CHAPTER 2

Detroit: Despite a Visionary Strategic Plan, a City Still Depressed

If Baltimore seemed on occasion to have broken the cycle of postindustrial decline, Detroit’s downward trajectory appeared unrelenting in the years that followed the uprisings of 1967. Despite an uptick in fortunes in the 1990s—part of a national surge in prosperity—Detroit’s resources continued to melt away in the twenty-first century. From its peak as the epicenter of the nation’s automobile production, with a population of 1.86 million in 1950, the city lost half its population over the next fifty years. The trend continued into the new century, as the city lost another 25 percent of its population, and levels of poverty and crime reached record highs. The recession that emerged in 2008 was especially cruel, pushing an overwhelmingly Black city, which had taken special pride in achieving home ownership, to record levels of foreclosure and homelessness. For the first time in a generation, a majority of the 714,000 remaining residents no longer owned their own homes. Revenue from real estate taxes plummeted, abandonment spread, and services virtually disappeared in some sections as the city scrambled to maintain ever-greater needs with ever-diminishing resources. The object of national and international ridicule, Detroit appeared to finally hit bottom when the state put it into bankruptcy in 2013, the largest jurisdiction ever to be so designated in the United States.

And yet, it was fitting in an “urban era,” as Richard Florida called the early twenty-first century, that Detroit might be cast as part of that renaissance. Not denying the city’s continued challenges, Florida nonetheless heralded “the other story of Detroit, the bigger one,” its rebirth, its rising. Founder and advocate of the New Urbanist movement Andrés Duany followed, supplying the ultimate signal in a few words of the city’s perceived revitalization under the headline “Why Detroit Is the New Brooklyn.” Adding to the pantheon of leading urban practitioners, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz singled out the city as “an incredible living laboratory where the future of American cities is being demonstrated, one project, one investment at a time. As counterintuitive as it may seem, Detroit’s intense civic engagement, networked leadership, and reevaluation of assets makes it a model for other cities and metropolitan areas.” Claiming the city now “teems with a post-post-apocalyptic optimism,” a writer for the New York Times Magazine suggested that Detroit could become “the testing ground for an updated American dream: privateers finding the raw material for new enterprise in the wreckage of the Rust Belt.”¹

That such a narrative could survive even bankruptcy was testament to two, potentially complementary initiatives: spurred growth through downtown reinvestment, aided in large part by loose regulations and generous public subsidies, and managed neighborhood decline under the direction of a visionary planning process determined that over time degraded or abandoned property constituting the great bulk of city land could be turned into assets. In the most optimistic of the scenarios put forth by foundations as well as the public sector, Detroit could become a thriving city once again, its residents the beneficiaries of creative capitalism directed by enlightened leadership. While such a vision was grounded in the hard work of community exchange and commitment, the prospects for realizing such a balance through redevelopment remained—ten years into the experiment—still tantalizingly out of reach. Given the gulf between resources available to each side of the downtown/neighborhood divide, such imbalance was hardly surprising.

As vital as it had been as a producer of industrial goods and the nation’s fourth largest city in the first part of the twentieth century, Detroit’s development had long represented the uneven benefits of the modern economy. Immigrants and their descendants historically worked for low wages until, famously, big labor in the form of the United Auto Workers in Detroit arrived at an agreement with big business after World War II that workers would get a fair share of profits. As their buying power increased, they would help sustain postwar prosperity. For a while, the bargain held, though to Detroit’s and other big cities’ detriment, government policies underwriting home mortgages in the suburbs invited the exodus of the middle class and undercut urban finances. Discrimination against African Americans, both in housing and in employment, left them marginalized in the metropolitan economy and concentrated in older urban areas where funds to provide services were compromised by declines in city revenue. Notably, Lyndon Johnson used a speech at the University of Michigan in 1964 to launch what he called the Great Society as an effort to reverse the peril Black inner-city families encountered in the postwar years. “Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit,” Johnson asserted, as he paused in the Motor City on the way to his address. “You folks in Detroit put American citizens on wheels, you have the American economy on the move. Unemployment in Detroit is down, profits are up, wages are good, and there is no problem too tough or too challenging for us to solve.”² Three years later devastating riots punctured that rosy picture, and the hemorrhaging of resources only accelerated from there.

The transition to a majority Black city, headed by a Black mayor, did not happen without additional turmoil. In the war years particularly, when industrial jobs opened to Blacks for the first time under federal rules adopted under pressure from civil rights leaders, the number of African Americans in the city swelled. Strict housing restrictions forced the overcrowding of Black neighborhoods, however, and when new, public housing was introduced to alleviate the problem, whites made sure such projects were not located in their neighborhoods. When Blacks crossed the color line, whites reacted forcefully, even violently on numerous occasions, to protect the exclusive nature of their neighborhoods. When realtors were able to penetrate such areas with scare tactics, warning that even the presence of one Black family would initiate precipitous loss of home value, previously white ethnic enclaves gave way to African Americans. Instead of finding upper mobility, however, the great majority of Black newcomers to these neighborhoods witnessed the relocation of industry to suburbs where white workers had relocated. By the late 1960s, Detroit was approaching majority Black status, even as the heart of its economy was departing.³

Such trends did not go unaddressed, even among Republicans as they took control of the federal government in the wake of Johnson’s decision, forced by the escalating financial and political costs of the Vietnam War, not to run again followed by Richard Nixon’s election in 1968. Having faced a liberal opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, in the GOP primaries himself, Nixon had bowed at least partially to the civil rights revolution, committing himself to encourage Black entrepreneurship and forming an urban affairs council within his administration to advise him. For secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he selected the liberal Republican governor of Michigan and a champion of Detroit, George Romney. It was Romney’s bold decision to deny water, sewer, and highway funds to suburban areas that failed to meet the fair housing requirements of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. Caught between advisers who sought to expand the GOP base among Black inner-city voters and white southerners,⁴ Nixon faced a defining moment whether to accede to Romney’s policy as it engendered white backlash. Romney never cleared his effort with Nixon, who, when he found out, ordered his chief policy adviser John Ehrlichman to “stop this one.” Admitting that reversing Romney’s directive would leave communities segregated, Nixon nonetheless declared he could not support “forced integration.” Having championed open housing in Michigan, telling legislators they would be facing “armed insurrection if they failed,” and believing that blighted Black ghettoes formed the root cause of urban rebellion, Romney persisted, writing in his journal, “Equal opportunity for all Americans in education and housing is essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart.”⁵ Nixon disagreed, fired Romney, and never looked back. Indeed, full enforcement of federal open housing provisions had to wait until the Obama administration, when they again engendered pushback, especially from Republicans now fully in line with the southern anti-integrationist attitudes ultimately embraced by the Nixon administration.⁶

