DETROIT – There’s no doubt that Detroit’s image has vastly improved since the days when it was known as the murder capital of the country. Suburbanites used to brag that they hadn’t gone into the city in decades, and the top official of Oakland County suggested it be fenced off “like an Indian reservation.”
Today, downtown Detroit is in its best shape in decades, filled with gleaming new restaurants and sports arenas packed with visitors on weekends. Thousands show up every Saturday to visit Eastern Market, which dates to the 1850s and is the largest open air farmer’s market in the nation.
Detroit has become a superb place to visit.
But would you want to live there? And if not now, what are the chances Detroit will become a more livable city in the near future?
Mayor Mike Duggan, a white guy from the suburbs who has been elected by mostly black constituents, has demolished more than 20,000 derelict buildings, taken credit for getting the street lights on again, and led a huge celebration in May when the Census Bureau reported Detroit had gained 1,852 residents over the previous year.
Though the amount was tiny, it was the first time Detroit, which has shrunk by two-thirds since its peak, losing an astonishing 1.3 million people, had gained population since the 1950s.
“Detroit is a vibrant and growing city again,” said a triumphant Duggan, who has been mayor since 2013.
But is it really?
Detroit Future City is a non-profit group dedicated to improving life there, including the goal of “making Detroit a more thriving and resilient middle-class city.” Last month, it released a report called “Making the Middle Class: Leveraging Detroit’s Neighborhoods to Build a Middle Class City.”
Nice title; nice goal. But the report, published on glossy paper and beautifully illustrated, tells exactly the opposite story Since the city emerged from bankruptcy a decade ago, the number of middle-class neighborhoods has dramatically declined, not increased.
Income disparities between white and Black Detroiters have increased, not lessened. And while the U.S. Census may have found that the city had a statistically insignificant population increase between 2022 and 2023, Detroit Future City found that Detroit “still has seen a notable loss of 67,000 residents since 2012,” and that the African-American population fell by nearly 100,000.
The college-educated white population is increasing, and is concentrated in a few census tracts that “offer access to amenities,” places that would have been called “yuppified” a few years ago.
But jobs and better housing for blue-collar and service workers is nowhere to be seen. John Mogk, a distinguished law professor who has worked in civic affairs for more than half a century, thinks the city’s prospects suffered a major blow in 2006, when the state constitution was amended to forbid the use of eminent domain to take privately owned land for economic development.
The city has lots of vacant land, but mainly in small, scattered parcels. Years ago, Mayor Duggan told this columnist Detroit was out of the running for a new Amazon headquarters “because they needed a thousand acres. I have difficulty putting 20 acres together.” Before the amendment, the city used eminent domain to gather the land needed for the only two auto factories still operating today in Detroit, Stellantis’ Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant, often known as Poletown, and General Motors’ Jefferson Assembly plant.
Mogk, who twice ran for mayor, said he knows nobody wants to see people forced from their homes. “So I would adopt the California rule that you can’t use eminent domain to oust someone who has lived in their house at least a year,”
Most of the parcels that would be needed for new development are vacant and are held by speculators. But there’s another, lesser-known problem, called the DDA: The Downtown Development Authority. It was started in 1976, when Detroit’s downtown was starting to look more like a ghost town.
The way it works is through a device called “tax capture,” which siphons off tax money from schools, libraries and other public needs and directs it to downtown economic development.
That may well have made sense once, but now downtown is thriving and many Detroit neighborhoods are in increasingly desperate shape. While downtown and what is called “midtown” Detroit are doing well, the Detroit Future City report concludes that “there are many areas of the city that continue their long-term downward trajectory,” and others that … are slipping in other indicators, such as income.”
Earlier this fall, Detroit City Council released a report on the DDA that said “it is clear that investments in the downtown have not lifted the city to share in any levels of prosperity.”
Detroit could abolish the DDA, Mogk noted. But vested interests would be sure to fight that.
Mayor Duggan, who hasn’t yet said if he will try for a fourth term next year, has a slogan that’s as vague as it is uplifting, “every neighborhood has a future.”
What remains to be seen, and largely depends on decisions he may make, is just what that future will be.
(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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