Indianapolis: over 50 years of urban "cheating"?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by eschaton

This had real political implications for the historic urban core, with city government literally hostile to the interests of the traditionally urban center. Made it much easier to clear out the center for office buildings and stadiums - utilizing the CBD for the interests of suburbanites to an even greater degree than typical for the city. Which is part of the reason I think the decline of the urban core was so marked.

Looking even more closely in than the 71 square mile "old city", we can also look at the 42 square mile "center township" of Marion county which has had fixed boundaries over time and has downtown Indy right at its very heart.

Center township 1950 (peak): 337,211

Center township 2010 (nadir): 142,787

Change: -58%


That's some Cleveland-level population decline right there!

But none one ever thinks of Indy as a hollowed-out Cleveland type of city. Thanks Uni-gov!


The good news, though, is that from 2010 - 2020, center township's population turned around and rose 7.5%, climbing to 153,549 people, so at least things are going a lot better for it these days.

[Docere]

Both Indianapolis and Winnipeg had top-down mergers around the same time (Winnipeg in 1972 I think), where the state/provincial government forced a merger. In Manitoba, it was done by a progressive (NDP) government in order to more equally share urban and suburban resources, in Indiana it was done by Republicans for partisan considerations and to strengthen suburban voting influence on local policy.

[craigs]

Like so many US cities, in the age of mass "urban renewal" large swathes of residential Indy were bulldozed and converted to other uses--transportation, education, government, commercial, entertainment and tourism, etc.

Compare this 1955 aerial with a Google Maps aerial of the same areas today: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39...oASAFQAw%3D%3D


source

[Wigs]

Steely, I agree with your assessment that Uni Gov structure hid central/core city Indy's decline as opposed to Rust Belt.

However, downtown Indy overall is on the up and up. Article posted today:
- Almost 50% new residents since 2010
- $9.5B in the development pipeline


https://www.indystar.com/story/news/...SL5Gu-OW9dJ0lR

Many people don't know Indy's got a Canal Walk
• Video Link

[DCReid]

What's the point here? I am thinking about Columbus, OH and how even though the metro has grown and done well, there are still pockets of abandonment and urban decay caused by suburban and exurban flight and manufacturing decline. I was told that Delco once employed thousand in Columbus, and the area where the middle class that worked there is now run down. Columbus reminded me of a southern city, with a mostly stagnant downtown and some pockets of gentrification, but the real growth in the exurbs. I am not as familiar with Indy but I think downtown Indy was helped by attracting a lot of sports entertainment and it has helped its reputation.

[Docere]

How did "old Columbus" fare in terms of population?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by craigs

source

HOT DAMN!!


my God is our society fucking stupid.

Originally Posted by Docere

How did "old Columbus" fare in terms of population?

Great question.

We'd need a good map with the 1950 city limits of c-bua and someone one with the time/patience to add up a crap load of census tracts.

[ColDayMan]

Originally Posted by DCReid

What's the point here? I am thinking about Columbus, OH and how even though the metro has grown and done well, there are still pockets of abandonment and urban decay caused by suburban and exurban flight and manufacturing decline. I was told that Delco once employed thousand in Columbus, and the area where the middle class that worked there is now run down. Columbus reminded me of a southern city, with a mostly stagnant downtown and some pockets of gentrification, but the real growth in the exurbs. I am not as familiar with Indy but I think downtown Indy was helped by attracting a lot of sports entertainment and it has helped its reputation.

Downtown Columbus currently has 40 projects u/c (I'm not saying it's a fully vibrant downtown but it certainly isn't stagnant) and whole swaths of the city have been gentrified. Previous Appalachian and black communities have seen full-on gentrification the last 15 years so much that suburban communities have now become "new homes" for affordable housing (Obetz, Minerva Park, Heath, Hebron, Whitehall, etc). Delco was HQ'd and had 11 factories in Dayton, not Columbus. Columbus was never a factory town, thus it never had the rustbelt repuation as the rest of the state. The only factory that I can think of was the old GM plant on the westside that is now a casino. Yes, exurban Columbus is growing but also the city of Columbus is growing (it grew by 100,000 the last Census without annexation or much empty land), and inner-ring suburbs are growing.