Had Republicans not chosen to abandon their historic Black constituents to court disaffected whites in the 1960s, Detroit’s isolation from its predominantly suburban neighbors might not have been quite so complete. Anticipating the strategy Secretary Romney applied a few years later, Detroit officials tried to slow suburban expansion in the mid-1950s by refusing to sell its needed water supply to any additional jurisdictions outside the city beyond the forty-two they were already provisioning. Following a storm of protest, the mayor removed the head of the water department, and the immediate issue was resolved without slowing suburban expansion.⁷ Following the 1967 uprising, area businesses, headed by auto industry executives, took the lead in forming the first “urban coalition,” New Detroit, with the aim of directing private as well as public resources toward the reconstruction of the center city. Over the next two years, the organization directed some $10 million in grants to community organizations and to campaigns for welfare, health, and police reform. In the effort to put white capitalism to work to promote Black capitalism, as Richard Child Hill puts it, a new organization formed, the Economic Development Corporation of Greater Detroit. Failing to prompt much in the way of a turnaround, however, these organizations faltered, and corporate leaders withdrew to create yet another organization, Detroit Renaissance, with the narrowed purpose of physical and economic revitalization, leaving New Detroit to focus on the city’s racial and social problems.⁸

For their part, city officials tried to revive Detroit’s fortunes through federal urban renewal funds as so many other cities did, seeking to physically rebuild two downtown neighborhoods: predominantly Black Gratiot and the ethnically mixed Corktown. While Corktown residents put up a good fight, the result was much the same as it was in Gratiot: wide-scale clearance and the dispersal of residents into other nearby neighborhoods, adding to overcrowding and decline. With the advent of the federal Model Cities program in 1966, the city designed a nine-square-mile area at its heart for renewal. Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh’s close ties with the Johnson administration ensured generous funding, with the result that more clearance followed as new highways complemented new construction. Overall, more than twenty thousand homes were demolished to make way for highway construction, while another ten thousand homes were lost to urban renewal.⁹

Conservatives like to point to longtime labor leader Coleman Young, elected as the city’s first Black mayor in 1974, for accelerating both the departure of whites from the city and the city’s decline. Years after Young’s departure, Steven Malanga, the conservative policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, could write, “The truth is that Detroit was a failed city long before it became insolvent, thanks to the virtual collapse of its municipal government during Young’s 1974–1994 tenure as mayor.”¹⁰ The reality was more complicated, given the context of his years in office. In the three years immediately before the riots, an average of 22,000 whites left the city each year. In 1967 that number rose to 47,000, while another 80,000 left in 1968. While 891,000 whites lived in Detroit in 1969, by 1976 the number had fallen to 543,000. The city’s wealth dropped accordingly. Between 1970 and 1990 the percentage of Blacks living in the city rose from 44.5 to 78.4 percent and the poverty rate rose from 14.7 to 32.6 percent.¹¹

As mayor, Young pushed the predominantly white firefighter and police forces to hire African Americans and expanded the Black presence in city government overall. In terms of seeking to boost the city’s finances, however, he acted much as his predecessors had, by cutting government costs and promoting big-ticket downtown investments, including a new sports arena and completion of the giant Renaissance Center, designed by preeminent architect John Portman and opened in 1977. As planning historian June Manning Thomas said of the actions of an emerging group of “messiah” mayors, including Young, “Frozen out by erratic and then declining federal dollars, hemmed in by growing suburbs, and buffeted by continual population and economic decline, these mayors turned to visible if shallow symbols of progress.”¹² But suburban independence from the city, affirmed in the Supreme Court ruling on Bradley v. Milliken that rejected a lower court’s order to consolidate city and suburban school districts in order to achieve greater racial balance, continued unabated.¹³ A profile of longtime Oakland County chief executive L. Brooks Patterson under the headline “Drop Dead, Detroit!” captured the outer suburbs’ lasting antagonism toward the city. An attorney for the plaintiffs in the Milliken case who further boosted his reputation by representing white opposition to integrating schools in nearby Pontiac in the early 1970s, Patterson recounted a story he liked to tell his children: why they didn’t need Detroit. “I can’t imagine finding something in Detroit that we don’t have in spades here. Except for live sports,” he asserted. “We don’t have baseball, football. For that, fine—get in and get out. But park right next to the venue—spend the extra twenty or thirty bucks. And, before you do go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.” Making his bias even more transparent, Patterson confided, “I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.’ ”¹⁴

The “white noose,” as critics came to call suburban control over adjacent central cities, deepened its position of privilege over the years. From 1970 to 2000 the median value of owner-occupied homes in Detroit, adjusted for inflation, dropped 8 percent, from $67,000 to $62,000, while comparable house prices in the suburbs rose 50 percent, from $94,000 to $142,000. The gap in average household income between the region overall and the city was the widest of the nation’s thirty-three largest metropolitan areas.¹⁵ As Detroit witnessed something of a revival in the 1990s, its median household income grew by 17 percent and Black homeownership reached 53 percent. Headlines inside and outside the city proclaimed the city’s rebirth was at hand.¹⁶ But the early years of the new century marked yet another steep decline. Even as population and manufacturing dropped in the metropolitan area, it fell even further in the city. Although Michigan’s population was up 6.9 percent over the previous decade, Detroit’s population declined by almost 25 percent, and the number of residents employed fell by 32.2 percent. Manufacturing jobs held by city residents dropped from 65,000 to 20,000. Only 6 percent of the value of taxable real estate in the three-county Detroit area could be found in the city. During the ensuing recession, real estate markets in the city collapsed as the median selling price in Detroit fell from $73,000 in 2004 to $24,000 in 2009, reaching a low of $16,000 in May 2011. Not surprisingly, abandonment increased, to 22 percent of the city’s 380,000 buildings, leaving whole sections of the city looking like a ghost town. Approximately 14 percent of occupiable land—twenty square miles—was vacant, and total assessed property value declined by $1.6 billion between 2008 and 2013.¹⁷

Strapped for revenue, city services continued to decline, a phenomenon the journalist Charlie Leduff highlighted in his best-selling book Detroit: An American Autopsy. The book opens with the discovery of a body that had been frozen for a number of weeks in the shell of a building that was accumulating enough water in its basement to afford ice skating within its walls. It turns out that the body, which was fully encased in ice except for two protruding feet, had been sighted some time earlier but not reported. Leduff called 911 only to be told they could not be bothered, and it took even more time before the body was finally removed. The dire picture of a dysfunctional city went downhill from there. According to a study released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2007, Detroit had the least capacity to deliver basic services and the greatest need among the nation’s fifty largest cities.¹⁸ So bad had conditions gotten that Detroit fostered a virtual industry of what came to be called “ruin porn,” with its dramatic images of decline, in word and through the camera’s eye.¹⁹

Figure 4. Converted from several open parcels to a single two-acre civic square at the heart of Detroit in 2004, Campus Martinus Park became both a symbol of downtown revitalization and a magnet for new investment and social congregation. Dan Gilbert chose this location for Quicken Loans, which in 2018 became the largest overall retail lender in the United States. Courtesy Downtown Detroit Partnership.

