Rightsizing Cities Initiative

As some historic cities and towns are prospering, others are dealing with significant numbers of vacant and abandoned properties—the effects of decades-long economic and population shifts. These shifts affect historic residential neighborhoods, central business districts, and neighborhood commercial corridors, leaving older properties empty and historic landscapes pocked with vacant land and buildings.

PlaceEconomics believes that older places contain the necessary ingredients for revitalization as strong, vibrant places to live, work, and do business. Downtowns and commercial corridors offer economical spaces for start-ups and established businesses, a convenient transportation network, and a customer base within walking distance. Historic neighborhoods are filled with beautiful, well-built houses that are close to shopping, schools, and transit. Perhaps most importantly, older cities and neighborhoods have a unique sense of place that is in high demand by young professionals, empty-nesters, and people who want to live where things happened in the past and are happening now: places with a strong sense of history and opportunity.

The Rightsizing Cities Initiative focuses on planning decisions and regenerative opportunities that are deeply rooted in local landscapes and character. It ties together local assets and a pragmatic planning ethos to produce clear, workable, community-based plans and strategies for strategically strengthening neighborhoods in rightsizing efforts

Services

As cities and towns look to shape smaller, brighter futures, PlaceEconomics offers a number of services to assist in the process. These services can be tailored to public and nonprofit clients.

  • The Re:Local tool that assists planners and preservation advocates in making strategic reinvestment, rehabilitation, and demolition decisions across neighborhoods
  • Workshops and training to help identify historic preservation’s role in rightsizing
  • Reports on best practices in rightsizing

Current Projects

Resources

Who We Are

For the last 25 years, PlaceEconomics has been helping clients understand and capitalize on the economics of historic places. The Rightsizing Cities Initiative expands this work to the planning sphere, helping municipal governments and nonprofits in legacy cities take advantage of heritage assets as they plan for the future. RCI Director Cara Bertron specializes in innovatively integrating preservation into large-scale planning projects. She wrote her Master’s thesis on how preservation is being incorporated in older industrial cities’ rightsizing strategies and recently developed character studies, a new model for citywide historic resource survey work, as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Cara also authored the Charleston Preservation Plan (with Page & Turnbull), which received a National Trust Honor Award in 2009.

Please write RCI@placeeconomics.com for more information about the Rightsizing Cities Initiative and our services.

Buzz

Cleveland: Downtown Living Sees Growth
“Those signing leases [in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square] are everyone from young professionals to older residents. Nearly 1,000 more housing units will enter the downtown market in the next 18 months. ‘Things have changed – people don’t want to wait an hour in traffic any more to get to their jobs, so if you work downtown these people want to live downtown,’ adds Douglas Price, CEO of K&D Group.”
(WKYC, 5/23/13)

Historic Buildings Falling Fast in Ohio
“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of wholesale demolition of old houses. It happened in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and it left many urban landscapes pocked with weedy lots… Preservationists have been pretty quiet in the past couple of years during this new age of demolition. If they don’t find their voices soon, they won’t have much to talk about in the future.”
(Columbus Dispatch, 4/10/13)

Muncie Has Chance to Right-Size
“Donovan Rypkema spent the past week conducting research in Muncie that could help the city downsize, although that’s not the term he uses. ‘There are more challenges than there is money in all of these right-sizing cities,’ Rypkema said… ‘It’s not that nothing should be torn down, but there ought to be some systematic framework to it. In most places, the decisions are made on an ad hoc basis.’”
(Muncie Star Press, 2/11/13)

Putting the Right in Right-Sizing
Drawing on two years of fieldwork in two Michigan cities, this report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Michigan Historic Preservation Network “offers a number of observations for preservation and planning professionals about the role of preservation in cities undergoing rightsizing. The case study also offers suggestions for integrating preservation into rightsizing more broadly.” Click below to download the report (PDF, 12.1MB).
(Putting the Right in Right-Sizing, Nov. 2012)

Free Fall
“St. Louis has torn a lot of buildings down (8,000 in the last decade)… [But] all that demolition has happened alongside a growing push to save the city’s trademark red brick architecture, and to turn some of these eyesores into assets, anchors to help rebuild these neighborhoods before they’re gone completely.” (Next American City, 10/8/12)

Retooling Motor City
Monocle’s video exploration of Detroit’s growing economy includes an interview with Jeanette Pierce of D:hive: “People want culture and history and community instead of cul-de-sacs and highways and chain restaurants. Ironically, the fact that all of that suburban crap was not interested in Detroit is what is making us extremely interesting now.” (Monocle, Oct. 2012)

Moving Home: The New Key To Success
“Boomerangs — people who move away from a place and then later move back — make up over 37 percent of in-migration to U.S. metro counties, and even more than that in counties that are economically distressed… Cleveland considers return migrants so important to its future success that it has an economic-development nonprofit with a division devoted solely to attracting more of them.” (Salon.com, 6/23/2012)

Rust Belt Reboot Has Cleveland Rocking
“[Cleveland] sure doesn’t sound like the place that was long the butt of jokes by late-night comics, and there are similar stories coming out of Detroit, St. Louis and Buffalo. Blue-collar towns seem to be attracting a new generation of residents looking for an affordable urban lifestyle.” (NPR, 6/11/2012)

Cincinnati Fights Its Way Back
“The city is experiencing a renaissance, with private development revitalizing once ignored areas — most notably Over-the-Rhine, the historic district just north of downtown that has become a gathering spot for the young and trendy.” (Cleveland.com, 6/02/2012)

Redeveloping Empty Schools
“More than 100,000 children have left the hallways of Detroit Public Schools in the last decade. To address the problem, school and city officials announced Wednesday they are collaborating on a citywide effort to reinvent [almost 84] vacant school buildings and sites into innovative redevelopment projects… DPS Emergency Manager Roy Roberts said it costs the district from $300,000 to $900,000 to tear down a school. Roberts said he would rather see the buildings and sites repurposed and money from the sale going toward the students in the district.” (The Detroit News, 5/24/2012)

Pittsburgh’s Plan: Preserve Historic Structures
From PRESERVEPGH: “Preservation of cultural and historic assets is a critical issue because these resources broadly contribute to the city’s character. They make neighborhoods places where people want to live, work, invest, learn and spend their time.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 5/23/2012)

Calling All Boomerangs
On coming home, via Aaron Marks, a native of the Cleveland suburbs: “His return forced him to explore the heart of his home region for the very first time… Before long, Marks and his girlfriend found themselves inundated with the architecture, food and culture they were searching for without the exorbitant cost of living of NYC, LA or Chicago.” (CoolCleveland Blog, 5/23/2012)

How Detroit Is Rising
From Richard Florida: “Detroit’s new generation of place makers and city-builders draws deeply on the city and the region’s many assets. Yes, urban renewal devastated parts of the city, and yes, it’s true that there are too many empty lots and abandoned buildings. But a walk through and around the urban core evidences a fabulous urban fabric with fantastic historic buildings of the very sort that Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said that old buildings give rise to new ideas.” (The Atlantic Cities, 5/15/2012)