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.

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.

Just to show you how bad the crisis in vacant and foreclosed has become, Habitat for Humanity is still around, and still helping out — only now the group is concentrating, in some places, on tearing houses down, The New York Times reports. The organization is already hard at work at this effort in Saginaw, Mich., a city plagued by abandoned properties.

As part of an agreement with the city, and with at least $500,000 from the state and federal governments, the Habitat for Humanity volunteers and paid workers plan to demolish two vacant, dilapidated houses here a week, every week, over the next two years. As for creating homes, they will build or refurbish eight houses this year.

The shift in the organization’s focus is a sign of the times in Saginaw, a shrinking city northwest of Detroit where at least 800 houses sit empty and doomed, and offers a glimpse of what increasingly empty neighborhoods in many cities may soon face as foreclosures continue.

International leaders of Habitat for Humanity, an organization more than three decades old, say their focus is changing to meet the demands of a changing economy. In cities where so many homes sit empty, the group is leaning away from building new houses and instead fixing up old ones, said Ken Klein, the vice chairman of the group’s board.

At least Habitat is out there, doing something about this. There’s much more Congress and the Obama administration could do to help out as well. It’s not an impossible task. In April, New Jersey will begin, for the first time, requiring a bank or other entity that forecloses on a house to take responsibility for it both before and after it becomes a bank-owned property, or REO.

Lawmakers could easily require banks receiving bailout funds to take care of their neglected REOs, as a condition of getting the money. Public shame, which worked in convincing some AIG executives to give back some of those bonuses, might also work here. Pass around a few photographs of trashed houses owned by Citigroup, Wells Fargo, etc., and it could go a long way in prompting some action.

The government could also get behind cities that are trying to stop banks from dumping their dilapidated REOs on the real estate market at fire-sale prices, claiming the practice has become a public nuisance because it causes a death spiral of falling property values. Washington, in addition, could support the idea of a federal land bank, or  land banking efforts in general,  so communities could more easily acquire and reuse large inventories of vacant homes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new policy of not automatically evicting renters from foreclosed homes was a huge step in the right direction – but there have been few other innovative rental ideas coming from the government.

The worrisome question is not so much what Washington eventually will do — it is when will it finally get around to doing it? How many cities will be left scarred by vacant and abandoned homes before someone acts?