It was against this background that the new, more optimistic narrative emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century. Boosted by Richard Florida’s own promotional efforts, Detroit Renaissance followed up the second international Creative Cities Summit, held in the city in October 2008, by contracting with the consulting firm New Economy Strategies to reenvision the metropolitan region’s strategy in the spirit and language of creative growth. Such efforts built on the already considerable increase in the number of new residents under the age of thirty-five downtown, up 59 percent over the first decade of the new century, even as the city population as a whole continued to drop. Their presence evoked a torrent of commentary, none better capsulated than in the words of a travel writer for the New York Times who provided the cheery contrast to multiple portraits of a failed city by noting, “Downtown sidewalks are packed with millennials taking a break from beach volleyball to sip craft beer and nibble on artisanal pickles.”²⁰ Such scenes were made possible by a growing presence of new business. In 2003 Compuware moved its headquarters, along with 4,000 employees, from Farmington Hills in suburban Oakland County to downtown. While only the fourteenth largest company in Oakland, Compuware boosted Detroit’s employment base by 13 percent. Its location around the revitalized Campus Martinus Park drew the kind of crowd activity and investment that every downtown was seeking.²¹ In 2010 Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert moved 1,700 employees to the Compuware Tower at the park’s edge. Extending his investments through the purchase of some additional ninety properties, he had by 2017 invested $2.5 billion, employed 17,000 people, and attracted international attention. “Here, man, oh, man, it’s a dream,” the Detroit-born Gilbert told New York Times contributor Ben Austen. “Anything can be created in Detroit. Down here, like in basketball, you can create your own shot.”²²

Figure 5. The view south along John R Street from Edmund Place, Detroit, 2003. Despite its location close to Detroit’s downtown, the Brush Park neighborhood experienced extreme decline until it began to benefit from the expansion of investment in the early twenty-first century. Dan Gilbert’s City Modern complex represented a step beyond the individual restoration of buildings, but residential revitalization in the area remained limited. Camilo José Vergara.

Gilbert most visibly took advantage of the limited capacity of city planners and bureaucrats to oversee the nature and effect of his capacious expansion, but he drew as well on state assistance, including some $200 million in subsidies as incentive for his initial move into Detroit. Not limited to the immediate downtown, Gilbert extended his investments into the city’s Midtown section, even as he secured the naming rights for a 3.3-mile trolley—the QLINE—that fulfilled Detroit Renaissance’s 2008 recommendation to form a “creative corridor” along the city’s central thoroughfare, Woodward Avenue.²³ In addition, Gilbert turned to the once elite but famously decayed in-town neighborhood of Brush Park, where he dubbed a new development with 410 units of apartments, duplexes, and townhouses “City Modern.” Supported with $23 million in state aid to abate asbestos in the soil and remove underground storage tanks and claiming to have “collaborated with existing neighborhood residents, city and state agencies, local developers and active community groups to achieve a shared vision for this project,” developers nonetheless engendered criticism for the way Black residents had been pushed out of the neighborhood over many years. Other Gilbert investments included restaurants, gastropubs and bars, and a yoga studio. As David Segal of the New York Times put it, immodestly, in his discussion of Gilbert’s effort to turn downtown into a high-tech hub, “He seems to consider it his duty to rebuild what a previous generation allowed to fall apart.”²⁴

Gilbert’s investments proved a variation on but not an exception to what David Harvey has called entrepreneurial capitalism, characterized not by land clearance and new construction of the kind that typified urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century but publicly subsidized private business aimed at growing capital investment.²⁵ That pattern was most evident in the government support extended to Little Caesar CEO and owner of Detroit’s professional hockey and basketball teams, Mike Ilitch, who received substantial concessions for building an $863 million sports arena and surrounding entertainment district. In return for building the facility to house the Pistons and the Redwings, Ilitch’s development company received thirty-nine publicly held properties for the price of one dollar. Ilitch’s share of construction costs was limited to 42 percent, and the city forfeited a revenue-sharing arrangement from Redwing ticket sales worth approximately $7 million a year. Although development was contested at every stage of public review, Detroit officials touted the benefits they expected to follow from their public subsidies. “Developers have always shaped American cities with their big projects, of course,” Peter Eisinger writes, “but such projects in most cities—think Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn or Boston’s Harbor and Waterfront development—are contested, constrained by affordable housing or minority contracting set-asides, subject to larger city plans, or planned in conjunction with or even initiated by city government actors. Few are as comprehensive, grandiose, unregulated, and unchallenged as those in Detroit.”²⁶

Even as a growing number of news outlets trumpeted the vitality of downtown Detroit, its costs did not go ignored or uncontested. In his book How to Kill a City, journalist Peter Moskowitz chose to single out Detroit, along with global powerhouses New York and San Francisco, for their contributions through gentrification to deepening social inequality. Pointing to downtown and midtown Detroit as “the crown jewels of Florida-led new-age urban revitalization models,” he laid out the ways recent investment, following David Harvey’s critique of the way capital seeks undervalued opportunities, had deepened inequality. In the 7.2 square miles at the city core, he relates, “the rich, mostly white newcomers to the city and their allies in business get accolades from the press, the government’s attention, and the financial backing of Detroit’s nonprofit sector, while the rest of the city—the remaining 134.8 square miles outside the 7.2—slowly falls off the map, bled out by foreclosures, blight, and a lack of city services. For those who stay but cannot afford to be within the 7.2, the city is literally going to seed around them.”²⁷ Quite clearly, any public official in charge of the city had to address the disparities between downtown development and the city’s impoverished neighborhoods.

Figure 6. St. Joseph Street, west of DuBois, 2013, part of one of the many underserved neighborhoods in Detroit suffering abandonment and underinvestment in basic services. Camilo José Vergara.

