Across the Midwest, the stimulus package is encouraging very strange things: cities are using it to demolish capital instead of to build it.

The signs are everywhere if you know where to look.  In the Polish Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I’m pitching my tent in a vacant lot. Until a few months ago, an abandoned house stood in the space where I’ll be sleeping tonight.   A journalist was squatting in this house, free of rent, much like artists who took over empty factories and abandoned houses in the 1990s.  The landlord didn’t bother to evict her: times were hard and few tenants were available.  The house was falling down, and the journalist was doing basic repairs and making sure that no one damaged the property.  The agreement suited everyone.  Valuable housing stock was maintained; meanwhile, a woman was able to keep a roof over her head.

Last year, however, the city seized the squat, which was $6,000 overdue in back taxes.  Rather than leaving it standing, the city spent about $5,000 in federal funds to bulldoze the house.  The vacant lot is not likely to be rebuilt anytime soon.

The $5,000 stimulus check plays out this way: a woman looses her place to live while the bulldozer driver makes a buck.  The stimulus ends there.  Abandoned lots in poor neighborhoods like the one I’m camping in tonight won’t see construction for the next few years, if ever.

Bulldozing is an odd strategy for an economic downturn, but it’s the major urban strategy being pursued in the rust belt.  The “shrinking cities” scheme started in Flint, Michigan in the 1980s.  Instead of allowing vacant houses to stand, city officials would use federal, state, and local funds to bulldoze houses.  The vacant lots would be turned over to favored development corporations or – more likely – left fallow.  In the wake of the current foreclosure crisis, the strategy of “shrinking cities” is being adopted as a way of dealing with vacant lots in Cleveland and Pittsburgh; bulldozing is now the unofficial urban policy of the Obama administration.

Illegal squatting demonstrates need, not recklessness, especially in the part of America that needs cheap housing even more than the rest. In my July 2009 tour of eleven cities across the Rust Belt, I found that unemployed people were cutting their expenses by moving into decaying houses.  One Flint resident I spoke to estimated that 45% of the residents of the neighborhood of East Town were illegally squatting in abandoned homes.  Squatters are caricatured as drug  dealers and arsonists, but more frequently they are just poor families. Residents in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Pittsburgh whom I interviewed identified mothers and children living in an abandoned house across the street; they were the daughter and grandchildren of a steelworker who had lived his entire life in the neighborhood.  When he died, the family had nowhere else to go and the squat became a temporary shelter.

The Rust Belt’s unemployed need hope, not to be pushed out onto the streets.  Sacramento’s tent city and Las Vegas’s motel population are evidence that there is nowhere better for them to go. Cheap housing is a valuable commodity to the nation’s poor.  It is the infrastructure that allows poor people to continue searching for jobs instead of flooding homeless shelters, churches, and overpasses.

Housing is expensive to rebuild; its destruction marks waste.  Wasting resources in a crisis should be marked as a crime.  Bulldozing makes a mockery of Obama’s economic stimulus plan.

There are much better strategies available to local officials who take the stimulus package seriously. In the middle of the twentieth century, FDR’s scheme for rural electrification and Eisenhower’s highway act knocked down the walls that prevented commerce.  Such projects connected remote geographies, allowing isolated families to access a market where their energy could be rewarded with work.

By choosing to connect the poor rather than bulldoze their homes, we could bootstrap the economy.  City-wide free wireless internet access (wifi) could connect poor neighborhoods in Flint and Pittsburgh, giving unemployed families the chance to at new skills and far-away jobs.  Light-rail construction would create businesses and jobs for the poor and immigrants who live in the outer ring suburbs of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

America’s economy depends upon connectivity, not destruction. It would be a crime indeed if the Obama stimulus program enriched no one except the bulldozer company: but that is indeed what will happen if local politics goes unreformed.

This article was produced as part of Commonweal Institute's Progressive Op-Ed Program