And where once there were families, now there are open, empty lots, driving wedges into neighborhoods and fracturing longstanding communities. But the recent creation of urban gardens has helped to stitch some of these communities back together. They’re also putting Detroit on the verge of a new economic model, and with it, the hope of jobs. Correspondent Desiree Cooper has the story, which is a co-production with Detroit Public TV and Blueprint America.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

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

Not too long ago it appeared that the United States was gaining steam in the pursuit of high-speed rail. We finally had a White House that made passenger rail a high priority. With Obama calling for $8 billion in 2012 and $53 billion over six years for passenger rail projects, and a goal to provide 80 percent of Americans with access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years, governors and the transportation industry were licking their chops.

And then we hit the skids. Florida Governor Rick Scott, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, all newly elected Republicans, abandoned high-speed passenger rail projects, rejecting a combined $3.6 billion in federal funds in the process. That figure is more than the gross domestic product of some small countries, like Fiji, Somalia or Guam.

And then Congress eliminated about $1 billion that Obama wanted in the current budget for rail projects, and $400 million from the $2.4 billion already set aside for high-speed rail in Florida.

It “makes no sense” Obama said, referring to the abandoned rail projects. He’s right. Transportation infrastructure projects help the country stay competitive. And they create jobs. The abandoned rail plans would have generated at least 35,000 jobs combined, according to news reports. That squandered opportunity was a bitter pill for some lawmakers in Florida, where the unemployment rate is 12 percent. The state had not even received bids on their project when the governor decided to turn down $2 billion in federal dollars earmarked for an 85-mile high-speed link between Tampa and Orlando. Among the disappointed were U.S. Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican and new chairman of the Congressional House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.  Another 26 state senators rebuked the governor for turning down the money, writing in a joint letter, “Politics should have no place in the future of Florida’s transportation.”

Gov. Scott’s decision, announced in February, was a slap in the face to the Obama Administration, coming a little more than a week after Vice President Joseph R. Biden unveiled the president’s rail plans. The Florida project was a centerpiece of those plans. It was one of two high-speed lines already approved by Congress. Like his fellow governors who rejected federal rail aid, Scott argued that his state might have been liable for billions of dollars, claiming that ridership estimates were too optimistic, and worried that taxpayers would be left with a  $3 billion tab to pay if the line wasn’t successful.

Scott’s pronouncement was described by Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, who, according to The Florida Times Union, compared the rail project to the interstate highway projects of the 1950s. “Can you imagine if the governor had tried to kill Eisenhower’s interstate highway system? That’s what we are facing today,” Nelson was quoted as saying in the newspaper. The senator raises a good point. Some of our nation’s greatest infrastructure was built in precarious financial times.  The United States Congress approved construction of the transcontinental railroad – one of America’s great technological achievements – during the American Civil War.

The governors who turned down the billions in high-speed rail may be making short political hay out of their decisions. Their states may feel the sting of jealously, as the funds they snubbed are funneled to other states eager to create jobs and build a world-class transportation network for the future.

In California, which received the largest portion of redirected money from the abandoned projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the time, was only too happy to take the funds. California voters have already approved almost $10 billion in bonds to build a high-speed rail system from San Francisco and Sacramento to San Diego. They’re going to need a lot more to meet the anticipated $45 billion price tag.

There were plenty of others vying for those $2 billion in abandoned Florida high-speed train dollars.  In fact there were 90 proposals from 24 states, the District of Columbia and Amtrak. “This is a knock-down drag-out fight over who is going to get it,” said Kevin Brubaker, Deputy Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. Among the eleven Republican governors seeking a slice of the pie was Gov. Walker of Wisconsin, who would have liked to get back $150 million of what he had initially rejected. “We’re glad that Gov. Walker has recognized the value of high-speed rail to the Midwest,” Brubaker said, “and is seeking funds to support it.”

Recently Ray LaHood, the federal transportation secretary, announced that Amtrak and 15 states will be awarded the $2 billion that Florida gave up. The biggest slice of that money, about $800 million, will be used to improve train speeds on the Northeast Corridor, as well as improve the reliability of commuter lines.

The New York projects may not sound sexy but they are the type of projects that need to be done to get us on the right track to high-speed rail, according to Darnell Grisby of Reconnecting America. “Part of the problem with American passenger rail is that a lot hasn’t been improved in many years and getting us to high speed requires getting us up to the speed of other countries,” he said. We need to improve existing rails so that they can handle high-speed trains.