Many of the city’s difficulties originated outside its boundaries, in cutbacks in state and federal aid and in global economic trends. But the city’s reputation suffered further from political missteps that extended well beyond the worst imaginings of conservative punditry. Kwame Kilpatrick became the city’s youngest mayor ever in 2002 at the age of thirty-one. Generous in handing out breaks to downtown investors and drawn into making risky deals to close the city’s budget deficits, Kilpatrick, initially considered a rising political star, failed nonetheless to spur revival. Burdened by growing debt and mired in highly publicized instances of personal and fiscal misconduct, he was forced to resign in 2008 and subsequently charged and convicted of fraud, racketeering, and extortion.²⁸ After Detroit City Council president Kenneth Cockrel Jr., son of the longtime Marxist activist and former city councilman himself, stepped in to complete Kilpatrick’s term, former professional basketball star and political outsider Dave Bing defeated Cockrel to become mayor at the next election. It was Bing’s primary contribution to set Detroit on an overt path of managing decline.

A successful businessman after leaving the NBA, Bing presented himself as the outsider to the system ready to make the hard decisions to get the city back on track. To deal with looming deficits, he cut back the number of city employees and pared benefits, fighting unions as he did so, and privatized a number of city services, including public health. In yet another effort to spur downtown development, he expedited permits, giving newcomers like Dan Gilbert largely a free hand. “My job,” Bing announced, “is to knock down as many barriers as possible and get out of the way.”²⁹ Even as he pursued conventional cost-saving measures, Bing took an even bigger step by enlisting the support of a consortium of philanthropic organizations to underwrite a strategic planning process intended to determine how to best allocate scarce resources for city services to meet the city’s vastly altered business and demographic makeup. Turning the responsibility for the effort over to the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation,³⁰ he launched his initiative with a well-publicized set of activities in February 2010.

From the start, it appears, Bing had in mind a kind of carrot-and-stick approach to providing services by which he hoped to stir residents to move from abandoned areas to stronger neighborhoods where services could be concentrated at lower cost. New York City at the height of its fiscal crisis in the 1970s had considered such an approach, but Mayor Abraham Beame had rejected it out of hand, and only a few cities—notably, Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio—had even considered an administration not built around the goal of uniformly growing population and resources.³¹ When a senior official suggested such a policy in 1993, Mayor Coleman Young openly derided it.³² But Bing considered the concept of allocating resources selectively compatible with his corporate thinking and a tangible complement to his effort to promote business downtown.

Bing’s candid revelation that relocating citizens from blighted to healthy neighborhoods was “absolutely” part of his plan to shrink and save the city drew praise in conservative quarters, including the Manhattan Institute, but generated fierce resident opposition. After facing considerable hostility at an initial meeting that drew some nine hundred people, he endorsed a robust civic engagement process, insisting that with the help of resident input he could find ways to conserve city resources while at the same time increasing job opportunities and raising Detroit’s quality of life.³³ To do this, Bing retained responsibility for dealing with Detroit’s immediate problems while assembling an independent team of consultants to draw up a vision for the long term. Funded generously by the Detroit-based Kresge Foundation as well as other philanthropic organizations, Detroit Works, as the group came to be called, in an effort to overcome resident fears as well as skepticism, hired twenty-four “process leaders” from local civic institutions and charged them with gathering constituent input, resulting in some thirty thousand one-on-one encounters.³⁴ As a prominent African American within a largely white planning profession, Toni Griffin took the lead role as consultant, making clear at the start that her effort would put equity and respect at the center of the agenda.³⁵ As further consultants to the effort, the city enlisted the Boston-based firm of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, which described the 347-page report released in 2013 under the title Detroit Future City Strategic Framework as an “action-oriented roadmap for decision-making” to improve both the quality of life of residents and business in Detroit. To meet both challenges, abandonment and improving the quality of life of area residents, the report offered a combination of productive efficiencies by linking social, economic, and ecological systems. “These integrated solutions suggest new forms of urban living,” Stoss declared, “new modes of production in the city and newly productive green infrastructures for the city at large.”³⁶

Addressing the central question of massive abandonment, Detroit Future City laid out ways to better connect residential with employment centers, produce greater density in neighborhoods to sustain them, and use landscaping to convert abandoned areas to parks and other amenities. In place of abandonment, such areas, planners claimed, could become “alternative use areas” whose transformation “hinges on re-imagination and reuse of vacant land for productive uses, or where there is excess vacant land, returning it to an ecologically and environmentally sustainable state.” The report stopped short of suggesting that development be reduced to a handful of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. “To do so,” Griffin subsequently asserted, “would naively fail to recognize the complexities and stigma of urban renewal, relocation, and gentrification. Instead, the team developed recommendations rooted in the realities of the current housing market, the pace of recovery, and the urgent need for more reliable public services in the face of diminished resources.”³⁷ In an effort to address resident fears that some areas would gain preference over others, the report sought to group newly repurposed green areas with nearby built-up neighborhoods. Supporters also stressed the ways cleared land could foster employment, citing prospects for urban agriculture and the reuse of vacant industrial buildings to produce lightweight materials.³⁸ As Dan Kinkead, the founding director of projects for implementing the Detroit Future City (DFC) plan, phrased the potential for transformation, “The sociocultural, economic, and physical intersections yield a new life for Detroit’s buildings, and a new opportunity to create a more inclusive, granular, and resilient localized economy. If Fordist scales of production and division of labor instrumentalized its workforce and contributed to Detroit’s downfall in a global economy, more skilled, hands-on and remarkably less extractive production processes are emerging as intrinsic qualities to provide a more fertile economic environment and a reduced number of footloose enterprises.”³⁹

Although the plan received mixed reviews among academics, British scholar Seth Schindler made a credible case that it marked a welcome departure from the kind of market-based redevelopment that had been dominating postindustrial recovery nationally and in downtown Detroit. While economic growth remained the city’s long-term goal, its full realization was put off well into the future as the city entered a process of stabilization through 2030, followed by another twenty years of capacity building. Pointing to a body of academic literature embracing slowed growth as a means of enhancing environmental conservation, Schindler credited the plan for proceeding “not only from a standpoint of land use or economic growth, but in the context of city systems, neighborhood vision, and the need for greater civic capacity to address the systemic change necessary for Detroit’s success.” With that path forward, he expressed his hope that Detroit’s progress could be qualitatively different as both sustainable and equitable. Such hopes were centrally featured in planners’ ongoing activities and embraced by professionals, who applauded the central role landscape architects might provide with a program of purposeful planning for open space.⁴⁰

