Ward 3

As a mostly bogus debate rages over an amendment to Windsor’s Official Plan to halt the sacrifice of more agricultural land to unchecked commercial developments, new descriptors are surfacing in the urban planning world.

Windsor needs to heed the examples of rustbelt American cities such as Youngstown, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and sister city Detroit. These former manufacturing beacons are undergoing painful re-inventions of themselves focused on planning strategies that debunk the long-held belief that the outward growth of cities is good.

A librarian friend recently sent me an eye-popping article from Cityscape, a US government journal of policy development and research. The document heralds the implementation of “smart decline” for cities previously enamoured with “urban sprawl” and later “smart growth.”

Justin B. Hollander at Boston’s Tufts University looks at the increasing shrinkage of Flint and Youngstown and the strategies these cities are taking to “shrink effectively.” The article considers how “depopulation” creates different physical impacts, notably housing abandonment.

Youngstown is held up as a model of depopulation planning, having shrunk from 148,000 to 74,000 since 1950, when it was a bastion of steel making. “The city came to terms with its ongoing population loss and called for a better, smaller Youngstown focusing on improving the quality of life for existing residents, rather than attempting to repopulate the city.”

In Flint, devastated by the General Motors pullout in the 1980s, Hollander studied the changing housing-unit density in core neighbourhoods.

Some neighbourhoods changed to accommodate a smaller number of occupied houses while others did not, resulting in a lower quality of life for residents left behind, triggering strategies on how to customize land uses to right-size the physical features of a neighbourhood to match its smaller population.

Strategies embraced by smart decline proponents envision the conversion of bulldozed neighbourhoods to urban farming and greening.

In Detroit, the idea of widespread sideyard acquisitions of vacant lots has been introduced to reduce housing density, a process described as “blotting.” The urban fabric changed, not by city plan or regulation, but by actions of individual landowners in expanding their lots to mirror density patterns in suburbia.

The purchase of sideyards can expand properties and accommodate nice green space, gardening and even reforestation.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, facing the bankruptcy of his city, is moving on a controversial plan to identify blighted areas, bulldoze abandoned houses and cut off city services to neighbourhoods beyond the point of no return.

This would effectively, if not legally, shrink the traditional boundaries of Detroit, and force the state of Michigan to step in and claim a new budding greenbelt. Depopulation strategies such as this create an urban donut, featuring a shrunken core, surrounded by a buffer of green space and reclaimed agriculture. Beyond the buffer is the urban sprawl generated by “white flight” migration over the last half century.

This brings us back to Windsor. While our demographics are different, and we are not at the same stage as Youngstown, Flint or Detroit, there are troubling harbingers. Windsorites who drove to Caesars Windsor in April to see Bill Clinton might have caught a stomach-churning glimpse of urban blight east of the casino in the Glengarry Marentette district.

Twenty-year-old predictions that neighbourhoods adjacent to the casino would soon resemble Atlantic City are hauntingly coming true. A trip downtown or to Indian Road on the west side, will give you an even more gruesome picture of a city in decline.

It is time for city leaders to face facts, as Youngstown and Flint have done over the last 15 years, and accept the idea that the salad days of manufacturing wealth and rollicking urban growth are not coming back.

Instead of addressing these realities head on, Windsor City Hall is fending off demands by developers and lawyers with no civic conscience to plough up more farmers’ fields. The city’s planning department, working on a new Official Plan, has hard demographic evidence to support its position that no new greenfield lands need to be designated for commercial growth for the next five years.

A 2007 consultant study identified 1.7 million square feet of vacant commercial floor space in Windsor, 1.8 million square feet of potential additional floor space and 69.1 acres of vacant designated commercial land.

Developers and the mainstream media love to paint the planning department’s position as a “development freeze” that sends out the wrong message that Windsor is anti-business. This plays into their agenda of being able to hand-pick their own locations to build more far-flung big boxes and continue to cannibalize a core area with 20-percent vacancy rates.

When City Council debated the merits in March of requiring developers to pay for a market impact study to justify the location of large commercial development outside the current zoning designation, Michael Jagatic, the Development Chair of the downtown BIA, delivered a haymaker to the jaw of the urban sprawlers.

“Being thankful for any kind of development the city can get is like taking up smoking to lose weight,” he says.

These growth addicts, sadly including the Development Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, dismiss the city’s offer to shop investors around to identify existing vacant sites for redevelopment, such as the former Home Depot next to Devonshire Mall.

Meanwhile, GTA municipality Markham is planning to freeze expansion onto prime farmland to establish a permanent food belt, heeding urban planning futurists who predict that only communities that can feed themselves will be sustainable.

Muddying the waters for Windsor is the last Stats Canada census in 2006, which showed a population increase of 8,000 to 216,473 from 2001. This census occurred prior to the stock market crash in 2008 and several other crippling blows tied specifically to Windsor’s economy and employment rate.

Anecdotal evidence tells us that migration out of the city has shrunk the population and a dearth of jobs has discouraged immigration. So we anxiously await the 2011 census. If that census shows depopulation, it will be evident that pulling back boundaries will be the only way for Windsor to survive.

Originally published in the May issue of BizX magazine. Reprinted with permission