Look what's happening to downtown.

• Author: Loyacono, Laura
• Position: Includes related articles on Tax Increment Financing and on books on urban renewal

As people and businesses moved to the suburbs after World War II, inner cities lost their tax revenues and suffered serious, even dangerous, decay. Now they're snapping back.

The end of World War II brought a mass migration from America's cities to greener pastures. Millions of Americans fled in pursuit of the newly obtainable American Dream. The suburbs were born. Farmland and open space started giving way to new development and subdivisions.

By the '70s, once vibrant inner cities like Milwaukee, Baltimore and Detroit were places to avoid. Crime, poverty and urban decay became synonymous with "downtown."

But all is not lost - many of the worst cases are experiencing a rebirth. From Cleveland to New York, cities are finding their way back from the brink and into a new era of dynamic and vibrant growth. Some are looking to capital construction projects such as stadiums and convention centers to bring tourists and suburbanites downtown for a day of entertainment and shopping. But others are looking for a more fundamental shift - bringing people downtown to stay.

"For the past 50 years the suburban edges of U.S. cities have been encouraged to prosper, while the centers have been allowed to deteriorate. First came segregated suburban housing, developed with federal subsidies. Then came subsidized highways to service the commuter communities. Then retail shopping malls and eventually the workplace itself moved to the suburbs, in the form of office parks," says Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, former state legislator and author of The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life.

"In Detroit, Los Angeles and to varying degrees in all U.S. cities, the disassembled ingredients of the city sprawled across the suburban landscape, while large central cities have done little more than draw attention to their own pathologies by crying out for help from a federal government encrusted in a $5 trillion debt."

Under Norquist, Milwaukee has adopted urban planning and design guidelines that complement the traditional manner in which cities were originally built, rather than duplicating suburban development patterns. This type of planning has come to symbolize a national movement that has been dubbed "new urbanism" where cities favor small scale development and downtown retail, shunning the office park type of development that depends heavily on surface parking lots and auto transportation.

BATTLING SPRAWL

In an effort to fight suburban sprawl, states like Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Florida, Vermont and Hawaii have enacted "smart growth" policies that hope to address in part the needs of older cities. Maryland's Smart Growth legislation, adopted by the legislature in 1997, was passed largely in response to the concern that suburban developments were eating up farmland and open space. The law limits most new state infrastructure funding and economic development incentives, housing and other programs to existing communities. Vice President Al Gore commended the Maryland plan when he announced a new federal "livability agenda," which will seek to work with states and localities in planning large federal infrastructure, redevelopment and housing policies that discourage sprawl.

"We are beginning to untangle the myths about how we got to where we are," says Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown. "It took decades, but in the first federal plan to look at growth issues, Vice President Gore finally acknowledged that federal policies on transportation, education and housing have hurt the inner cities. And the federal government is finally noticing good state ideas in this area like Maryland's Smart Growth initiative.

A mainstay for urban redevelopment agendas has been a plethora of big-ticket items to spur growth and generate excitement about big city offerings. Major league stadiums have led the list - professional sports team owners and state and local governments are leveraging tax money to finance stadiums in Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland and Seattle.

Several states have helped finance new convention centers including those in Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston and Milwaukee, or arts centers such as the new performing arts center in Newark and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Kansas City and Detroit have adopted casino gaming to bring people downtown and generate sales tax revenue.

Gratz, however, is critical of "headline grabbing" civic projects - from big cultural centers to new stadiums that require huge capital investments. "Convention centers, stadiums, aquariums, cultural centers, enclosed malls - these are about politics and development profitable for a few, not about developing local economies," she says.

Many agree with Gratz when she says that no stadium has revitalized downtown by itself. Rather. smart planners are learning that stadiums should be located in areas where revitalization is well under way.

In Denver, Coors Field has become a welcome addition to lower downtown, or LoDo, where businesses thrive and housing projects and loft conversions are a common sight since its designation as a historic district in 1988. Coors Field is within walking distance of a pedestrian mall and public transportation and is near a major highway. Bill Mosher, one of the developers, says it takes the sting out of losing a ball game when you can exit the stadium into vibrant pedestrian friendly surroundings - rather than being stuck in a parking lot or in a massive traffic jam on the highway.

SAVING OLD BUILDINGS

As in so many other cities, historic preservation has been key to urban rejuvenation. Downtown Denver suffered from a series of boom-bust economic cycles in which many of Denver's historic structures were...