The release of Detroit Future City in January 2013 generated considerable attention, but it was overshadowed almost from the start by indications in the state capital that Detroit’s immediate precarious economic situation was about to prompt extreme measures. Under Republican leadership, the Michigan legislature had in 2011 upgraded state powers to assume power over cities facing bankruptcy. Within two years, the state had appointed emergency managers in four cities—Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Ecorse, and Flint—and was considering intervening in Detroit. Governor Rob Snyder moved on March 2 to impose an emergency manager on the city with virtually complete control over city functions. On July 18 emergency manager Kevyn Orr, unable to work out a plan to retire what he identified as some $18 billion in financial obligations, declared the city in bankruptcy, the largest ever for an American municipality.⁴¹

Predictably, such action generated a substantial local backlash. A parade of local and national civil rights activists, speaking for the city’s predominantly African American constituency, denounced the oversight decision. “As opposed to having a city council that’s democratically elected and a mayor, you’ll have a plantocracy—a plantation-ocracy—replacing a democracy,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson warned.⁴² A contingent of activists representing Detroit’s beleaguered neighborhoods under the name Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management also objected, putting forth as an alternative their own “people’s plan” contesting the loss of self-governance and presenting policies that would put the interests of poor people and communities of color first. Among their proposals were that Detroit businesses hire local residents with the goal of achieving a level of 70 percent by 2020, that $220 million in lost revenue-sharing funds promised in 1999 in return for Detroit lowering its taxes be restored, and that “predatory Wall Street-related financial expenses should be fully discharged in bankruptcy, without further cost to the City.”⁴³

Seized on by conservative commentators, including George Will, as a lesson in failed governance, bankruptcy raised fears among liberal critics on the other hand that external control of the city would be used as one last step in elevating the role of finance over governance.⁴⁴ Indeed, the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, who was already well versed in bankruptcy proceedings, including the 2009 restructuring of Chrysler, in making his first settlement offer heavily favored bondholders by offering them 75 to 82 cents on the dollar compared to only 10 cents on the dollar for pensioners. The settlement took many turns, however, before arriving in 2014 at a more balanced approach. Respecting at least in some form the unwritten “social contract” promising social services for residents,⁴⁵ bankruptcy judge Gerald Rosen, serving as chief mediator, managed to craft an agreement that protected pensioners more generously and ensured the flow of state revenue for city services in years to come. By securing $350 million in pledges from a handful of foundations to relieve the city-owned Detroit Institute of Art from pressures to sell off its assets to help close the deficit and a commitment of $150 million in state funds for each of the next ten years, the agreement brought the city a guarantee of $1.7 billion to remove additional blighted buildings, to buy fire trucks and ambulances, and to upgrade its antiquated computer systems. Civilian retirees were ensured 74 percent of their pension payouts and firefighters and police, who were not receiving social security benefits, as much as 96 percent from a separate fund, while banks received only 30 cents on the dollar.⁴⁶

This “grand bargain,” as it was called, was widely praised in mainstream commentary. Ford Foundation CEO Darrin Walker, an African American and Detroit native who committed $150 million to maintaining the Detroit Institute of Art’s independence, for instance, fully embraced the settlement, commenting, “I am radically optimistic about Detroit’s future.… Detroit for me, is so much about the opportunity for this country. While the bankruptcy—the grand bargain—was certainly not perfect, it put Detroit back in the starting block.”⁴⁷ Walker was right that Detroit was back in business, but at a number of costs. While pensions were largely protected, that was possible only with the further loss of up to 90 percent of health insurance benefits, costs estimated at a cumulative $4 billion. Current city employees were left with less generous plans based on highly optimistic projections for growing the remaining pension funds. More significantly, the initial bankruptcy ruling overturned a provision in the Michigan State Constitution—shared by thirty-six other states—that affirmed public pensions as a “contractual obligation” that could not be “diminished or impaired.” Nor would full political control be restored, as legislators imposed an oversight commission with considerable authority over city contracts and wages.⁴⁸ Clearly, bankruptcy was the major issue facing Detroit for a few years, but another, contemporary story with far-reaching implications was suggested obliquely in the settlement’s commitment to funding the elimination of blight.

A year into the bankruptcy process, Detroit elected a new mayor, Mike Duggan, a former Wayne County Executive and prosecutor and subsequently chief operating officer of the Detroit Medical Center, one of the enduring anchors of downtown Detroit. Marginalized by the emergency manager and facing a 67 percent unpopularity rating, Bing had chosen not to run again, and Duggan, setting himself apart from his predecessor, ran on a campaign slogan “every neighborhood has a future.” As an active Democrat, Duggan was expected to challenge state oversight. Instead, according to Detroit News reporter Nathan Bomey, in his book on the city bankruptcy, Duggan dropped the critical comments he had intended to direct at Orr at his inauguration and was soon cooperating with the emergency manager on select items ceded to his control. Most visible was his success in restoring use of public lights throughout the city, both a symbolic and a practical public safety measure. Notably, success was attained only after the creation of an independent lighting authority with the ability to borrow new funds in the bond market and negotiate better deals with suppliers.⁴⁹ Although such privatization of services was already well advanced in the city, Duggan further advanced the practice by privatizing trash collection and, more controversially, leasing water and sewer service to a private company based in Illinois. Supported initially by Duggan in return for a $50 million-a-year payment into the general fund to support fire and other services, that arrangement withered under objections from suburban users, not the least Oakland County’s L. Brooks Patterson, who did not want suburban fees funding Detroit services. The final deal directed that money instead at improvements to the system’s decaying infrastructure.⁵⁰

The first white mayor in a generation, Duggan paid service directly to the concerns of Detroit’s majority Black residents by embracing the Detroit Future City report and naming as city planning director Maurice Cox, fresh from a high visibility role dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his position as director of the Tulane City Center, a community-based design resource center for New Orleans. An African American who made a point of recruiting other planners of color to his office, Cox put a high premium on advancing equity for the city’s remaining residents. Following the land use recommendation of the strategic vision for boosting a relatively strong neighborhood but one that was compromised by abandonment as a demonstration project, Cox strung together vacant lots to build a quarter-mile greenway path connecting the University of Detroit Mercy with Marygrove College in the city’s Fitzgerald neighborhood. Working with a real estate development group, Fitz Forward, formed in 2015 by two young Black men from New York seeking to boost wealth-building among Black residents, the city stated its intention to deal holistically with parks and public space as well as housing rehabilitation. Calling for infilling 192 vacant lots made available through the city land bank, Cox sought to create a park-like landscape that he claimed “knits the fabric of a neighborhood back together.” In rehabilitating 115 homes, Cox hoped to create a viable “20 minute neighborhood,” following a planning concept conceived in Portland, Oregon, where residents could live, shop, dine, and find recreational activities within a twenty-minute walk or bicycle ride from their home. Vacant lots not used for the pathway or the new two-acre Ella Fitzgerald Park were to be converted to mini-parks or urban farming plots of land dotting the landscape. With a level of cooperation that echoed James Rouse’s Sandtown initiative thirty years earlier, the Fitzpatrick effort drew support from the Knight and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the Kresge Foundation. Duggan highlighted the initiative in his reelection campaign, even as Cox praised local buy-in.⁵¹

