We all know about how downtowns/city cores across the nation have rebounded over the past several decades from the urban dark ages, but this thread is for urban places that were
egregiously hard hit by de-urbanization in the bad old days that are now showing signs of life and maybe don't get enough recognition for the progress (even if slow) that they are making.
I'll start it out with Chicago's south lakefront, the 8 red Community Areas on the map below (not including 34. Armour Square & 37. Fuller Park as they are mainly west of the Dan Ryan expressway). Together they total 13.14 sq. miles
once the heart of the city's hyper-segregated "blackbelt", much of it was an overcrowded slum by 1950, that started emptying out as more areas of the south and west sides were opened up to blacks in the post-war era. throw in some
HEAVY doses of slum clearance/urban "renewal", and by 2010 it had experienced severe population loss.
1950 population: 525,568
2010 population: 174,501
drop:
-351,067 (-66.8%)
but over the 2010's the area finally turned the corner and was broadly seeing the beginning of population rebound.
2020 population: 191,354
growth:
+16,853 (9.7%)
there is obviously still a
LONG way to go before Chicago's south lakefront starts resembling the fully built-out north lakefront, but that
nearly 10% growth last decade is nothing to sneeze at for a place that has taken it so freaking hard on the chin, and it's an absolutely wonderful start!
the area still has a respectable average population density of ~14,500 ppsm, and though it will never come close to touching half a million people again, even if it could rebound back up to ~300K over the next several decades, that would go a long way toward stitching it all back together as a more fully functional sub-area of urban chicago.
how about your city, what severely hard hit non-downtown area doesn't get enough recognition for its comeback story?
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