Re-Tooling for a Smaller and Greener City
CUDC Quarterly 4:1 - Fall, 2004

Youngstown hasn’t had a usable plan in a long, long time. One could hardly overstate how much has changed since 1974, when the city updated its comprehensive plan of 1951. The large-scale production of steel – all gone now – was still the basis of the Mahoning Valley’s economy in 1974. Tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared from the region, and tens of thousands of residents have left the city. In addition, thinking about cities, about neighborhoods and about the environment has evolved in radically new ways during the three decades in which Youngstown has drifted, punchdrunk from an economic pummelling that makes the woes of its larger, more economically diverse neighbors in Cleveland and Pittsburgh look comparatively manageable. During this period, the city’s core lost much of its vitality, and many older neighborhoods nearly disappeared, leaving behind desolate stretches of wasteland.


Youngstown on the rise. This 1882 panoramic view shows the core of Youngstown nestled into a bend of the Mahoning River. Development south of the river (above in view) is still sparse, and a few factories are smoking away in the valley to the west (detail immediate left). The city grew well beyond this core, but much of the vacant land in this view is actually vacant again now.

Eventually, the shocks of the 70s and 80s receded, and the patient stabilized. By 2001, public officials were ready to embark on a new planning process for a radically changed city, working in collaboration with the administration of YSU, the staff of YSU’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, and consultants from Toronto-based Urban Strategies, Inc. The result was a multi-year public process to develop a new comprehensive plan called "Youngstown 2010."

This process, which began in 2002 and was first unveiled to the public in December of that year, is significant, not just because it’s long overdue and badly needed, but because it became apparent early on that Youngstown would require a novel kind of plan.

Most comprehensive plans identify areas for redevelopment and major new public investment based on assumptions about growth and development pressures. To a considerable degree, this is true even for older cities that have been losing population. Cleveland’s plan, for example, talks about concentrating new commercial investment in nodes and identifies target areas for new residential development, but it doesn’t say as much as it might about what should happen between the nodes and targets. To point this out is not to criticize the efforts of Cleveland’s planners, but to identify the limits of what planning knows how to do in the context of American cities. The problem – and opportunity – in Youngstown is that the damage is so great that a more searching examination of the spatial structure of the city is required. This puts everyone involved in Youngstown 2010, professionals and citizens alike, into an unknown territory where they must find a way to plan for the future of a radically smaller city. Much of the public process has been dedicated to figuring out what this challenge means and how it can be approached.

Youngstown’s size presents challenges and unique possibilities. The city has vast tracts of property that are either vacant, tax delinquent or so vastly deflated in value that there is no way to finance new investment in it. While much of the land is residential property (some of it nearly reclaimed by nature), it also includes brownfields that require varying degrees of remediation.

At the most basic level, the city simply can’t afford to service all of this low-value property, but there could be an up side, too. As planners and citizens evaluate the potential of particular neighborhoods, unique possibilities emerge. Epidemic tax delinquency means that there is a lot of land in public ownership, and the cost of assembling land is incredibly low. This gives Youngstown a lot of room to manuever, to assemble large tracts for new developments or new greenspaces as opportunities present themselves. This is what is happening with residential development in the Smoky Hollow neighborhood east of the YSU campus. Along different lines, UDC’s plan for the Wick Park area north of campus envisions assembling land to create a light industrial campus and green space connections along key watersheds.

This is not the edge of small town in the country, it’s Youngstown’s Smoky Hollow neighborhod viewed from the eastern edge of the YSU campus. Because of its proximity to campus, new residential development is planned for this once-thriving immigrant working class district. In other parts of town, however, areas like this might be re-naturalized.

The 2010 Process has included a lot of attention to the nuts and bolts of these issues and identifying the tools to address them. The actions that have been defined most clearly to date apply to the most visible areas of the city where the opportunities are greatest, downtown and the environs of the YSU campus. Finding the right solutions for specific places will only get more difficult – and the solutions may have to be more adventurous – as planners look at other areas with less obvious potential.

Because big changes are being contemplated, it’s important that Youngstown 2010 also focuses on what might be called (in the language of the Middle East peace process) "confidence-building measures," as reflected in two of Youngstown 2010’s key themes: fixing "broken windows" and defining Youngstown’s role in the new regional economy.

Each of these themes involves taking an inventory of the city’s surviving assets. What is working or could work, both economically and environmentally? What kinds of relationships can be drawn between these viable institutions and sites? Are there opportunities for targeted new investment in relationship to them? The result of this ongoing process should be a realistic appraisal of the city’s assets and potential, without relying too much on "silver bullet" schemes to fix things. (Although even those have their place in the mix. There’s a lot of optimism that a new convocation center will give downtown Youngstown a needed boost.)

Ideally, this process, which is still underway, should provide the information needed to begin drawing the map of a smaller city. Then would come the fun part – finding creative and visionary uses for newly available land. In anticipation of that time, a key theme of the process from its inception has been "accepting that Youngstown is a smaller city." If that sounds a bit therapeutic, it is. Planning here is not just a bureaucratic or even political process, it’s a kind of post-traumatic civic "talking cure."

If it works, if the cure turns out to be more than just talking, Youngstown 2010 could provide an important model for other industrial cities trying to find their way in a new century. Given its heritage and topography, Youngstown could also end up turning into a pretty neat place along the way.

Industry abounds in the Mahoning Valley, and some of it is still alive and well. Active plants such as Tri-County Asphalt and Materials will be engaged in local and regional planning efforts to connect them with emerging market opportunities and resources at YSU and other academic and research institutions.

Click here for the latest updates on Youngstown 2010