Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'd argue Cleveland tore itself down to a greater extent than Detroit. Detroit, overall, is more vacant, but that's due to late 20th century market abandonment, not really top-down urban renewal.
Cleveland went batshit crazy with urban renewal. There was a downtown project called Erieview that erased everything between Euclid Ave. and the lake. There's a corridor from downtown to the eastern suburbs that erased everything in its path. The suburbanesque Cleveland Clinic sits on what used to be a second downtown.
Cleveland might also be the only major city without wealthy residential areas. Even Detroit has mansion neighborhoods and a few upper middle class enclaves.
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I don't think there's anyway this can be true. While Cleveland has some pockets of urban prairie, there's absolutely no comparison to the vast swaths of them that blanket much of Detroit.
The Woodward corridor doesn't seem much different than Cleveland's Euclid corridor on the east side. Both have some remnants of the past, but were largely torn down in the name of urban renewal. Public housing projects, medical campuses, college campuses...largely the same situation in both cities. I think both cities had extensive urban renewal in/near their downtowns, too.
Here's Erieview in Cleveland, and
here's South/West downtown Detroit. Pretty much the same type of low density industrial/commercial.
I'd say Cleveland and Detroit have similar levels of urban renewal, but Detroit has lost far more of its neighborhoods due to neglect and abandonment. While I agree with pj3000 that the presence of industry had a lot to do with it, I also think it was somewhat inevitable due to the incredible growth both cities experienced, followed by an abrupt reversal of fortune. Both Cleveland and Detroit experienced crazy growth for several decades, and planners incorrectly assumed that growth would continue. When Erieview was torn down, planners intended that area to become a higrise centric, high density area. Well, the growth stopped, and people started fleeing the city in droves, so obviously those plans weren't going to work. Only one highrise was built-
Erieview Tower