Mallach on CDCs and Shrinking Cities

Alan Mallach (Brookings) has published Where Do We Fit In? CDCs and the Emerging Shrinking City Movement in the Spring 2011 issue of Shelterforce. In this short piece, Alan looks at the efforts of community development corporations (CDCs) to contend with the problems faced by cities such as Cleveland, Youngstown and Detroit. He goes on to discuss the fundamental problem of how to craft a local development mission in a market that is clearly shrinking. Unlike Baltimore, a post-industrial city in a growing region, the cities Mallach highlights are located in parts of the country that continue to lose population. We here at Land Use Prof have blogged about the release of Detroit's 2010 census numbers and a recent NY Times discussion of the shrinking-cities quandary. With this Shelterforce article, Alan Mallach brings his formidable analysis and decades of community development experience to bear on this critical issue for American cities in the 21st century.

Jim K.