Cities in Transition: 'Boom-Bust' added to the list

The American Planning Association has come out with its Cities in Transition: A Guide for Practicing Planners, a 165-page large-format paperback on strategies for dealing with struggling cities. The report focuses much of its attention on what it calls Legacy Cities, like Detroit, Cleveland, or St. Louis. Another category are so-called Gateway Cities, mid-sized municipalities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states like Springfield, Massachusetts. These cities experienced many of the problems of Legacy Cities but have been revitalized in recent decades by immigrants. A third and final category are the new cities in trouble — like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which were sustained by the housing boom and suburban expansion — now stopped for the foreseeable future. So-called Boom-Bust Cities are focused mostly in California, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. A big problem is that housing values have sunk below the cost of new construction: "In Las Vegas, homes in many distressed older neighborhoods (typically 1950s and 1960s vintage) were selling in 2011 for $30,000 to $40,000, while houses in newly built planned communities were selling for little more than $100,000, barely half of what they cost to build fewer than 10 years earlier," the authors report.