1920s Suburbia - Dearborn, MI
Great cities have great neighborhoods. But not only has Metro Detroit long neglected its most walkable, urban neighborhoods, it has actively undermined them through sprawl.
Despite the fact that population growth has been flat for forty years (there are fewer people in Metro Detroit today than there were in 1970), we’ve kept building new subdivisions. Metro Detroit is now 50% larger than it was in 1970. Think of the madness of that. Despite the fact we could all comfortably live in a fraction of that space — in suburban, single-family homes no less — we’ve kept pushing ever outward, leaving behind the communities at the region’s center.
These are the communities with the greatest potential for urbanism. Places likes Detroit, Dearborn, Hamtramck, and Ferndale. While generally car dependent today, they are centered around small downtowns and have walkable street grids. With the right reinvestment, these communities could creative an urban alternative for Metro Detroit — an area where more people live in apartment buildings and condos than single-family homes, an area where it’s easy to walk to the store or bike to work.
1950s Suburbia - Warren, MI
But the sprawl of the region actively undermines this future. The problem is not suburban living per se — even Detroit proper is dominated by single family homes. The problem is that suburbia is so dominant and so overbuilt. For forty years, there have been more homes than households in Metro Detroit. So every time a new subdivision is built — and new ones are built all the time — older blocks of homes in less desirable areas lose value. They can’t compete with the lower taxes and bigger homes of the exurbs, and developers aren’t interested in reinvestment because it’s cheaper to build new. So these older blocks end up blighted or even abandoned.
Historically, most of the damage has been in Detroit. The Detroit Parcel Survey found that a third of all residential land in Detroit is now vacant — a figure that never ceases to astonish. But the blight is also visible in the ‘burbs. Older suburbs like Hazel Park and the southern end of Warren have long struggled to maintain their retail and commercial corridors. Dying malls and empty factories are becoming common sights. Post-housing bubble, they are struggling to keep houses occupied, too.
For the cycle to ever end, and for urban redevelopment to have a fighting chance, we need to curb regional sprawl. It’s the necessary counterpart to “rightsizing.” Consolidation of the urban core must be matched by growth controls at the edge. If it’s not — if we simultaneously build our urban corridors up and our suburban edge outward without population growth — we’ll only further squeeze the areas in the middle, letting more historic communities slip into needless decline. And the damage will increasingly be felt not in Detroit but in the older suburbs that most closely surround it.
2000s Suburbia: Macomb Township
When friends come back from trips to Chicago, they often lament that Detroit is not a “real city.” As quick as I am to protest — we have great parks, renowned museums, incredible architecture, huge festivals, immigrant enclaves, and more, don’t we? — I know exactly what they mean. Detroit may have all the components of a major city, but it lacks the connective tissue, the urban fabric, to tie it all together. Even Detroit’s most hyped urban neighborhoods are pockmarked with empty buildings, and the region’s growing suburban downtowns lack real diversity and remain isolated from each other.
In the next few posts, I’d like to explore what it would take to create a cohesive urban corridor in Metro Detroit out of the hodge podge of development we have today. Doing so, I think, will involve at least three major steps. I’ll explore each of these in turn in the next few weeks:
- Stop the sprawl. Metro Detroit’s population hasn’t risen in forty years, yet we keep subsidizing sprawl. It’s time to focus on redeveloping the city and retrofitting existing suburbs instead.
- Complete urban neighborhoods. Metro Detroit has the building blocks for urbanism, from Midtown to Hamtramck to suburban Main Streets like 9 Mile in Ferndale. We just need to develop them.
- Link them together with rapid transit. Starting with Woodward, rapid transit could bind Metro Detroit’s many hubs of urban activity together, forming a single urban corridor to anchor the region.
My hope is that this series of posts will spark a broader discussion about the future of Detroit. For too long, we’ve elected politicians without vision for the region. It’s time to start thinking seriously about what Detroit could become and what we need to do to get it there.
