Leave urban neighborhoods to rot: Will it pay?

Michael Brown, temporary mayor of Flint, Michigan, recently floated the idea of shutting down portions of his beleaguered city. The comment, which was apparently an off-the-cuff suggestion, has spurred conversation about the best ways for depressed municipalities to deal with abandoned and underperforming areas.

The decline of cities like Flint, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cincinnati offers a powerful argument that the country's manufacturing sector is, largely, a thing of the past. As companies have moved operations overseas, many of their former headquarters have become ghost towns, where bands of stray dogs and squatters roam among houses whose property values are rapidly approaching zero.