When Jay was starting Y-town 2010 the focus was going to be what Y-town could offer that the burbs couldn’t (he hired the outside consultants from Toronto’s rebuild to help him set up the plan). Those things were an education and art’s based community with a focus on some higher end bars, etc (which christ, just started coming to fruition, what, two years ago?). I mean I laugh at that “A” apartment building they put up there but you tell me it’s actually nice for the market.
IMO a city like Y-town has to especially focus on people that want urban living and sucking up people graduation from the college that are staying around the are (major, major, major problem).
Cities like that coming back to life is going to be really contingent upon how many youth’s work in the area. If you can provide the jobs and the experience they’ll stay. Downtown Y-town has immense potential as a very small and cool little stretch. Get a bunch of bars, make it affordable, make it security by populace (the U-Penn or Hopkins model where you have people out having fun all the time so criminals find other areas to eff with) and you can start holding onto those graduates.
Now I’m strictly talking about the core city, most of Y-town is fat at this point that needs trimmed.
A big deal also goes into what you define as critical mass?
One of the biggest aspects of Y-town 2010 was cleaning up the deserted neighborhoods (read: removing) and the brownfields. I have no idea what the progress is on that front since I haven’t spoken with Jay in ages and haven’t been inside the city of Y-town but twice since the early part of the aughts.
Fact is that this country has enough McMansions EVERYWHERE that youth in revolt have turned against them.
Also, I don’t know if a biggoted place like The Mahoning Valley (in regards to Youngstown) will ever socially tear down enough walls to appreciate the opportunity. Then again I laughed at Trafficant’s last ditch effort to get love with that stupid ass convention center thing and it worked out well (at least at first, no idea now).
EOD: wherever you have education, art and walk ability you have potential. Good the South Weymouth Air Base Redevelopment. I worked on that project about six times from 2007 to my February career shift and it still isn’t fully moving forward but it is going to be your model redevelopment for the smaller city (much different income than Y-town though). This is what your modern community center development is: townhomes, apartments and condos with attraction retail and some office and maybe hotel.
My experience with McMansions was mainly tied to valuing portfolios for large developers and builders selling multi-billion dollar portfolios to the banks for ten cents on the dollar to try and clear some bad debt off their books and stay afloat.
There are literally hundreds of these articles popping up now:
http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/no-mc ... nials.html. This isn’t just some new development; it is the future of development. Fuck my former company started churning out articles for papers on this back in 2007 when the downturn crushed us and we had nothing else to do (beyond marketing). Also if you start researching the “pre-adulthood” stuff you can really start to get a grip on how different Gen Y is. My little brother is worse than me, I left Ohio for the East Coast, he’s going to China to teach English. I won’t even consider marriage till 35. I’m on the later side but no one I hang out with has married before 28. And kids… BAHAHAHA
This is also must read stuff from The Atlantic back in 2008:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... slum/6653/Factually when we finally kill off all the old bastards that sucked the life out of this country and left us bankrupt we’re going to have a much different US. You’ll still have places like South Range where everyone inbreeds with a girl two years their younger and sends their kids to school there, but that will be far more exception than norm.
I personally vote for just sending all the boomers to Florida then annexing it to Cuba.