All of Columbus is growing.

As far as "southern city," I can't wrap my brain around that one. We have pockets of Appalachia on the south and westsides but they look like this:


https://images1.loopnet.com/i2/9do7L...to-1-Large.jpg

...which I don't typically view as "southern vernacular." And with all the Northeast US and Cleveland transplants living here, you certainly don't hear it.

Originally Posted by Docere

How did "old Columbus" fare in terms of population?

Here are the numbers for the old city limits (40 square miles) courtesy of https://allcolumbusdata.com/:

1950: 375,710
1960: 389,222 +13,512
1970: 348,808 -40,414
1980: 287,089 -61,719
1990: 268,265 -18,824
2000: 246,713 -21,552
2010: 234,582 -12,131
2020: 256,939 +22,357

That's a population density of 6,423 per square mile for the old city of Columbus in 2020.

[Marshal]

I can't speak to Indianapolis, but not all population changes reflect a city's economic or other performance indices. Montreal is a good example. While it did go through a period of decline (as Toronto ascended), the City of Montreal lost a not insignificant amount of population. That loss reflected much more than that decline, as the City of Montreal, the densest part of the region by far, depopulated mainly due to a shift in the nature of its residential building form. This was not a change in building stock, but rather was a change which saw dense building forms being renovated to house significantly less people. A dense building with 6 suites became one with three. Montrealers wanted more space and could afford to make it a reality. The City population dropped well below a million and has only recently recovered due to newer, higher density construction. At the time, the press took this as a sign of further decline, but that was a mistake. The metro population continued to grow (albeit slowly) throughout this period. Currently, both the City and the region are growing at a healthy rate. (If growth is a marker of health.)

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by ColDayMan

Here are the numbers for the old city limits (51 square miles) courtesy of https://allcolumbusdata.com/:

1950: 375,710
1960: 389,222 +13,512
1970: 348,808 -40,414
1980: 287,089 -61,719
1990: 268,265 -18,824
2000: 246,713 -21,552
2010: 234,582 -12,131
2020: 256,939 +22,357

Oh, thanks for that!

Old city Columbus 1960 (peak): 389,222

Old city Columbus 2010 (nadir): 234,582

Change: -40%



At 51 sq. miles, that geography compares fairly decently with Indy's 42 square mile center township, which did this:

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Center township 1950 (peak): 337,211

Center township 2010 (nadir): 142,787

Change: -58%

In rough terms, those figures closely align with those of Cincy and Cleveland, respectively, from the chart in the first post.

In any event, it's awesome to see that both of the above urban core geographies saw solid growth last decade. That's definitely something to celebrate!

[Crawford]

I remember seeing an academic comparison of Cleveland and Nashville, using Nashville's old city boundaries. The urban population loss was essentially the same. Both lost something like 40% of their core 1950 populations. Of course Nashville is about as boomtown as it gets while Cleveland is about as Rust Belt as it gets, but the demographic patterns were almost identical.

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I remember seeing an academic comparison of Cleveland and Nashville, using Nashville's old city boundaries. The urban population loss was essentially the same. Both lost something like 40% of their core 1950 populations. Of course Nashville is about as boomtown as it gets while Cleveland is about as Rust Belt as it gets, but the demographic patterns were almost identical.

Interesting observation that lead to this question: does population matter if there is foot traffic and activity? Broadway in Nashville might have fewer residents than in 1960, when upper floors were apartments and are now additions to bars, but Broadway likely has more people walking around on a given day now than it did 60 years ago. Compare that to an old commercial strip in Cleveland or a Rust Belt city. Apartments above storefronts might also be gone, but are those commercial strips seeing the same amount of activity as Broadway in Nashville?

