Can downtown densification rescue Cleveland?
Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, has a good idea which neighbourhood needs to be fixed if his city is to thrive. That is, his own. Mr Bibb, a 36-year-old former consultant who took over as mayor at the start of last year, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Cleveland, just a short walk away from his office in the city’s grand neoclassical city hall. For exercise, he jogs in the park outside. And he thinks that if Cleveland, a city of 362,000 people that was once home to almost three times as many, is to start growing again, it needs more people to be able to live lives like his.
“If we don’t have a thriving urban core… we don’t have tax revenue to fix potholes, to pay police officers more, to hire more folks to pick up trash and do recycling,” he says. “The urban core of any city is its heart and the soul.” It “feeds all of the arteries” that keep other neighbourhoods alive.
Mr Bibb’s enthusiasm for downtown is far from unique. In the decade or so up to the pandemic, revitalising historic downtowns was the big hope of many leaders of struggling cities in the rustbelt. And to a remarkable extent they were succeeding.
2023-06-01 07:58:51
Post from www.economist.com
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