Changing urban form in a shrinking city

Abstract

This paper uses building footprint data in a shrinking city, Baltimore, MD, in 1972 and 2010 to achieve two primary research objectives. The first is to understand the historical patterns of housing construction and demolition in selected row house neighborhoods in Baltimore between 1972 and 2010. The second is to understand changes in housing footprints, and associations between these changes and physical and socio-economic characteristics in selected neighborhoods. We find that housing losses and associated changes in building footprints have shown substantial variation across our study area and exhibit clustering within our study area. Moreover, while housing loss is strongly associated with certain physical factors, there is a weaker association between housing loss and changes in certain socio-economic neighborhood characteristics between 1970 and 2010. Our research findings provide support for targeted, evidence-based neighborhood-based strategies that encompass traditional as well as novel approaches to vacant land management.

Urban decline and residential preference: The effect of vacant lots on housing premiums

“…Tach and Emory (2017) found that the redevelopment of VLs into public housing had significant direct and indirect spillover effects on neighborhood racial and economic composition; VLs in gentrifying neighborhoods were also found to be more likely to be filled by higher-income residents than vacant units in lower-income areas. Relatedly, Hollander et al (2019) found that severely depopulating neighborhoods in Baltimore exhibited significant spatial clustering of VLs. Some hedonic models have examined the effects of converting VLs into nondevelopmental land uses (e.g.…”

Are patterns of vacant lots random? Evidence from empirical spatiotemporal analysis in Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo

“…Frazier et al, 2013;Morckel, 2014;Reis et al, 2016;Sakamoto and Yokohari, 2016). According to Hollander et al (2017), who tested whether building demolitions are clustered in row house neighbourhoods in Baltimore, demolition is treated as a proxy for vacant lots since demolished buildings are also popular measures of shrinkage and easily geocoded. By comparing building footprints (polygons that represent building shapes on a two-dimensional plane) in 1972 and 2010, Hollander et al (2017) found that at the parcel level, demolitions were no more clustered than expected, while the opposite was true at the block group level.…”

“…The process of population loss and its related problems, collectively termed urban shrinkage , constitutes one of the most pertinent issues in developed countries (Haase et al., 2014, 2017; Hollander, 2011; Hollander et al., 2017; Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2012). The places of urban shrinkage are named shrinking cities and face challenges of ever-increasing demolitions of buildings and vacancies of building lots (Frazier et al., 2013; Haase et al., 2017; Hackworth, 2016; Hollander, 2010; Schetke and Haase, 2008).…”

The dynamics of food shopping behavior: Exploring travel patterns in low-income Detroit neighborhoods experiencing extreme disinvestment using agent-based modeling

“…Throughout the second half of the 20 th century, the coupling of rapid suburbanization and disinvestment within urban cores has reshaped the spatial structure of America's cities. A consequence was the deterioration of accessibility for large urban population segments to reaching basic daily amenities [1][2][3][4]. With the suburbanization of residents, businesses, and the tax base more broadly, urban commercial destinations-from personal and health services to healthy restaurant options and retail outlets-have been steadily moving to locations in the more distant metropolitan peripheries.…”