Demonstration projects offered some hope for the future but did little to relieve the immediate problems associated with widespread poverty. While the boom downtown had raised some concerns about gentrification, the problem was minuscule, with only about 2 percent of the city directly affected, compared to the crisis building among victims of subprime loans who faced foreclosure of their homes in ever-greater numbers. It was welcome news, then, when President Obama, blocked from enacting new legislation in the Republican-held Congress, announced in February 2010 that he would direct unexpended funds in the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program to eighteen of the nation’s neediest states in what would be known as the Hardest Hit Fund. Initially planned as relief to those facing foreclosure, the program as finally agreed upon also authorized expenditures for demolition in the name of fighting blight. That shift owed much to former Cuyahoga County treasurer Jim Rokakis, founder of the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation in Ohio, who was arguing as the recession deepened that local officials needed more money and tools for the acquisition and redevelopment of abandoned properties.⁵² In making his case in Washington and elsewhere Rokakis enlisted Dan Kildee, who had followed Rokakis’s lead by forming a land bank in Flint. It was Kildee whose Center for Community Progress had been the architect of the critical land use section of the Detroit Future City report, who subsequently convinced state officials to embrace demolition funding and to direct 50 percent of the initial $100 million in state Hardest Hit funding to Detroit for that purpose.⁵³

Described as “the only national nonprofit specifically dedicated to building a future in which vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties no longer exist,” Kildee’s Center for Community Progress started in Flint in 2010 in an effort to reverse a pattern of abandonment and ensuing blight that so often followed foreclosures. After witnessing for some years as Genesee County treasurer the cumulation of properties out of foreclosure in the hands of speculators who abandoned them when they no longer proved profitable, Kildee succeeded in getting state law authorizing the formation of land banks for counties in such distress. It was his intent that the land bank he founded in Flint would both help property owners facing loss of homes to stay in them and ensure that when foreclosures did occur, these properties did not end up in the hands of speculators. When the process proved effective, Kildee resigned his government position to form the nonprofit Center for Community Progress, taking his plan nationally, even discussing it with members of Barack Obama’s campaign and his first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan.⁵⁴ As consultant to the DFC effort, center staff called for “a truly transformative strategy for land repurposing, redevelopment, and management (that) will demand that the City look at its regulations governing vacant land and problem properties in private ownership, and how those regulations and their enforcement help or hinder the achievement of Detroit’s revitalization goals.” Citing an alarming increase in the number of foreclosed properties passing into the hands of speculators and the ensuing further destabilizing of neighborhoods, it urged a systematic and coordinated approach to put that land to good use.⁵⁵

Although President Obama was unwilling to sponsor a bailout of Detroit as he had the auto industry at the height of the recession, he announced in September 2013 a $300 million package of support for Detroit, including funds to form and support a Blight Removal Task Force. Its 2014 report, echoing Mayor Duggan’s campaign slogan “Every neighborhood has a future—and it doesn’t have to include blight,” made clearance, demolition, and land assembly a central mission for the city’s near future. With the Center for Community Progress once again acting as consultant, the task force, which was cochaired notably by Dan Gilbert,⁵⁶ embraced DFC’s commitment to “intentional open space” as a means of bolstering residential and business stabilization and growth. The proposal was everything Mayor Duggan could ask for: an endorsement for turning an ineffective agency into a powerful tool for redevelopment and requiring the coordination under one body of all public agencies, which were admonished to “change how they think about land, and make equally fundamental changes to the way they acquire, manage, and dispose of land and buildings, and the way other public agencies regulate them.”⁵⁷ Announcing the reorganization and revitalization of the city land bank formed in 2009, Duggan set forth ambitious goals for demolition and clearance, giving them special prominence through a website devoted entirely to charting the program’s progress.⁵⁸

Such declarations posed high goals and ones that were perfectly within the framework of Duggan’s first run for office. In his ten-point, every-neighborhood-has-a-future plan released during his 2013 campaign, Duggan promised to streamline the demolition process and strategically target neighborhoods, create much tougher code enforcement, require banks to participate in neighborhood redevelopment, clean up vacant lots, and reform the city’s existing land bank so that vacant land could be used again. Strangely—because it appeared to have drawn little comment at the time—Duggan also managed to bring up again Bing’s discredited policy of choosing between neighborhoods by pledging to create “positive incentives to move families from sparsely-populated areas into stronger neighborhoods.” Given conversations at the time about “shrinking cities,” it should not have been surprising that Flint mayor Michael K. Brown raised a similar concept, at a rotary club lunch in 2009, of “shutting down quadrants of the city.”⁵⁹

Under Cox’s stewardship, triage of this sort did not materialize, but Duggan’s embrace of a demolition program and his expectation that a revitalized land bank would effectively manage the deluge of properties coming into its possession proved overly optimistic. Fighting blight fit the goal of converting physical liabilities into assets, but it had a devastating effect on individuals, whose vulnerability had been made worse by the loss of jobs and the loss of home value during the recession. Five thousand homeowner applicants making less than $30,000 a year were turned down at the state level for Hardest Hit funds, while more than 2,000 homeowners making more than $70,000 were assisted. Renters in homes in arrears for property taxes saw their homes foreclosed before their own eviction. Homes remained assessed at pre-recession value, so no relief came in the form of lowered property taxes.⁶⁰ As the numbers of foreclosures soared, reaching a record in 2014 of 62,082—25,500 of which remained occupied—the land bank fell hopelessly behind in its work, leaving whole sections of the city in limbo. However well intentioned, the decision to direct money at blight rather than to those in greatest need for assistance to hold onto their homes had a profoundly negative effect. The rate of home ownership—a central reflection of the health of what remained of the Black middle class in the city—which had reached a high of 53 percent in the 1990s, fell to 41 percent. As many as 20 percent of all city residents faced the loss of their homes. Decrying the use of tax foreclosure to drive displacement, housing activist Michele Oberholtzer condemned a process whereby Black homeowners were “in the position of babysitting property for suburbanites, who are now returning like absentee fathers to reclaim what they left behind after a 50-year hiatus.” Added Laura Gottesdiener in a scathing report for the Nation, “For the city’s low-income, Black, and elderly residents, Detroit isn’t a city on the rise, but one under siege.”⁶¹