Cityfest, Detroit’s best summer festival, is no more. After a great 20-year run, the New Center Council, the organizers of the festival, have decided to focus instead on redeveloping New Center Park. Just as the award-winning Campus Martius has brought new life to downtown, organizers hope the renovated park will serve as a year-round anchor for the neighborhood. The park, which has capacity for 700, will host free movies and concerts Wednesday through Saturday all summer long.
New Center Park Site Plan
As disappointed as I am to see Cityfest shut down, I can’t totally begrudge their decision. The New Center Council is an economic development agency, not a cultural organization. The motivation for producing Cityfest was to draw attention to the New Center and build the area’s image. In that regard, the event was a great success. Who didn’t gawk at the majesty of the Fisher Building while standing in line for ribs? But a four-day party doesn’t make a neighborhood. A great urban park can.
New Center Park Pavilion
I’m certainly still rooting for Cityfest to make a comeback. Summertime in Detroit won’t be the same without it, especially with Festival of the Arts having met its end as well. But if the choice is between a great, four-day party and a round-the-clock neighborhood, I know which one I favor.
Driving eastbound on I-96 through Detroit, you might see it out of the corner of your eye — a brief burst of light and color as you pass West Grand Boulevard. That fleeting flash of brilliance is Detroit’s African Bead Museum, a remarkable but unheralded collection of outdoor art on the city’s west side.
Started ten years ago by the artist Dabl, the open-air exhibit celebrates African language and culture through an exuberant display of broken mirrors, beads, colorful paint, and found objects. The collection consists of two brightly adorned buildings, a found art exhibit (“Iron Teaching Rocks How to Rust”), a community garden, a sidewalk mural featuring the scripts of African languages, and a small shop, Dabl’s Perette’s, which is filled to the brim with gorgeous African beads and jewelry.
It’s truly a sight to behold, and further evidence that Detroit deserves to be a national arts destination. You can check it our for yourself at 6559 Grand River Avenue, Detroit, MI 48208. It’s near the junction of W. Grand Boulevard, Grand River Avenue, and I-96, right across from Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church and Northern High School. Be sure to stop into the store, too, to meet the artist and peruse his fabulous collection of African beads.
Looking south at Mitchell and Medbury on the east side.
Writing in Fast Company, Greg Lindsay argued this week that downsizing Detroit “won’t make Detroit any denser, but the opposite.” He then quotes The Baffler’s Will Boisvert at length for support. While I too am not totally comfortable with Bing’s rhetoric on rightsizing, I think there are enough misconceptions in Boisvert’s quote that it’s worth picking apart section by section. Let’s start at the top:
[As] rational as all this sounds, it hangs on a grotesque misunderstanding of Detroit’s predicament. Despite its ghost-town image, Detroit’s population density is still actually rather high by American standards. The city is half again as dense as Portland, Oregon, substantially denser than the booming Sunbelt cities of Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas, denser even than Pittsburgh–all of them places that adequately fund city services. Detroit’s problem is not underpopulation, but brute poverty, something that the grossly overstated efficiencies of shrinkage won’t alleviate.
It’s true that overall, Detroit is still denser than newer Sunbelt cities, even after losing half its population. Unfortunately, Detroit is no longer dense enough to support its own infrastructure. There are far too many streets, sidewalks, and sewers per person. The city is fiscally unsustainable, and as a consequence, depopulating neighborhoods are neglected, leading to environmental damage as well. Burned out homes are left standing; illegally dumped trash piles up in the streets. That’s why planners favor rightsizing — so Detroit can stabilize at a size it can afford to maintain and maybe start to grow again.
And for all its anti-sprawl rhetoric, shrinkism is extravagantly wasteful from the larger perspective of metropolitan land use. It hollows out the dense core of metro-area settlement under the assumption–the ugly, unstated postulate of shrinkage–that decent people can’t be enticed to live there.
