Vacancy
An aerial view of a row house block in Baltimore plagued by the “broken tooth syndrome:” Lots of vacant land where housing once stood.
In last week’s New Yorker, writer Nick Paumgarten pointed out the damaging effects of the economic downturn on the urban landscape. “Putting aside the long-discussed public projects that are endangered or doomed… dozens of private undertakings have stalled or died. The calls go out to the architects: pencils down.”
This, in turn, creates a glut of vacant and underutilized land. In Baltimore, where I live, that economic downturn has been happening slowly over the last 50 years. The city has lost 400,000 residents since its population peak in the ’50s. According to current city records, there are 16,496 vacant buildings and 17,617 vacant or underutilized lots.
“Vacant space tends to remain vacant, in anticipation of an upswing,” Paumgarten writes. “Tax policy, inertia, and the eternal belief that things will get better (profitable) again usually trump civic dreams of pocket parks or stickball fields. Whoever ends up owning it all, after the foreclosures and the workouts are done, holds out for the big payday.”
I’ve been curious to know how people are working with these vacant lots in the meantime. Is there a way to activate land when development dollars are not available?
Cleveland has an interesting answer in its group Pop Up City. They hold temporary events on vacant sites around town, things like movie nights, neighborhood dog parks, and flea markets with stalls for local crafters.
The TKF Foundation, based in Annapolis, Maryland, funds projects in the Mid-Atlantic that transform underutilized spots into parks and gardens for public use. They funded a project in East Baltimore to help a pastor turn a drug corner into a park; they supported a community member who planted thousands of indigenous species on a vacant lot, turning it into a full-blown arboreteum. (You can read about the projects in a new book titled Open Spaces Sacred Places.)
Earlier this month I took part in a design conversation around the topic of vacant land and housing. Over 100 people showed up with design schematics, slideshows, maps, photos, and ideas. It’s incredible to see the kinds of grassroots efforts that are happening outside the official planning process: there are farms, community gardens, and designs for collectives of engaged individuals to band together and revitalize blocks of vacant houses together. A sculptor named Sarah Doherty has endeavored to take back the alley behind her house using art. She has affixed pages of poetry to the chainlink fence and placed sculpture on vacant lots. Neighborhood kids, some of them members of a local gang, approached her to see if they could post their own poetry or help with the art installations. Sarah has found that the simplest acts can generate compelling results. After cleaning up the trash and condom wrappers from one particularly dirty spot, she filled in all of the cracks in the asphalt and concrete with blue chalk. “The trash has not come back,” she says.
Close-up on the blue chalk in the cracked asphalt. (Reminds me a bit of artist Andy Goldsworthy and the work documented in the film Rivers and Tides.) Photo courtesy of Sarah Doherty.
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One of the more exquisite programs to come to television, only to die for its quality, was “EZ Streets.” (1996)http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116161/
Among the most compelling images on the program was in its opening credits (as I remember them). A helicopter shot…circling over a city, one sees a closer and closer vision of devastation as the camera descends to the scene of the core action. At first you see a recognizable urban pattern, but then the camera reveals block after block of urban decay, focusing eventually on blocks of six, or three, or one standing house or building.
This place—the never-recovered city of Detroit after the 1967 riots—featured prominently in this very dark program about civic corruption. Among the most memorable scenes in the series took place in an abandoned (aren’t they all now) Albert Kahn designed factory. A newly-elected, young, first, black mayor of the city, standing among the cadence of concrete-capitaled columns, has his family threatened unless he votes for the casino initiative in the city.
I remember, as then-president of Detroit’s AIA chapter, calling Dennis Archer, a new, but not the first, black mayor of the city, to offer the organization’s site-selection and zoning assistance after he threw his support behind a new casino initiative. This was about three years after this scene appeared on “EZ Streets.”
Now, more than ten years later, Detroit’s latest mayor is in jail, one of the three licensed casinos is in bankruptcy, Congress has denied funds for the sustainability of the city-sustaining automobile industry, and the city lacks the funds to demolish the abandoned and progressively collapsing houses I have seen on my drive to work every day for the past decade, that represent the move of more than a million—more than a million!—people from this city in the past generation.
When I was working on the design of the Chrysler Technical Center —the move of the auto maker from Detroit’s Highland park neighborhood to the suburbs beginning a decade earlier in 1988—we often talked about planning for that which was left behind in the city. One of the more startling images was offered by a Chrysler exec, “We should turn Highland park into a cornfield,” he said. “Everybody wants to build in a cornfield.”
I think I’ll start planting.
Comment by Jim Meredith — December 13, 2008, @ 7:23 pm
My experience with inner city gentrification was in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood, one of the oldest of neighborhoods in this country, with Pedigree going back to William Penn himself. A neighborhood that has long lost its appeal to most suburban dwellers and was mostly inhabited by old hippies and newly arrived artists looking for cheap homes within walking distance from the center of the city. I worked on a number of projects in the neighborhood trying to make a difference in a place where the notorious “Broken Tooth Syndrome” was in full bloom. I designed a fence and a gate, which were the security barrier for a parking lot, mostly used by customers to a local food business and an artist community working on the upper floors above the commercial ground floor store and warehouse. The big dilemma was what kind of fence was going to be suitable in a neighborhood filled with abandoned buildings and cars? where crime was always just around the corner and where buildings were continuously sprayed with graffiti art of the kind “good bad and ugly”. I went for the best we could afford within the budget, with the help of a local artist came up with a design that was a mix between a serious and a Funky look that would fit the neighborhoods mixed buildings. Well to my great surprise the fence was liked by all. The old timers were delighted anyone would do anything better than a chain link fence, the artist felt an immediate connection to the artistic elements of the fence, the customers coming from the wealthier parts of town felt this was a happening place and the gangs roaming the streets at night felt it was not to be marked by them since it was Cool enough as an element and landmark in the neighborhood. So, now 15 years later the fence is still intact never once marked!! yes it is worth going the extra mile when trying to give these places a second chance, it just has to be capturing the diversity of the community, not more not less.
Comment by vibeke — December 18, 2008, @ 2:08 pm
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