As the foreclosure crisis escalated over the next several years, the Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the city, seeking to force it to exercise its right of first refusal on 2,000 properties at risk of falling into speculators’ hands. A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, which had been created as part of Duggan’s 2013 campaign pledge, claimed that the city was too ill-equipped to purchase so many occupied properties, leaving only a pilot project in place conducted in conjunction with Quicken Loans and the United Community Housing Coalition, giving 80 renters a chance to buy their homes for $2,500 to $5,500.⁶² Arguing that it was less expensive and more humane to keep people in their homes than to demolish them, Oberholtzer pointed to the opposite result of what the first land bank in Flint had intended. In the 2016 auction, 1,525 properties—26 percent of sales—went to the 20 most prolific bidders. Efforts to block speculation through such sales failed when bidders created new limited liability companies to get around obligations to meet standards required under previous sales. “While companies escape scrutiny by mercurially reincorporating under different LLCs, individual homeowners dare not bid in their own name and nonprofits dare not help them,” she asserted. “So, they are left as sitting ducks to wait out the auction until that inevitable knock comes on the door.”⁶³ Given the blight task force’s own stated intention, under section 9–2 of its report, to “Maximize the impact of the Plan of Adjustment blight-focused Reinvestment Funds by deploying them in ways that increase the potential for future revenue,” brisk sales made possible by expedited procedures introduced into law by a Michigan-based conservative think tank⁶⁴ were at least adding to city revenue. The last part of that same objective, “expanding their range of uses, including elimination of blight for commercial structures, vacant lot clearing, and rehabilitation in neighborhoods,” proved more problematic.⁶⁵

Following release of the Detroit Future City report, the Kresge Foundation committed $150 million to create an office under the Detroit Future City name to put the strategic framework into effect. With the largest pool of funding immediately available to fight blight—$50 million in Hardest Hit funds and another $52 million in Plan of Adjustment funds marking the end of the city’s bankruptcy—DFC threw itself into the campaign hosting Blight Bootcamp in June 2014 in an effort, in the words of the organization’s first executive director, former mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr., “to support blight elimination initiatives by empowering residents to get involved in the fight against blight.”⁶⁶ The organization offered blight boot camps in subsequent years, turning the greater part of its own funding toward the environmental objectives promoted in the strategic framework.

In light of the continuing crisis for the majority of city residents, DFC’s efforts appeared marginal at best. Following Stoss’s contention that “intentional” conversion of the city’s 120,000 vacant lots—75,000 of them already in public hands—made it possible to conceive landscape infrastructure as “a civic instigator,” DFC staff and their allies stressed ongoing “civic engagement” in their work. As Esther Yang, who joined the effort after working at the Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City, after its formation under Toni Griffin at the City College of New York, put it, “If you don’t listen well, you don’t design well.”⁶⁷ A five-year strategic plan released in November 2017 identified five priority areas intended to “galvanize Detroiters and stakeholders in continued implementation of the 2013 Strategic Framework.” It described its land use and sustainability priority as an effort to empower Detroit residents and stakeholders with tools and information to address issues surrounding the city’s vacant land. Planners called this part of a “green culture shift that looks beyond the value of land as defined by the real estate market and recognizes the opportunity to promote environmental sustainability, quality of community life, and equitable economic opportunity for Detroit residents.”⁶⁸

Although such ambitions could be demonstrated in market-driven and publicly assisted development along the Detroit River,⁶⁹ the most immediate payoff for residents were small-scale grants, exemplified by the $100,000 awarded to ten neighborhood groups in 2018, intended to reclaim vacant lots “to build the capacity of non-residential building owners to manage stormwater runoff on their properties.” Linked with the organization’s “Field Guide” to help owners develop those lots with sustainable, easy-to-follow templates—offering options like “soil builder” or “party lot”—DFC’s grants were as high on self-help as they were low in funding levels. Directions for creating an “8 mile rain garden,” for instance, described the difficulty as low and the time to complete work with two or three people involved as only a weekend. “Installing the 8 Mile Rain Garden will make for a fun and rewarding weekend with your friends, family or neighbors,” the DFC website assured its users. “The installation of this lot design should not require professional assistance if you, with the help and support of others, would like to build this design. Please refer to the Step-By-Step section for guidance.”⁷⁰ Peppy, upbeat, and reassuring, the grants program hardly pointed to neighborhood transformation, let alone represented an equitable share of resources for reinvestment. Clearly some other form of organizational effort would be necessary in order for area residents to garner anything like their fair share of the returns on reinvestment.

When the owners of the Little Caesar’s Arena failed to meet the obligation negotiated in return for some $450 million in public financing—that is, to hire Detroit residents as half the construction workers on the project—it chose to pay $2.9 million instead.⁷¹ Seeking better results in securing community benefits, a number of community groups formed the Equitable Detroit Coalition. They created a city ordinance that gave community benefits a top priority, and when city council failed to act, they secured enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot for the 2016 election. Within days, councilmembers produced their own ballot initiative, raising the floor of projects affected from $15 million and receiving at least $300,000 from public sources to $75 million and $1 million, respectively. Both proposals appeared on the ballot, with only the council-supported ordinance winning. Despite the setback, two architects of the original initiative could report, “Detroit offers some measured hope that equitable development can eventually become a new normal for city leaders and residents alike, and promise that this fundamental shift is worth the long and often bitter fight.”⁷²

Two ordinances subsequently passed by the city council in 2017—one requiring that 20 percent of all housing units be offered at affordable levels for new projects receiving at least $500,000 in monetary support, and the other requiring that seniors and low-income residents be notified before being unexpectedly displaced—attempted to mediate the human costs of new development. A further city commitment to forming a $250 million fund to preserve affordable housing promised a significant increase in an existing effort, from 1,772 units saved between 2015 and 2018 to a projected 10,000 additional units over the next five years. Further “people’s bills” introduced to the city council were intended to strengthen the community benefits provision passed by referendum in 2016 by requiring developers to negotiate with residents and making sure those who qualified could get help with the Homeowners Property Tax Assistance Program prompted by the ACLU suit.⁷³ By contrast, Mayor Duggan chose to tout the kind of corporate largesse associated with the “grand bargain” that terminated Detroit’s bankruptcy. Announcing $5 million contributions each from seven companies, each directing their funds to a single neighborhood, Duggan’s news prompted review of the inequities associated with such select investments. Moreover, a news source wondered, pointing to the decision by Domino’s Pizza to spray-paint its logo on manholes the company was donating to the city, who really wanted even a part of the city to bear a corporate brand?⁷⁴ Plenty of evidence remained to sustain such skeptics.

