Alexia Fernández Campbell: Can you explain the concept behind Youngstown’s plan for “smart shrinkage”?

Ian Beniston: The way I view that is, planning within the realms of reality. It's not that we don't want to grow. Given the option to shrink or grow, anyone is going to pick grow. But we're not operating in such a way as if we're going to grow tomorrow or even growing now. I think it's really a common-sense approach. It's not like “Oh look at us, we're dying.” It's more like, this is our reality, and we have to make decisions a certain way based on this.

Campbell: Why do you think it was considered such a novel idea at the time?

Beniston: I think it was considered such a novel idea because you had elected officials here articulating the message that perhaps smaller is better and that we're not growing. Not just now, but we really haven’t grown for two-and-a-half to three decades. So we need to start operating in such a way [that accounts for the lack of growth], and that impacts everything you do—when you're thinking about land use, thinking about delivering services, thinking about operations, and what the future city will look like. There were very few elected officials at the local level, anywhere in the U.S., who were articulating such a message publicly. Embracing shrinkage has to do with the fact that we had the infrastructure for 250,000 people and we currently have 65,000. That alone means there are going to be severe fiscal challenges.

Campbell: Did the city ever try encourage people from empty neighborhoods to move to more stabilized neighborhoods?

Beniston: The 2010 plan was very basic, so there was the clean-and green-portions of it, improving quality of life, redefining the regional and local economy, but it didn't get down to the property level of detail. [The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation] has taken the next step to developing detailed plans with a more market-and-data-driven strategy on the varying health of neighborhoods, so we know which neighborhoods are weak or distressed. We know which are transitional or functional or stable and we've tailored the specific work that need to happen to each of those neighborhoods.

Campbell: What type of work?

Beniston: In stable neighborhoods, for example, we really shouldn't be demolishing housing. This is oversimplifying this, but if there is a vacant home there, it is likely something that should be rehabilitated, whereas the neighborhood that is already 70 percent vacant, the strategy is probably demolition and reusing the land for another purpose. For example, recently we started working with a company that grows hybrid poplar trees on these acres of vacant land, which are then harvested. Those are the types of things—in areas with high vacancy—we need to be thinking of. They are strategies that generate some employment, plus also take property off the city's maintenance rolls and put it back to some sort of productive use that has some sort of benefit to the ecosystem.