Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities

This report explores the challenges of regenerating America’s legacy cities and suggests ways to overcome obstacles such as job and population loss. Community and economic developers will learn how to rebuild the core of a city, repurpose vacant land, and more so they can revitalize their own hometowns.

See also our short video in which Alan Mallach explains the challenges and opportunities for legacy cities, as well as our 2017 report, Revitalizing America’s Smaller Legacy Cities, which focuses on cities with populations of less than 200,000, located primarily in the Midwest and Northeast.

About the Authors

Alan Mallach is a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting professor in the Program for Sustainable Planning and Development at Pratt Institute. He is the c-author of the book Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture, published in 2010 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and editor of the 2012 book Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland.

Lavea Brachman is the executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center and the chief architect of the Restoring Prosperity to Ohio initiative. She is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a fellow of the German Marshall Fund for the United States. She has been a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a visiting professor in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She is co-author of Ohio’s Cities at a Turning Point: Finding the Way Forward, published by the Brookings Institution.