[mhays]

Commercial strips probably have less activity even if the population is the same.

Much of that is the shift from small shops to supermarkets and big-box retail, which even urban residents often fall for.

Another element would be more driving and less transit.

A third would be that people walk less (so it's said), whether because they're lazy or they're kids kept hermetically sealed until they go to college.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

Broadway in Nashville might have fewer residents than in 1960, when upper floors were apartments and are now additions to bars, but Broadway likely has more people walking around on a given day now than it did 60 years ago.

By people you mean tourists, not residents walking to perform functional tasks. An amusement park also has a ton of pedestrian activity...when the park is open. But nobody actually lives there.

The dilemma of the post-2010 urban resurgence of the second-tier cities is that it's all drive-to urbanism. Almost everyone moving into renovated row houses or residential conversions is bringing their car with them. College students are taking uber/lyft to parties instead of walking.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

Interesting observation that lead to this question: does population matter if there is foot traffic and activity? Broadway in Nashville might have fewer residents than in 1960, when upper floors were apartments and are now additions to bars, but Broadway likely has more people walking around on a given day now than it did 60 years ago.

I very strongly doubt Broadway in Nashville has the same level of foot traffic today as it did 60 years ago, but even if it does then that certainly isn't true about the nearby streets.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I remember seeing an academic comparison of Cleveland and Nashville, using Nashville's old city boundaries. The urban population loss was essentially the same. Both lost something like 40% of their core 1950 populations. Of course Nashville is about as boomtown as it gets while Cleveland is about as Rust Belt as it gets, but the demographic patterns were almost identical.

Yeah, I saw a similar result via a comparison of apples to apples imposed urban core boundaries between KC and St. Louis.

[jmecklenborg]

^and residential population is basically irrelevant since after WWII many states stopped collecting state property tax, adjusted what states versus counties versus cities versus towns were responsible for, and enabled cities to levy their own municipal earnings taxes. This encouraged cities to replace residential areas with industrial areas and other types of employment. Low and no-income residents are a drain on municipal resources so there was every incentive to use federal funds to bulldoze poor areas with the hope that the residents would move into federally subsidized housing or move out of the city altogether.

For whatever reason, the media and people who ought to know better focus on residential population and not how many people work within municipal boundaries as a marker of success.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

^and residential population is basically irrelevant since after WWII many states stopped collecting state property tax, adjusted what states versus counties versus cities versus towns were responsible for, and enabled cities to levy their own municipal earnings taxes. This encouraged cities to replace residential areas with industrial areas and other types of employment. Low and no-income residents are a drain on municipal resources so there was every incentive to use federal funds to bulldoze poor areas with the hope that the residents would move into federally subsidized housing or move out of the city altogether.

That's a pretty terrible idea since every economy needs low wage workers, whether or not they directly show up in the bottom line of the tax coffers.

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

For whatever reason, the media and people who ought to know better focus on residential population and not how many people work within municipal boundaries as a marker of success.

Do other cities have income taxes on suburban commuters? I know Detroit does, but I think it's pretty rare nationally. And even in Detroit suburban commuters pay a lower income tax rate than city residents, so it is more lucrative from a revenue perspective to have residents inside the city than commuters (for the same job at least). NYC doesn't have an income tax at all for commuters so they derive a humongous amount of revenue from income tax on residents.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Do other cities have income taxes on suburban commuters?

Chicago has no local income tax of any kind, for city dwellers or suburban commuters.

It's one of the reasons our property and sales taxes look so high (relatively speaking).

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Chicago has no local income tax of any kind, for city dwellers or suburban commuters.

It's one of the reasons our property and sales taxes look so high (relatively speaking).

Looks like Chicago doesn't have a corporate tax either? So the city is entirely funded through property taxes and the sales tax?