DETROIT – In many ways, Detroit is clearly better off than just a few years ago. Though the pandemic slowed the pace of progress, the downtown is home to an expanding list of exciting new cultural attractions.
Suburbanites who once shunned the city now flock to its concerts, exciting new restaurants, and even Detroit’s wretched sports teams. The city emerged from bankruptcy a decade ago, and has remained solvent, if not prosperous.
But the city is still hemorrhaging people, as it has steadily done since the 1950 census, when they counted 1,849,568 people. Today, the population is barely a third of that.
Mayor Mike Duggan, first elected ten years ago, originally said history would judge his administration a success only if it stopped the population decline. That hasn’t happened, but there’s agreement that what’s needed is a flourishing of vibrant, diverse neighborhoods.
That’s happening in some places — but too often, the city and the rich and powerful end up sabotaging them.
Neighborhoods, that is, like Hubbard Richard (pronounced Rees-hard) whose few thousand residents occupy a few square miles of land just southwest of downtown and east of the ancient Ambassador Bridge, soon to be eclipsed by the new Gordie Howe International Bridge, which is expected to open in early 2025. Sam Butler, president of the Hubbard Richard Resident Association, is a 39-year-old urban planner who grew up in the suburbs.
“We may be sort of a model,” for the city of the future, he said. By his estimate, the neighbor is about a third white, a third Black and a third Hispanic. He loves that, and he also loves that it is a very walkable community. “I can walk to good restaurants in 10 minutes and downtown in 25,” he said.
Now executive director of a non-profit called Doing Development Differently in Detroit, a group that aims to get more equitable housing, Butler moved to Detroit in his early 20s, after getting a master’s in urban planning from the University of Michigan.
He loved the vibe of a resurgent city, and like many millennials, valued an essentially walkable community, and found it in Hubbard Richard, a neighborhood named for Bela Hubbard, a pioneering state geologist, and Father Gabriel Richard, a priest instrumental in the early development of Detroit, and whose bones lie in the basilica of St. Anne de Detroit, the second-oldest continually operating Roman Catholic church in the nation.
That church is at the west end of Hubbard Richard, and right on the front line of the problem facing the community. For next to the neighborhood is the immense customs plaza for the Ambassador Bridge, now one of the United States and Canada’s most economically important border crossings. Matthew Moroun, whose family owns the border crossing, apparently wants to expand that customs plaza even more. Why the Morouns want to do this is a mystery, since they’ve admitted the new Gordie Howe will take away 75 percent or more of their lucrative business, mostly from trucks hauling freight.
Moroun also told Detroit City Council he has no intention of building a new bridge, though he has said otherwise in the past. But for years, he has trying to get the city to give him title to slightly less than four acres of land in return for the Moroun family paying $5 million to make improvements to Riverside Park.
The Hubbard Richard Resident Association passionately opposed that deal, which council initially rejected in 2021. This year, there were major protests. U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), whose district includes the area, was on the side of the residents.
She showed up at a protest with a bullhorn, saying “all I see is them (the Detroit International Bridge Company) wanting to take away from the community,” adding that she was “ashamed that our city would want to give them any public spaces at all.”
Sam Butler called the bridge company an “existential threat to the neighborhood.” He added that the impact “of moving 10,000 trucks per day closer to a vibrant, walkable neighborhood would have serious health effects on local residents.”
What the Hubbard Richard residents wanted was for the bridge company (essentially, Matthew Moroun) to agree on a package of community benefits before council agreed to the deal.
Council member Gabriela Santiago-Romero, whose district includes the area, strongly agreed, saying that was the only way the people would have any leverage.
But on Feb. 21, the full council, possibly under pressure from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, sided with the Morouns on a 6-3 vote. Some members said they felt obligated to do so, because the bridge company had fulfilled the terms of an agreement made in 2015.
Though he was devastated, Butler noted over coffee that the bridge company had promised to keep talking with the residents.
One longtime observer called the residents’ hope they would get anywhere naïve, “They are nice kids, but being nice doesn’t work with the Morouns,” he said, noting that the Morouns had a long history of not even honoring agreements they were obligated to make. In one case in 2012, that led to a judge briefly jailing the late Matty Moroun, the present owner’s father, for contempt of court.
What the Morouns are up to is a mystery, but Gregg Ward, owner of the Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry, said the Hubbard Richard residents are right to be concerned.
The bridge company has a track record of buying up houses on both sides of the water and leaving them to decay, with the idea of eventually bulldozing them for a new bridge.
Even if they never do, he calculates they make at least $2 million every week they delay the opening of the Gordie Howe.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
