DETROIT – Let’s ask the really hard question: Do cities like Toledo and Detroit have any real hope of becoming truly vibrant, dynamic, and prosperous places again?
For years, a succession of mayors of both cities have promised that happy days are, if not here again, just around the corner. Yet for years, both cities have continued to lose jobs and people.
Detroit’s crash has been far more dramatic and devastating than Toledo’s. Detroit’s population peaked in 1950, when it officially had 1,849,548 people, and was the fourth largest city in the nation.
Toledo reached its highest population in 1970, when the census counted 383,818. Comparing the two cities makes more sense than you might at first think: Though they are in different states and much different in size, they are only an hour’s drive apart, and have had similar, industrial-manufacturing-automotive-based economies.
Today, Detroit is a hollow shell of its former self. Last year’s census found only 639,111 people, meaning that two-thirds of the city’s peak population has simply disappeared.
Toledo’s decline may have started a little later than Detroit’s, but a little earlier than the numbers suggest: The peak 1970 population figure disguises the fact that, through annexation, the city nearly doubled in size during the 1960s.
But ever since that 1970 census Toledo has also steadily, if more slowly, lost people; last year’s count was 270,871. While there are no scenes of abandoned factories and urban desolation comparable to Detroit’s, many manufacturing jobs and five of the seven Fortune 500 companies that were headquartered in Toledo are gone as well.
Detroit is not only in considerably worse shape than Toledo, it is in many ways better off than it was a decade ago, despite the population having now fallen to what it was about 1914.
The city survived tumbling into bankruptcy and being taken over by the state a decade ago. It emerged from that, shorn of much of its debt, and today, the downtown is probably more vibrant than it has been since the 1960s — or at least it was before the pandemic.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has gotten the street lights working again, demolished derelict buildings, kept the city solvent if not prosperous, and, after two terms, is still hugely popular.
There seems no doubt whatsoever about his being reelected next month; in the August primary he got an astonishing 72 percent of the vote to 10 percent for his closest challenger.
But by most measures, the city is still in dreadful shape. Car insurance remains far too expensive for most residents. Many of the neighborhoods are bleak, blighted or utterly devastated landscapes of feral animals and uninhabitable homes.
Unemployment among adults in the labor force is 25 percent – equivalent to the national rate at the depths of the Great Depression. Detroit also has the nation’s second-highest poverty rate – 30.6 percent, just behind Cleveland’s 30.8 percent.
So what, if anything, should these cities do?
What can they do?
Ronald Randall, a political science professor who founded the University of Toledo’s Urban Affairs Center around 1979, isn’t sure about some cities, but thinks Toledo can revive.
“As compared to Cleveland or Detroit, our problems are still manageable, even if not as manageable now as in 1970 or even 1980.”
Randall, who is now retired, believes Toledo should have used the fact that it had an existing water system more aggressively in order to get areas bordering the city to agree to be annexed to Toledo.
“Instead, we adopted policies that made it more attractive to move to the suburbs,” he said, which meant the city lost tax revenue.
He also thinks Toledo gave up too much when it negotiated the new Toledo Regional Water Authority in 2019, and should have been tougher. “Sylvania was threatening to build its own water system, but if you look at the price of doing that, they really couldn’t afford to.”
Nevertheless, he thinks Toledo can turn things around if the city works harder to keep people, and especially businesses, from leaving. “I think you have to do everything you can to make Toledo attractive, so people and businesses have more of an incentive to move in or stay in than move out. The planning commission or some other city department should work with businesses that need to move or expand to find them somewhere in the city to move to.”
Detroit’s dilemma is different. The city has lots of city-owned land, but mainly in terms of small parcels.
That has badly stymied attempts to attract major employers like Amazon, who often demand sites of 500 to 1,000 acres. One Detroit mayor told me he would have a hard time assembling more than 20.
In the past, Detroit has used eminent domain to force private owners to sell land to the city for major projects, such as the 1980 “Poletown” auto plant — but Michigan’s Supreme Court has since ruled that unconstitutional.
Some urban experts think that the only truly viable long-term solution for Detroit would be a metropolitan government in which the city and the suburbs would share services and tax revenue.
But that seems politically impossible. Both cities have mayors — Detroit’s Duggan and Wade Kapszukiewicz in Toledo — who are overwhelming favorites to be reelected next month.
But don’t expect their next terms to be easy.
30-
