Michigan's landscape is being transformed on the large scale by urban sprawl, and our neighborhoods, communities and cities are paying the price. While Michigan spends its resources building outward in long bland strip malls, young professionals are continuing to leave the state in order to climb the professional ladder in places like Chicago, Boston, Seattle and New York. Where we once invested resources in beautiful and long-lasting architecture, we now settle for plasterboard strip malls tossed up virtually overnight. Instead of living near our jobs and spending more time with our families, we live far out on the fringes and sit in our cars sometimes an hour or more as we commute to jobs in the city.

When you look at our major cities, with their empty skyscrapers, deserted thoroughfares, and empty houses, it's clear that something has changed over the last half century. We have abandoned our investment in these great population centers, and instead are sprawling out to develop our fields and farmland. Homes and businesses are now more spread out and use up more land, asphalt and resources to provide the same services we used to get locally. Convenient urban neighborhoods have been traded for suburbs in which you absolutely must climb in your car just to go get a loaf of bread or take your children to school.

Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Saginaw and many other great Michigan cities are losing people, money and infrastructure, making them less and less attractive places to live and work. While the cash leaps out to support new suburban development in farmland and open spaces, Detroit has lost nearly half its population in the last 50 years, making it home to one of the most massive urban exoduses in American history. The Motor City "Motown" was once one of the jewels of American urban life, but it can now seem like a ghost town on a Saturday afternoon, with vacant storefronts, buildings and schools.

The state's overall population grew only 6.9% between 1990 and 2000; meanwhile, population in the 13 largest cities actually dropped by 4.3%, reflecting a fundamental shift in the way we live and use land. From 1970 to 2000, the amount of land classified as "urban" grew significantly faster than the population in most regions of the state. Around Flint, the total population fell by 2 percent from 1970 to 2000, while the amount of urbanized land grew by 72 percent. Even in Grand Rapids, which has invested heavily in revitalizing its downtown, the amount of urbanized land grew twice as fast as population.1 Meanwhile, farmland and forests on the outskirts of our cities are rapidly being converted to new malls and subdivisions.

Public policies have been putting our cities behind the 8-ball for decades by encouraging and subsidizing their evacuation through new highways, infrastructure and massive tax-incentives for new businesses to locate outside our core urbanized areas. "Cool Cities" is about rethinking the way we choose to live, and putting a stop to urban flight once and for all. Cities and towns across Michigan's can be great places to live, and by supporting redevelopment in existing areas, we can reverse the trend. Cities offer us what no cookie-cutter housing and shopping centers plopped into cornfields ever will: a sense of history, aesthetics and community.

1Orfield, Myron. Michigan Metropatterns: A Regional Agenda for community and Prosperity in Michigan. Ameregis, April 2003.