potentially good - ridding the landscape of deserted, decrepit structures.

potentially bad -- gentrification run amock. Given the general trends, I can't help but be somewhat suspicious.

I'm not sure why the federal govt should have anything to do with this.

cost constraints and two ongoing wars.

Here's the thing: YES, bulldoze. More, even, than they're talking about. But don't just bulldoze (okay, some of it, sure. Some isn't worth saving. But some's got asbestos and FSM knows what else in / on it, and so must be handled correctly!) -- recycle and reuse. Lots of old buildings have better lumber in them than you can buy today. But don't WASTE. Some things need saving 'cause they're historically worth saving, some things are worth saving to put to better or different uses, and some things are worth saving as materials for new iterations.

That said, you could put some people to work doing the demo, sorting the materials (think ReStore), and others to work rebuilding smaller and more user-friendly (and less dilapidated, plus ADA-compliant) houses, libraries, schools, senior centers, making it easier for people to live well (with yards, gardens, parks/playgrounds, community centers, etc. handy) in what's left of the cities.

Bonus: no vacant structures for crack-house or meth-lab exploitation; no incentive to vandalize/ strip fixtures/materials, no rows and rows of deteriorating buildings in "dangerous" neighborhoods. More people working. More people able to afford housing. More public transit. Better community life.

Bigger bonus: fewer miles of pavement, less sprawl, less cars spewing pollution, less fractionalization -- and maybe as a bonus to that, less factionalization -- of communities.

We've done "bigger, faster, shinier, pricier." How about we try "better" for a change?

Plus, if we do this, we might finally be able to turn those "dangerous" neighborhoods into 'hoods where people have jobs, homes, schools -- and some control, for a change, over how their environment's treated, used, maintained. Maybe the idea of secession isn't such a bad one, it's just the scale that's the trouble. What if you let viable neighborhoods secede from bigger cities and become their own cities, stop being subject to distant council / mayor control -- and the crony contracts and neglect for older 'substandard' areas that have historically followed such models?

seriously -- most outer ring suburbs were farmland less than 25 years ago, and relocation the people in those homes to urban areas makes more environmental sense than trying to "reclaim" urban areas. (here's a clue -- there is almost no "nature" in urban environments to return to. bulldozing merely flattens the unnatural environment, but it doesn't change its essense. ).

I picked falcons 'cause they're easy to find on the Web with photos and video, and 'cause they're apex predators in their food chain, meaning they're not going to be the wildlife in the city if the only thing they have to live on is thrown-away bread.

Versailles is a state of mind, really Lambert, after I gave you a tour of DC!

A few points. First, 'right-sizing', as they are calling it, has long since been decided by anything-but-benign neglect most specifically the policies of the national government. In a place like Detroit, a place I'm intimately familiar with, this process has already began to take place in parts of the city without the concerted effort of any government. Entire Census blocks of area are in the process or have reverted to nature. Urban or Ghetto prairies, they call them.

I don't mean to try and make light of Katrina or disrespect anyone that had to go through it, but we've been experiencing a continuous Katrina up here in Michigan for decades, now, with either no one noticing or no one caring. That's hardly to imply that this state and its cities hold none of the blame, but I often think people trump up the blame on the state in its cities while ignoring the main culprit. We've been the victim (yes, I said it, and don't apologize for it) of a good 50 years or more of trade policies that not only simply had the bad consequence of, but sought to, dismantle American manufacturing as we know it. That is not acceptable, it's not our fault, and it will never be forgiven.

I hope what people are seeing now, and what we've been screaming to the world for decades, is that a place like Michigan is just the start of things, the ground-zero of this nuking of our national manufacturing sector. It's not some anamoly or tragic (always take note of the lack of agency in that word) consequence of a perfect storm; it's the result of a flawed and short-sighted belief that we shouldn't make things here, anymore, that everyone and everything can and should be folded into a 'new, knowledge-based' economy.

What you've all witnessed is the dismantling and deconstruction of a state that was central in building all of these "Sunbelt" (what an incredibly tasteless word to use if you're going to use Rustbelt to refer to the manufacturing regions on the country, BTW) that everyone else ran off to with reckless abandoned, creating some cities literally in the middle of desert.

Sorry for going off on a tangent, but I just wanted to make the point that we got to the place where we have to deconstruct many of these cities because our policies didn't have bugs, some of their central features let to what we see today.