Genesee County’s deputy register of deeds, Shannon Cooper, was surprised when she reviewed the numbers for Michigan Messenger. Cooper found that in May and June last year, the county, home to Flint, had 709 foreclosure filings. In May and June of this year, there were only 183.

However, it wasn’t all good news. Ingham County, home to Lansing, reported a 20 percent increase in May and June over last year.

You can read Heywood’s full report here.

The movement calls for communities to cordon off mostly vacant areas, cut them off from city services and let the land return to nature. It’s headed by Genesee County Land Bank Chairman Dan Kildee, who has drawn national attention for his efforts. As TWI noted recently, Kildee has been asked by the Obama administration and by a group of charities to explore the shrinking cities approach for other communities beyond Flint.

But urban ideas that play well on the national stage don’t always have the same reception closer to home, the Messenger says.

Businessman Dayne Walling and former state representative and current Genesee County Commissioner Brenda Clack, both Democrats, are facing off against one another in an August election. Both candidates recently expressed some doubts about the movement — and pressed for more details. Walling, for example, noted that there are thousands of houses that need to be torn down, “but we need to make sure that residents have every opportunity to weigh in on the process. Every neighborhood needs a unique solution.”

From the Messenger:

Clack called the shrinkage push a “political bullet,” adding that she is worried about residents who are low income or senior citizens living in properties that the land bank might have its eyes on being left out of a place to live.

“I don’t believe in removing people,” she said. “In some areas there are one or two abandoned homes on a block that need to be torn down, but we don’t even have the money to tear them down.”

Clack said that the shrinkage idea would “not be a top priority” for her if she was elected mayor.

“You re-pattern the city, you don’t shrink it,” she said.

Both candidates said they were concerned over the current lack of specifics regarding the shrinkage push.

“It’s partly controversial because not that much is known about it,” Walling said. “Right now it seems more like a catch phrase, not a plan.”

Former Flint Interim Mayor Michael Brown had jumpstarted the shrinking cities idea by suggesting in March that the city should cut off service to abandoned areas as a way to deal with blight.

Now that the shrinking cities idea is a movement, it could be something that sounds like a great idea — unless it happens to be your neighborhood that’s on the chopping block.

But it also may be an idea that’s going to pick up steam elsewhere. The Obama administration is seriously considering supporting the shrinking cities movement as a way to address economic decline,  reports the British newspaper, The Telegraph.

The Telegraph dubbed the idea a “shrink to survive” approach, and said it is being headed by a familiar name to TWI readers: Dan Kildee, founder and chairman of the Genesee County Land Bank in Flint. TWI profiled Kildee and his land bank last year. Land banks allow cities to acquire and reuse vacant and abandoned properties.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

The Telegraph has few other details on how this all is going to work. It’s also not clear how aggressively the Obama administration will embrace the idea. It’s true that in many ways, the shrinking cities movement is a “radical experiment,” as The Telegraph puts it. We are long accustomed in this country to the idea that only growth is good.

But the shrinking cities movement could quickly gain traction, despite its controversial nature. For all the towns and communities like Flint that have been smacked hard by the foreclosure crisis and are facing a deluge of abandoned and vacant properties, shrinking to survive soon may seem more like a smart move than a radical proposal.

As The Wall Street Journal reports today, other towns also in financial peril are considering another approach – “disincorporation.” It means dissolving a town — literally. That could allow residents to avoid paying local taxes, escape the costs of local services and pensions, and get other services more cheaply by sharing the costs with the surrounding county.

Disincorporations are rare, usually resulting from population declines that leave too few residents to support the government. The most recent in California occurred in 1972, when stalled growth and political instability led Cabazon to dissolve itself, according to the California Association of Local Agency Formation Commissions. In Washington state, the last one occurred in 1965, when Elberton gave up its autonomy after 70 years, according to the nonprofit Municipal Research and Services Center in Seattle.

Today, some small municipalities are exploring the step to escape some financial burdens that have been exacerbated by the recession.

Several small  towns in Washington state, Colorado, and California are considering disincorporation seriously, but it’s not clear whether they’ll have the legal authority to go through with it. Disincorporation wasn’t intended to be used by towns to escape financial burdens, according to The Journal. And besides, many counties and surrounding towns aren’t in much better financial shape, and are likely be reluctant to take on more costs.

