Alison Stewart speaks with two journalists about where the population conversation stands today and what, if anything, we should be doing about it.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Julia Whitty is an award-winning environmental reporter. As a correspondent for Mother Jones, she traveled to India to write about population growth – something she calls “the last taboo.” Julia’s latest book is “Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean.”

Phillip Longman is a senior fellow with the New America Foundation and Washington Monthly. A former senior writer and deputy assistant managing editor at U.S. News and World Report, Longman’s byline has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. He is the author of “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity (And What to Do About It).”

Blueprint America on Need to Know time travels to 1968, a time when the threat of world famine and pollution from the “population bomb” captivated a national audience and spawned a movement, only to be diffused by beltway politics and emerging hot button issues. Within just a few short years, it seemed the population bomb had become a bust.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

In May as part of our “Shrinking Cities” series, the Blueprint America team traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, where a grand experiment in urban renewal is underway.

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams is leading a closely watched effort to “shrink” this blighted rustbelt city back to health.

Over half a century ago, Youngstown was a steel town and at its peak was home to nearly 170,000 people. Most lived in tidy middle class homes. But in the late 1970s the steel mills started shutting down. And in a story all too common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, Youngstown fell into a slow, steady economic decline.

Today, fewer than 60,000 people live amid the ruins of closed factories and abandoned homes. On some streets, more homes are vacant than occupied. The tax base has been decimated. Still, Mayor Williams has rallied a surprising amount of local support for his plan to remake Youngstown into a place worth staying in.

Linda Jenkins is Youngstown born and raised. We met her as we filmed the demolition of the house across the street from where she lives.

Mayor Williams told us that he needs residents, like Jenkins, who are in Youngstown for the long haul — because living in a shrinking city isn’t for the fainthearted. And, in the last five years alone, the number of volunteer and nonprofit development groups in Youngstown is growing — up from 19 a few years ago to over 50 today.

Jim London is one of them. Presley Gillespie, president of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, is another.

Jacob Peters and David Rodriguez are city housing inspectors doing their part in shrinking Youngstown.

Can a city that has lost so much really recover? Phil Kidd, a local community organizer, believes in his city and its people, and says that Youngstown has turned a corner.

It’s a slow process. Youngstown didn’t lose more than 60 percent of its population overnight. It could take years, even decades, to rebuild. It will also take more than a mayor and his plan. To use a turn of phrase, it will take a village.

Related:

Youngstown, the incredible shrinking city

In Youngstown, a house now abandoned was a home

More than a few people have likened the devastation inside some neighborhoods in Detroit, Michigan, to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. One observer said succinctly that Detroit has suffered a ”slow-motion hurricane Katrina.”

Architect and urban planner Reed Kroloff has been able to see both cities close up. As dean of architecture at Tulane University, he was responsible for bringing back 97 percent of the school’s student body and 100 percent of its faculty after the disaster. In 2005, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin appointed Kroloff to the “Bring New Orleans Back Commission” to assist in the reconstruction of the city. Kroloff left New Orleans in 2007 to become the director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He continues to write and think about how cities on the brink can be brought back.

“I think that (Detroit) actually has an opportunity to be successful,” Karloff said, during an interview for Blueprint America’s “Shrinking Detroit” report,“but it’s going to take a long time. It took a long time to ruin it. You can’t fix it overnight.”

In this extended interview Kroloff talks about how cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, can retool their economies in the 21st century, now that their 20th century factories and mills are shut down and residents have fled. Interestingly, Pittsburgh – and its turn from steel to high-tech research and development – could provide a model.

In the first quarter of 2011, the U.S. manufacturing sector created more than 140,000 new jobs. And last year marked the first time in more than a decade that more manufacturing jobs were created in this country than were lost. But experts say manufacturing is unlikely ever to play as large a role in the American economy as it once did. With thousands of houses sitting empty and crumbling, people won’t be moving back into the old industrial cities that pepper the Rust Belt anytime soon.

