Check out Shrinking Cities from Virginia Tech’s Dept. of Urban Affairs and Planning.
The blog comes from the Shrinking Cities – Sustainability studio in Virginia Tech’s School of Urban Affairs and Planning, Alexandria Campus.
It  “aim(s) to explore the opportunities and challenges of shrinking cities in the context of contemporary urban planning. We will evaluate strategies and commentary on shrinking cities, including urban agriculture, storm water infrastructure, pocket parks, vacant property reclamation, land banks and community energy generation.”
Lots of good stuff here on Baltimore, Cleveland, Youngstown and more.
-KG

Good Magazine is reporting that four Detroit High Schools will begin training students to work at Wal-Mart.
Students will receive 10 credits for 11 weeks of job readiness preparation with the retail giant.
Advocates say it’s a good opportunity for students, given the city’s staggering unemployment rate.
Advocates for the poor say the students are being trained for dead-end jobs and lives of subserviance.

-AS

Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

Plain Dealer editorial writer Sharon Broussard was treading on familiar ground when she offered this piece of advice to Cleveland Public Schools Eugene Sanders Sunday:
“Don’t be afraid to blow up the current system and come up with really radical ways to create new schools that work and that can gain community support.”
Did you hear that? That was me groaning.
Plain Dealer writers frequently offer this kind of advice, always directed at Mr. Sanders personally. Because if only he would “come up with really radical new ways to create news schools that …

Are African American males our greatest untapped resource?

The answer is yes, according to a study by Policy Bridge, Cleveland-based, minority-focused think tank.

“No single resource in Northeast Ohio is as underutilized as African-American males,” reports the agency in its study, Untapped Potential, African-American Males in Northeast Ohio.

• In Cleveland, roughly 65 percent of all males living in poverty are
African-American.

• Roughly a third of African-American men in

I know we’ve had a lot on this blog about the current recession and how hard it has hit the auto industry and Michigan.
So, I apologize if you’re sick of reading about it, but I’m posting a link to this sobering Wall Street Journal Story about laid-off white collar workers.
“Mr. Barr, 46 years old, was the type of well-educated, white-collar ‘knowledge’ worker that Michigan hoped would help offset a decline in auto-assembly jobs. But Detroit’s Big Three car makers have aggressively thinned these ranks in the past two years, perhaps …

A Cleveland Magazine reporter has been following three Cleveland Public School students for 18 months to answer the question: What’s it like growing up in one of the country’s poorest cities?
It’s not a pretty picture, at least according to these three accounts.
There’s Ruben, a West Side Puerto Rican with a learning disability that recently knocked up his girlfriend.
There’s Angela, who spends are her time exhausted from her night job at Taco Bell, where she works to help support her ailing mother and younger sister.
And Gerald, a respectful and promising student, …

This past week, The New York Times highlighted Sinclair Community College, a school in Dayton helping to retrain workers for the “new” economy.
This glowing piece highlights the school’s low tuition, well-respected programs, aid for displaced G.M. and Delphi workers, and growing enrollment.
“We help people go from $8-an-hour jobs to $18-an-hour jobs,”the school’s president told The Times.
It’s also good to see a Dayton institution get good press after all the negative “dying cities” stuff.

Several Detroit Public School employees have been charged with felonies in connection with corruption and missing funds totaling tens of millions of dollars, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
This is on top of another pressing problem the school is struggling with, a $259 million budget deficit.
The charges are pretty shocking - “A probe launched by [Emergency financial manager] Mr. Bobb uncovered paychecks going to 257 “ghost” employees who have yet to be accounted for,” the Journal explained.
“He said that approximately 500 illegal health-care dependents he uncovered have cost the district …