Older Towns Getting Facelifts
Despite what it seems like, there is still a lot of development that can be done across the United States.
Newer suburbs and cities have sprung up all across the country, which have actually made things harder for older cities and towns to flourish.
That is why many developers and city officials are making strides to renew older cities and towns across the country.
A February 1, 2007 article by Thaddeus Herrick of The Wall Street Journal Online, “Aging areas around cities push suburban renewal,” discusses the various projects that these cities are taking on.
The mayor of Jennings, Mo., Benjamin Sutphin, is working to “raze and rebuild” many parts of his aging town. He has demolished and rebuilt shopping centers and movie theaters and countless other buildings all around town in an effort to bring some new life into the city.
Sutphin is definitely not alone in his quest, since this is happening in countless other “aging” cities throughout the U.S.
“In recent years, newer U.S. suburbs have flourished and big cities have lured business and residents back downtown. Caught in the middle are older suburbs, many in the Midwest where economic growth has been particularly slow. Their plight has attracted the interest of scholars and even earned them a name: inner-ring or first suburbs, as compared with the outer-ring suburbs or exurbs where developers can in many cases build from scratch.”
The problem is that many of these older cities do not have the money to rebuild and rejuvenate their buildings and structures; so they just continue to age and get overlooked by the brand new cities and suburbs popping up all over the place.
“‘Most of these places are out of luck,’ says Myron Orfield, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and executive director of the university's Institute on Race and Poverty, who was among the first to examine the problems of the nation's older suburbs with his 1997 book, ‘Metropolitics.’”
But some “inner-ring” suburbs like Jennings have been able to fight back and build and improve new and existing structures to make their city better.
It just takes a little work. Many of these cities face obstacles like certain zoning restrictions and funding problems.
“Jennings, for example, lured a developer who replaced a languishing 1950s-era shopping center with a new one that opened in 2006 anchored by a 126,000 square-foot Target store. In Lakewood, Colo., on Denver's western fringe, city officials faced with declining tax revenue agreed several years ago to plow under a nearly empty, 1960s-era mall known as Villa Italia. In its place: Belmar, an $850 million mixed-use town center developed by Denver-based Continuum Partners that has attracted a Whole Foods Market and an American Apparel store, among other tenants.”
It seems like it will just take a lot of time and money to keep these aging cities up with their more modern counterparts.