DETROIT, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- Youngstown, Ohio's mayor says plans to offer incentives to Detroit residents to move out of the city's most distressed areas will fail, based on his experience.
Youngstown experimented with a relocation plan in 2005 to move people and shut down parts of the city in an effort to make Youngstown a smaller but more livable city after 30 years of population loss, the Detroit Free Press reported Sunday.
It didn't work, Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams said.
The idea of moving people always was more "theoretical and academic" than a practical option, Williams said.
Hunter Morrison, an urban planning professor who helped draw up Youngstown's plan, said the city has "pretty much abandoned the notion that you're going to aggressively move out folks."
Detroit faces problems on a scale that dwarfs those of Youngstown, experts say.
The amount of estimated vacant and abandoned buildings in Detroit -- about 40 square miles of the city's 139 square miles -- could swallow Youngstown whole, they say.
"I can't imagine that," said Ian Beniston, an urban planner and deputy director of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Plan, a non-profit working in the city.
"Even just thinking about the scale of Detroit, and the amount of people and resources it would take to even do this in 10 neighborhoods. It's very, very significant," he said.