The good news, Grisby says, is that about half the states that applied for the rail money are states governed by Republicans. “Opponents of high-speed rail may have been more successful about getting their message out, but it’s not entirely factual information. There is still demand for high-speed rail and it’s bipartisan in nature,” he said.

Why do we need high-speed rail? Because, Grisby says, with gas rising above $4 per gallon, Americans need more convenient travel options. High-speed rail will also relieve stress on our roads and airports. Small communities, like those in upstate NY, will benefit from rail lines that allow residents to commute to the big cities where the jobs are, without abandoning their hometowns. Those communities that know how to market themselves can leverage a new high-speed rail line into a big economic plus for the local economy. And let’s not forget about job creation. As Grisby points out, Brazil, Russia and Southeast Asia are building high-speed rail right now and if America can build a high-speed rail construction industry, we can export our products, creating long-term jobs.

The industry needs proof that that our nation has a long-term commitment to high-speed rail and the best way to do that is to include funds for it in the next transportation reauthorization bill. Congress really needs to step up.  Over the next four decades the U.S. can expect our population to grow by 100 million Americans. With our current transportation infrastructure, Grisby says, we cannot accommodate that growth.

Our nation needs to have a long-term strategy for our transportation network, a strategy that transcends politics. If not, we will pay for shortsightedness and veer off track while other countries speed ahead.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

This just in from across the pond: “America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart.” Not news really. But somehow it’s seems more pathetic when written by people who take high speed rail service for granted.

In a recent article entitled “Life in the slow lane,” The Economist details just how far behind the United States is when it comes to infrastructure investment, describing in great detail our debilitating traffic congestion, dysfunctional rail service, and antiquated air traffic control system.  Turns out that a recent World Economic Forum study found the United States now ranks 23rd in the world  for overall infrastructure quality.

Making matters worse, there’s also a messy bureaucracy to contend with:

The formulas used to allocate the money shape infrastructure planning in a remarkably block-headed manner. Cost-benefit studies are almost entirely lacking. Federal guidelines for new construction tend to reflect politics rather than anything else. States tend to use federal money as a substitute for local spending, rather than to supplement or leverage it.

In a recent Blueprint America interview with Alison Stewart, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell grapples with many of the issues detailed in The Economist.  Rendell, along with former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, formed a non partisan group called Building America’s Future, which advocates more and smarter infrastructure investment.  Rendell tells Stewart:  “I don’t believe this [infrastructure] is a Republican issue or a Democratic issue, it’s an American issue.”

But in Washington these days, it seems no issue is non-partisan.  As our friends from The Economist coolly conclude:

Roads, bridges and railways used to be neutral ground on which the parties could come together to support the country’s growth. But as politics has become more bitter, public works have been neglected. If the gridlock choking Washington finds its way to America’s statehouses too, then the American economy risks grinding to a standstill.

More than half of Detroit’s 3,000 police officers currently live in the suburbs. In 1999, the Michigan state legislature lifted a law that required cops serving in the city to live in the city, and the ensuing exodus has been dubbed the “Blue Flight.” But yesterday, one police officer announced that he was swimming against the tide by moving back into the city.

Officer William Booker-Riggs’ decision was spurred by Mayor Dave Bing’s new incentive program, “Project 14,” which offers vacant homes in four city neighborhoods to police officers at bargain-basement rates. The  neighborhoods all have a large number of empty, inhabitable homes in desperate need of some tender-loving repair. Officers can purchase the homes from Detroit’s Land Bank for as little as $1,000 down, and are eligible for $150,000 renovation grants.

The $30 million project is named after a police code that is used to signal a return to normal operations, and the tagline of the project is, fittingly, “Live where you protect and serve.” Bing announced that he intends to use a combination of federal stimulus dollars and private funds to finance the project, which would include mortgage relief as well as stipends for renovation.

“Project 14″ is just one piece of Bing’s larger plan to revitalize Detroit by “rightsizing” it.  The mayor would like to streamline his troubled city by closing down blighted neighborhoods and steering residents into communities that have a better chance of survival. (For more on this story, see last week’s Blueprint America’s story: “Shrinking Detroit.”)

So far, “Project 14″ has generated less interest than similar incentive programs like “Live Midtown,” which targeted suburban commuters. The mayor says that some 200 officers have “expressed interest” in the program –  but fewer than 14 have actually signed up to date. Many are hoping that Officer Briggs’ decision inspires other officers to consider the reverse flight. However, critics of the program argue that police officers with families can ill afford to live in a city that lacks good services like strong public schools and, ironically, reliable emergency services.