Five years ago, there was an abandoned Roman Catholic church at the corner of Twelve Mile and Southfield Road. Today, there’s a bustling shopping center there with everything from two restaurants to a Detroit vs Everybody clothing store.
Five years ago, the stretch of stores and businesses along Coolidge in Oak Park was looking pretty ratty. Today, things are spruced up, cleaned up, and looking better.
Two tiny examples in two small commercial strips do not a Renaissance make. But something is going on in these two towns, something good.
They aren’t back to what they should be yet. Southfield has one of the largest and most impressive libraries around. But drive north up Southfield Road, and you see a disturbing number of empty storefronts. Oak Park High School boasts a dazzling array of alumni, from Geoffrey and Doug Fieger to Jeffrey Sachs, the world-famous economist who helped Eastern Europe’s leaders right their economies after the fall of Communism.
But its students now have some of the lowest test scores in Oakland County, and Southfield schools need a lot of improvement as well. Oak Park needs more economic growth.
Southfield needs to do something with the closed and abandoned buildings at the former Northland Mall, the iconic shopping center that, together with the nearby Lodge Freeway, helped spark the great migration from Detroit to the suburbs when they opened in 1954.
But I think it vitally important that both cities succeed, and here is why: Both were really born during the explosive expansion in the years that followed World War II. Oak Park, a village of a thousand people when the war ended was “America’s Fastest Growing City in the 1950s. Southfield, which had been farm and pasture land, became a city in 1958.
Within a decade, it had 70,000, and was soon both a bedroom community and a substitute downtown office hub. But it also became a destination for middle-class African Americans who wanted a suburban life style. The problem was, as always, getting white folks to stay in a community when black ones move in.
The black population of Southfield was less than one percent in 1970. It went to nine percent in 1980, 29 percent in 1990, and 54 percent in the year 2000.
But the rapid demographic shift didn’t please all black residents. I noticed something curious when Brenda Lawrence was making a bid to become Southfield’s first black mayor in 2001. I met some white voters who were all for her; they felt the city’s longtime white mayor was too close to the big developers, too stale, and needed to go.
However, I talked to some middle-class black residents who weren’t too sure they wanted a black mayor. As one man told me, “I came here to live in a suburb. I don’t want to live in another ghetto.” Lawrence won, but she did her best to keep Southfield healthy and diverse, and stayed mayor until the voters sent her to Congress four years ago.
When she left, the by-then mostly black voters elected a white mayor. They do value diversity of all kinds in Southfield and Oak Park. If these cities can stabilize and go on to thrive, I think that sends a solid message that all Metro Detroit can.