So what about the residents who continue to live there? Older manufacturing towns are searching for new ways to survive in the 21st century. In a country where bigger is almost always better, cities like Youngstown, Ohio, are trying to come back to life by shrinking themselves. This Blueprint America story reports on Youngstown’s plan to restore its former greatness, but on a smaller scale.(View full post to see video)

Related:

Dan Kildee, leader of the ‘shrinking cities’ movement, on saving distressed cities

In Youngstown, a house now abandoned was a home

Dan Kildee, a leader in the Shrinking Cities movement and the president of Community Progress, an advocacy group that is working to change the way government approaches cities in declines, has pioneered a land-banking system in his hometown of Flint, Mich. Today, Flint’s program is a model for other troubled cities looking to cope with their huge stock of abandoned homes.

Kildee talks to Alison Stewart about the need for a national agenda, the good that comes from demolishing houses and the mental shift Americans will need to make before they stop seeing downsizing as failure.(View full post to see video)

Related:

Youngstown, Ohio: the incredible shrinking city

In Youngstown, a house now abandoned was a home v” playersize=”512×288″]

A neighbor across the street, Linda Jenkins, was happy to see it fall. “I was elated, I was overjoyed,” she said. Jenkins had watched it deteriorate over the course of 10 years from her living room window.

As the backhoe tore the house apart, Jim London of the Idora Neighborhood Association, a local Youngstown nonprofit and block watch, said, “At one time, this was somebody’s pride and joy… this wasn’t a house, this was their home.”

Really, it is one thing to look at a blighted and abandoned building and say that it needs to come down. You can plainly see it. It is another to think of that house in the context of the thousands upon thousands of empty buildings just like it in Youngstown. For each one there are businesses that failed and families that struggled and left.

Local filmmaker Derrick Jones documented his own family’s history in one house in Youngstown. The film “631″ chronicles the many good times over the years, as well as the difficulties in maintaining the house with little income, especially after two fires. It is the story of one house, now abandoned, that was once filled with life.

Related:

Youngstown, Ohio: the incredible shrinking city

Dan Kildee, leader of the ‘shrinking cities’ movement, on saving distressed cities

Is Obamarail the new Obamacare?

Much like last year’s debate over health care reform, Republicans and President Obama once again find themselves at odds, this time over whether or not to build a nationwide high-speed rail system. Already, Republican governors from Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida have rejected over a combined $3 billion for building high-speed rail, stalling the Obama plan, at least for now.(View full post to see video)As the administration tries to get back on track, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat and co-chair of Building America’s Future — a non-partisan advocacy group calling for infrastructure investment — is making the case for spending now on modernizing the national transportation system, even as an emboldened Republican Party tries to cut government spending and tighten the country’s belt.

For more than two years now we at Blueprint America have been reporting on the state of our nation’s infrastructure. We’ve been looking at what’s broken, what’s working and asking whether policy makers have a vision for the future. It’s an important subject because whether and how we invest in infrastructure has everything to do with the quality and shape of the communities we live in. Yet sometimes, especially when we focus on zoning laws or funding streams, it can all start to seem rather abstract. But in our story, Future Detroit, a group of middle-schoolers who live in a broken down section of Detroit’s west side show in the simplest of terms how good infrastructure can make “people happier.”

The mayor of Detroit is promoting a controversial new plan to “right-size” the city. He may offer cash incentives to residents to leave vacant neighborhoods. The goal is to make the city more efficient in delivering services to its citizens.

But Detroit’s “rightsizing” plan is also about imagining a new city — and the imagination isn’t limited to city government. In fact, some of the great new ideas are coming from citizens who aren’t old enough to vote. This story about some of Detroit’s youngest city planners comes from Detroit Public Television.

With the city running a huge deficit, Detroit’s Mayor Dave Bing says it’s time for some big changes: He wants to rebuild Detroit by downsizing it. As part of his “Detroit Works” plan, Bing wants to move people still living in blighted areas into the city’s stronger neighborhoods. A newly streamlined city would then be connected by an improved transportation system, and empty spaces could be turned into parks or farms. A pilot program called “Live Midtown,” created in conjunction with three of the city’s large employers, is offering incentives for commuters to move into the city and help redevelop its Midtown district.

Convincing people inside the city to move will be challenging enough. But can the mayor also convince commuters to move in? Desiree Cooper reports from Detroit on these controversial plans.

Related:

Not in my backyard? Lisa Margonelli at the 2010 TEDx Oil Spill conference

When birds wash ashore