In 2017 state legislators amended a 1996 law to provide up to $1 billion in subsidies to reimburse all construction costs for newly defined “transformational brownfields.” Heavily lobbied by Quicken Loans, the new law included only one site in Detroit: the J. L. Hudson’s Department Store, where Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock development company’s plans for redevelopment were expected to generate a return of $557 million: $229.6 million from property taxes, $18.2 million from construction site income taxes, $1.6 million from city income tax, and $307.9 million from state income taxes paid by future workers and residents. Although the initial legislation was widened to support other major projects, Gilbert’s role was so closely identified with the legislation that it was colloquially dubbed as one of several “Gilbert bills.”⁷⁵ Such largesse was not enough. Building on a concerted effort to ingratiate himself with the Trump family, including making a $750,000 contribution to Trump’s inaugural committee, Gilbert successfully sought to include a section of downtown he dominated among the areas eligible for tax advantages made possible through the opportunity zone provision of the 2017 federal tax act. Like Kevin Plank in Baltimore, Gilbert successfully reversed a decision to exclude the area from consideration, and once again ProPublica reported that the area failed to meet the stated rules for eligibility.⁷⁶

When Amazon announced its competition for the right to host a second national headquarters in North America, one certain to require even greater subsidies, Mayor Duggan asked Dan Gilbert, not Cox or any other city official, to draft an application. Far from surprised, a Detroit Free Press columnist gushed, “The battle for the headquarters comes as Detroit continues a renaissance that began when it emerged in December 2014 from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Thanks to Gilbert, the family of the late Mike Ilitch and a host of developers who haven’t gotten as much attention, the city has sown a boon in development and population and excitement.”⁷⁷ Details of the proposal remained largely confidential, but a publicly released three-minute video under the heading “Move Here. Move the World” was revealing as it presented the city from an angle high aboveground, supported by a clearly African American voice conveying the argument that Detroit was not just making things again, it was hip. Reflecting the style as well as the poetic aspirations of other Gilbert productions, most notably an ad produced for the 2012 World Series narrated by white rapper Kid Rock,⁷⁸ the Amazon promotional described “an international hub full of vitality, of Michigan strength from the global reach of techno and Motown to the powerful rev of our engines, from style trends to technology, Detroit is the starting line of the world’s imagination.…We are small business savvy and billion-dollar business bold.” Stressing its commitment to pursue a “Marshall Plan” for workforce development, albeit without reference to the city’s high level of unemployment, the Detroit proposal hid the level of its proposed tax incentives while highlighting prospects for facilitating the preferred locations downtown for an influx of some fifty thousand new workers. “We have a path on the real estate to get you your 8 million-plus (square) feet that nobody has because of the concentration of ownership we have and the land that we have and the developments that can happen,” Gilbert said. “Your million (square) feet that you need in 2019, we have it for you in beautiful, renovated, cool downtown buildings.” While the plan was submitted in partnership with the city of Windsor just across the Canadian border, it appeared not to have addressed or partnered with any entity representing city neighborhoods.⁷⁹

Amazon did not include Detroit in its list of finalists, a blow Gilbert publicly attributed to the city’s failure to tell its own story of renaissance adequately. Others pointed out that Amazon’s requirements for superior mass transit and a ready workforce may have been more important factors. Most significant, of course, was the equation for “recovery.” Detroit Future City projected a staged recovery over fifty years—another lifetime for residents of the city. The boom downtown was immediate and spreading to Midtown, where the kind of technical expertise Amazon was seeking was accumulating. But general job readiness, transportation access, affordable housing, and even access to suburban homes remained distant objectives. The very language applied to recovery suggested strongly that renaissance was not for the people Maurice Cox was targeting. Bike lanes, pop-up parks, and “placemaking” gambits ensuring residents venues to “live, work, and play” were bait to attract “creatives,” not the yeast of working-class elevation.⁸⁰ No one denied the value of sustained civic engagement, but however invested “normal people,” as they were frequently referred to,⁸¹ might be, it was not the same as having power over decision-making. As Justin Hollander and Jeremy Németh argue so eloquently in their 2011 essay for the journal Housing Policy Debate, “smart decline,” if it is to be pursued equitably, must be more than inclusive. It must be responsive to different circumstances and modes of expression in order to effectively satisfy the prevailing formula for equity: just means to arrive at just ends.⁸²

As the number of properties passing to the city’s land bank accumulated, reaching nearly a hundred thousand in 2018, the pace of neighborhood renewal slowed, a condition Detroit Future City could not deny. Its 2017 report, 139 Square Miles, named to identify its focus on the area outside the 7.2-square-mile city center, pointed out that while there had been an increase of thirty thousand private-sector jobs in the city since the recession, those jobs skewed to higher-income positions in the downtown and midtown areas. Notably the most rapid growth, reflecting Quicken’s presence especially, was in financial services, up 989 percent. Overall, jobs per hundred residents had increased from twenty-five to thirty over the previous five years. To achieve a level of employment comparable to peer cities, however, Detroit would have had to double that ratio. At 8 percent unemployment, Detroit remained a working city, but the rate of unemployment was nonetheless twice that for Blacks as that of whites. Indeed, because of their concentration in low-wage occupations, 40 percent of African Americans were living below the poverty line, 53 percent of them living in areas of concentrated poverty of more than 40 percent. Twenty-four percent of Detroit residents overall lacked the resources to access adequate health care. House values were similarly diminished, with median sale prices in 2015 of only $19,070. More residents rented than owned, and among these, 37 percent spent more than half their income on rent.⁸³ As external funding for the city’s land bank ran out and the program came under scrutiny both for irregularities in contracting and failures to follow environmental requirements, Mayor Duggan proposed a $250 million bond program to complete demolition of the eighteen thousand remaining blighted structures in the city. But pointing to the lack of fully developed plans or investment to make over areas where demolitions concentrated, the city council blocked the proposal in November 2019. Duggan countered by putting the issue up for referendum in 2020. As that program remained in limbo, hopes for intentional use of cleared open space absorbed yet another blow.⁸⁴

Such ongoing confirmation of the unevenness—and ultimate inequity—of new development served to confirm once again how difficult it is to balance social needs with the imperatives for development promising financial return. No redevelopment process was going to proceed in light of past controversies associated with urban renewal without sustained efforts to secure citizen input. Engagement remained a central element of planning for neighborhood change well beyond the publication of Detroit Future City. But it was not local residents who set the agenda that determined what choices might be available, and the repurposed land that was presumably targeted for their health and safety always remained vulnerable to financial manipulation when profits might be feasible. Even the best-intentioned programs, then, continued to marginalize essentials, of employment, accessibility, and security. True progress toward shared prosperity thus remained in Detroit more a hope than a reality.