Nobody's talking about bulldozing the West End just yet. But at a time when other shrinking cities are contemplating smaller geographic footprints to save money and resources, is this a talk that Pittsburgh and the Obama administration soon might have?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Keep reading.

Pittsburgh was one of several cities mentioned in a Daily Telegraph (U.K.) story published this month and headlined rather ominously, "U.S. Cities May Have To Be Bulldozed In Order To Survive."

The story, which was picked up by the Drudge Report and soon after was bouncing around the Internet and talk radio, explored "a pioneering scheme" that originated in Flint, Mich.: "Razing entire districts and returning the land to nature," thus right-sizing the city to meet the current population (114,000), not the population it once served (196,000).

Dan Kildee, treasurer of Flint's Genesee County, "outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, [and] has now been approached by the U.S. government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learned to the rest of the country," the Daily Telegraph story said.

Pittsburgh was one of 50 downsizing candidates alleged to have been identified in a report published by the Brookings Institution.

Hold the phone, says Brookings. The report, called "Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities," was published in 2007 and doesn't call for bulldozing Pittsburgh or any other city.

It does say this, though:

"While older industrial cities' residential and business base has contracted over the past several decades, their physical footprints have not. Instead, once vibrant neighborhoods and industrial areas are left with thousands of abandoned buildings and vacant, often contaminated, lots that are costly to maintain at the same time that they act as a drag on proximate property values."

That's all true. And any industrial city in possession of such tracts and lots (which is to say, every industrial city) has been trying to figure out what to do with these properties, and these neighborhoods, for years.

And of those cities, a few have indeed mulled the idea of shrinking their footprints, including Flint. But Mr. Kildee says he never actually told the Daily Telegraph that America's older cities would have to bulldoze their way to prosperity, or that President Obama is considering such a large-scale rehab plan.

"It was a little bit of conflation of two different ideas," Mr. Kildee said, explaining the dust-up.

He said he was talking about the creation of a "land bank" much like Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority, an agency that holds onto properties and tries to sell them in a planned, systematic way. The land-bank lessons are ones Mr. Kildee had been asked to "apply to the rest of the country," and he's been having those talks with both the Obama administration and the and Bush administration before that, he said.

The "bulldozing" of sections of Flint is a separate issue.

"Look, we know we've already shrunk. We need to change the design of the city," he said.

And though the idea of shrinking the footprint of a city can be politically difficult (witness the outrage when it was suggested that parts of New Orleans should be returned to wetlands after Hurricane Katrina), it's less so in Flint.

"The blocks that we're talking about don't have anybody living on them," he said. There is no neighborhood opposition, because there is literally no neighborhood left.

Flint isn't the only town to acknowledge this reality. Seven years ago, city fathers in Youngstown, Ohio, conceded aloud that the city was shrinking, not growing, and that no amount of boosterism would bring back the heyday of steel and manufacturing.

It was an obvious admission, yet a bold one: Instead of seeking growth, Youngstown would have to try to "right-size" the city, focusing dwindling resources on the areas of the city most suitable for habitation.

The plan, called Youngstown 2010, would mean giving up on entire blocks or neighborhoods, steering residents and businesses downtown and toward the city's hospitals and universities. Some neighborhoods deemed unsustainable might be abandoned altogether, meaning the city could save money by not providing services -- street paving, garbage collection, police patrols -- in those areas.

"For some of these cities, the footprint is so much larger than they can really accommodate," said Jennifer Vey, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of the 2007 "prosperity" study.

The old equation -- revitalization equals growth -- "may not be realistic for some of these cities. ... The reality is that a lot of the cities are not going to see that population return in the foreseeable future, if ever," she said.

Instead, they must plan for "smart decline."

Pittsburgh, however, isn't contemplating any such action, says the URA, now or in the near future.

Nor, as it turns out, is Youngstown, even with 2010 right around the corner.

The recession, reports The Christian Science Monitor, is challenging Youngstown's plan. "The city has little money to demolish vacant buildings; no one has taken the $50,000 incentive to move. ... Youngstown's experience underscores the difficulties of urban engineering on such a massive scale, as the promise of renewal collides with the sacrifices needed to make it work."

In other words, it's easier said than done.

"It's intuitively a credible idea," said Alan Mallach, fellow with the National Housing Institute, a New Jersey nonprofit that studies housing and neighborhood issues. But it costs a lot of money to demolish properties or relocate people, he said.

And it's politically difficult, too, as the New Orleans experience demonstrated.

"People went berserk, and all of the politicians backed off," when the idea of "shrinking" New Orleans was broached, said Mr. Mallach. "You're going to have people who say, 'This is my home, and you're going to have to carry me out feet first.'" Persuading them to leave a neighborhood is a very slow, labor intensive process, he said.

Pittsburgh, like many other Rust Belt cities, has shrunk well below its industrial height as a town of more than 670,000 in the 1940s to a current population of just over 311,000.

But at just 55 square miles, Pittsburgh is still fairly dense with about 5,600 people living per square mile. Flint has a density of 3,700 people per square mile, and Youngstown has 2,300.

Some growth towns, by comparison: Phoenix (population 1.55 million) has a density of 2,900 people per square mile; Jacksonville, Fla., population 794,000, has a density of 1,061 per square mile; and San Jose, Calif., (939,000 people) is at 5,100.