NEW YORK TIMES: …“It is not the house itself that has value, it is the land the house stands on,” said Sandra Pianalto, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “This led us to the counterintuitive concept that the best policy to stabilize neighborhoods may not always be rehabilitation. It may be demolition.”
Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable, as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight, and increase environmental sustainability…
Today, it is also about disinvestment patterns to help determine which depopulated neighborhoods are worth saving; what blocks should be torn down and rebuilt; and based on economic activity, transportation options, infrastructure and population density, where people might best be relocated. Some even focus on returning abandoned urban areas into forests and meadows… (more)
EDITOR: Our publisher worked long and hard, but without any success, to educate the Gray administration that the best approach for Lancaster Square East was to acquire and tear down the Bulova Building and both the Brunswick Hotel and the Brunswick Annex to make way for upscale resisdential housing. Lancaster Square East is a classic case where the value of land exceeds the improvements. They would not even meet to discuss the matter.