Dissolving a town also means giving up a local government, with its ability to raise money through bond issues or taxes, and its control over development and zoning issues. The Journal described the move as a “once unthinkable” option for most communities. But as the shrinking cities movement and disincorporation attempts tell you, nothing’s off the table during a financial crisis.

Here’s Hungry Hungry Hippos:

While the story that Flint, Michigan, is considering bulldozing entire neighborhoods, blocking them off, and withdrawing city services from them is a sad and stark indicator of what’s happening in cities where the combination of the declining auto industry and the mortgage crisis are causing large population shifts, I’m not sure why Mary Kane thinks federal dollars would help avert it, or even why she thinks averting it is a good idea.

What interest does the federal government have in the city limits of Flint, Michigan?  What interest do we, as a society, have in keeping the residents of Flint, Michigan, living in Flint, Michigan, when their reason for being there is gone?

None, as far as I can tell.

Actually, I’m not talking about averting anything, and I’m sorry to have given that impression. Flint and other cities facing blight and looking to shrink their cities as a result may be going down exactly the right road. And, frankly, they may have little choice. But here’s the hard part: Reclaiming properties, tearing down blighted neighborhoods, reusing land on a large scale, and planning  for reconfiguring a city will take the kind of money many of these hard-hit places don’t have. They’ll need land banks, which are public authorities that can do these sorts of things. And those land banks need major resources and money from the government to reach the kind of capacity that will allow them to handle all this responsibility.

Flint is a leader in the shrinking-city movement because it has the Genesee County Land Bank, which is a model for the rest of the country. But as we’ve written, other communities are only now beginning to plan for land banks, and it can be a lengthy and expensive process to get one up and going. It took almost two years in Cleveland, where the foreclosure and abandonment crisis has been particularly severe. Unless the government gets behind these efforts, it’s like fighting a million-acre forest fire with a pick and a shovel, as housing expert Alan Mallach told us.

Mallach thinks the crisis requires a federal land bank. That may be a long time in coming, if it ever comes at all. Like Flint, other communities may be ready to join the shrinking city movement. But being ready – and having the money to actually make it work – are still two different things.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

Kildee’s land bank has become a national model for other communities wanting to take control of abandoned and trashed properties, clear blight, and find other uses for the land. TWI has reported extensively on land banks and the problems of vacant properties, as well as the proposals in Flint to begin shrinking the city. Flint isn’t alone, either. The New York Times reported last month that in Saginaw, Mich., and other hard-hit cities, Habitat for Humanity concentrates on tearing down blighted houses, rather than building new ones.

All of this is a testament to the dramatic crisis in some cities that hasn’t seemed to draw the attention of national policymakers. Lenders and the government can modify all the loans they want and hold off on new foreclosures, but that will do nothing to address the dilemma posed by vacant properties. It’s the back-end of the foreclosure process, and the damage is becoming permanent. The drastic measures in Flint — there’s no other way to describe cordoning off abandoned portions of the city and leaving them behind — should be a wake-up call. But it’s not clear anyone is listening.

Communities that have land banks — and there aren’t enough of them — need major resources from the federal government to address the scope of the problem. There’s no way they can do it on their own. Until that happens, if it ever does, expect more troubled communities to resort to things like shrinking their cities and enlisting charitable groups to tear down deteriorated houses.

As the mortgage crisis continues, it’s become clear that in some markets, banks and lenders dumped their trash and walked away, leaving cities that already weren’t thriving even worse off. It’s almost unbelievable to hear local officials in these areas discuss abandoned swaths of their land. (Kildee talks about creating a new “Flint Forest.”) But that’s the reality these days, in the American cities and neighborhoods we’ve simply left behind.

At Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, blogger Michael Shedlock passes along a chilling consequence of the emptying of American cities. In Flint, Mich., city officials are considering simply cordoning off mostly abandoned portions of the city, and no longer providing city services there, or asking the few people still remaining to leave.  It’s like something out of one of those futuristic horror movies.

From MLive, the blog of the Flint Journal, via Shedlock:

Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable — shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service.

Temporary Mayor Michael Brown made the off-the-cuff suggestion Friday in response to a question at a Rotary Club of Flint luncheon about the thousands of empty houses in Flint.

