It’s a curious name, the Shrinking Cities Institute. Kent State University near Akron recently founded this initiative which is expected to address the problems of.... It’s a curious name, the Shrinking Cities Institute. Kent State University near Akron recently founded this initiative which is expected to address the problems of the minority number of big cities which continue to shrink rather than grow.

As you might have heard, Pittsburgh falls into this category.

A commentary by the Rand Institute’s Barry Balmat and Peter A. Morrison that appeared in the Post-Gazette in 2004 observed that Pittsburgh's population declined nearly 10 percent during the 1990s, in sharp contrast to the 13 percent nationwide population increase. Since 2000, the city's population loss has continued unabated.

That’s just the facts, not the commentary, however. The juice of the story is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We’ll get to the why of that in a bit, but first a little on the thought about what to do with shrinking cities.

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