City Council President Jim Ananich said the idea has been on his radar for years.

The city is getting smaller and should downsize its services accordingly by asking people to leave sparsely populated areas, he said.

I haven’t heard of anything like this before.

People get outraged by AIG bonuses, and taken aback by bank failures. To me, the abandonment of America’s cities — and the complete and utter failure of Washington to recognize it for the crisis it has become — is the shocking part of foreclosures and the financial meltdown.

It is the first time Obama has used that line, which was well received by the union-heavy crowd of more than 300 people, according to the Flint Fire Dept.

Obama singled out Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a false prophet of change, tweaking her for being for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she was against it.

“You can’t just make stuff up!” he told the largely middle-aged crowd. “You can’t just reinvent yourself,” he added, arguing that the GOP ticket cannot offer change when it promises the same Republican policies on taxes, health care, education, ethics and rebuilding American infrastructure.

MI Gov. Granholm has been stumping for Obama.

Obama spoke while standing in front of three large hybrid sport utility vehicles — he told voters  an Obama administration would build cars in Flint, not Japan — and beneath a giant American flag. He took some questions from the friendly crowd, discussing military spending, Fannie Mae, Social Security and economic challenges. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Congressman John Conyers accompanied Obama, but did not speak at the event.

Obama’s speech focused on populist economics, and he repeatedly linked ending the war in Iraq to renewing the U.S. economy.

Today Obama heads to Flint, Mich., for an economic discussion at the regional technology center of a local community college.

Obama at a Chrystler plant on previous MI visit.

As Michael Moore documented almost 20 years ago, Flint is the kind of town that gets sold out by CEOs and neglected by politicians. The major job losses hit decades ago, but Flint’s population is still in free fall — it recently dropped 8 percent, to 114,000 people. Over the past three decades, the deciannual census counts show the population steadily dropped more than 10 percent.

Even as it thins out, this blue-collar base is essential to keeping Michigan blue. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry ran up his numbers to 60 percent in Genesse County, anchored by Flint, and eked by statewide at 51 percent. According to one report, Flint’s voters were rated the 10th most reliably liberal in the country — just behind San Francisco.

But Obama’s Michigan message is not all job losses and mortgage nightmares. The campaign will tap a local worker-turned-student, Jon Terbush, to kick off today’s event. Terbush, using money from a buyout after 12 years with American Axle, now is attending community college to brush up on technology and auto repair, according to a backgrounder from the campaign. Such voters have few reasons to re-up on Republican economics, as The New York Times explained today:

[T]he principal elements of Mr. McCain’s economic agenda on taxes, trade, regulation and health care follow the philosophic outlines of a deeply unpopular Bush administration. In offering new, immediate economic benefits, Mr. Obama has far outbid his Republican adversary… [Obama] has offered an ambitious range of proposals to arrest that decline and help average workers compete in a global economy.

Those proposals include a new tax credit of $500 per worker, or $1,000 for two-worker households; a new mortgage-interest credit, valued at an average of $500, for homeowners who do not itemize their tax deductions, and a college tuition subsidy of $4,000 per year for students who agree to perform community service. Mr. Obama would wipe out income taxes for older Americans earning $50,000 or less, saving some 7 million households an average of $1,400 apiece.

That’s on top of the still-unspecified subsidies Mr. Obama would provide for the purchase of health insurance for those who don’t now have it, the elimination of capital-gains taxes for small start-up businesses and an increase in the existing dependent-care tax credit that could save $1,100 for a single parent of two children who earns $40,000…

The Times reports that McCain, in contrast, is putting far less on the kitchen table:

By comparison, Mr. McCain’s list of proposals on this front is far more modest. He would double the existing child exemption to $7,000 from $3,500, but most tax-filers would not benefit because they have no dependent children or have incomes so modest that they already do not owe income taxes. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, would also offer a summer gas-tax holiday valued at about $30 a month.

Here on Obama’s plane, which is about to make the 40-minute hop from Chicago to Michigan, there’s little economic talk. Early this morning, Obama donned a White Sox cap and dropped off his daughters at their first day of school, then squeezed in a gym visit before boarding “O Force One.”

The schdeule promises a long day, with two events in Michigan and then a trip to Ohio — where Obama will continue to press for blue-collar support.