“Shrinkism” is not responsible for hollowing out Detroit’s core; suburban flight and jobs loss are. Rightsizing is an attempt to deal with the consequences of the mass abandonment that has already taken place. Part of the solution, as Boisvert recommends, ought to be limiting further sprawl on the metro area’s edge. But even if that were politically possible, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Nor would simply building new housing in Detroit’s emptiest areas. It’s been tried, and the unfortunate truth is that when 100 new affordable homes are built in Detroit, dozens more are abandoned because net housing demand is essentially zero.
The reasons why demand is so low are well known: crime, poor schools, high taxes, lack of jobs, poor city services, limited retail, and so on. Problems like these can’t be tackled in isolation. There needs to be comprehensive change to bring any one neighborhood back, let alone revive the city as a whole. That’s why so many leaders here have come to favor rightsizing. They view this as an opportunity to focus concentrated resources on Detroit’s most promising corridors, creating the conditions that will finally make Detroit’s older neighborhoods once again safe, enriching places to live.
As city districts are razed and emptied, development is shunted, as usual, to cornfields on the exurban frontier, where people drive everywhere and nowhere–that’s the green part of the equation.
Rightsizing will not “shunt” development to the exurban fringe. That’s what’s happening already. Most of the neighborhoods we’re discussing haven’t seen significant investment since the 1950s. If nothing is done, they will continue to deteriorate and the exurban fringe will continue to grow. If they can once again be made dense and sustainable, in part through consolidation, Detroit might have a fighting chance to compete against suburban neighborhoods by providing a safe, viable urban alternative.
Detroit’s not often pegged as a beautiful city, but art is pervasive here, if you just look. Hand-painted signs, community murals, and street art seem to adorn every building or the ruins that remain. As I walked through the quiet streets of the New Center today, along Second and Cass between I-94 and Grand Boulevard, I noticed some stunning pieces amid the grit.
First, I came upon the murals adorning the Detroit Children’s Museum:
Then I wondered alongside the train tracks. Much like the Dequindre Cut, the walls between the two sets of tracks function as an ever-changing gallery for graffiti and street art, visible only to the passengers of the Amtrak trains that pass by every few hours.
When a feral dog began to bark in the distance, I turned back toward Woodward. There I found a colorful youth mural, tagged over in parts with graffiti, that had been organized by the New Center Council. And in the distance stood the newest addition to Detroit’s skyline looking north: a bright blue, 9-story mural splashed across the side of a building on Grand Boulevard.
You have to give this guy some credit. It’s thirty degrees, snowing, and the middle of rush hour, and he’s hauling a bed, a couch, and two chairs down Warren on a bicycle — and making quick work of it, too.
Headed east on Warren pulling a bed, a couch, and two chairs.
Off he goes down Ferry Street. Final destination unknown.
On Sunday I decided to drop by the DIA to see the Neighborhood Project, an exhibit by Mitch Cope and Gina Reichart, the Detroit artist-duo behind Design 99 and the Power House. The artists weren’t around that day to speak to, but I was struck by the little manifesto they left on the whiteboard:
Own Your City: Ten Easy Steps
1. Own a house
2. Live in house
3. Meet your neighbors
4. Invite neighbors into your house
5. Own your neighborhood
6. Live in neighborhood
7. Meet your neighboring neighbors
8. Invite neighboring neighbors to your neighborhood
9. Share everything
10. Own your city
The list is a little tongue-in-cheek, but it stuck with me. Detroit might be a better city if more people felt like they owned the place — like we all owned Detroit and were responsible for its upkeep together.
Normally, we relegate this responsibility to government. We pay taxes so bureaucrats can make sure the street lights stay on and the grass gets mowed. But in Detroit, it doesn’t work like that. We pay taxes all right, but too often the street lights don’t stay on and the grass doesn’t get mowed. With half the population gone, there just isn’t revenue enough to run the place–and what revenue there is seems to get sucked up by corruption. So for better or worse (mostly worse), residents have to make do themselves. It isn’t fair, but it’s reality.
I find the Power House inspiring because it makes the best of this bad situation. Cope and Reichart bought an abandoned home just north of Hamtramck and are retrofitting it as an energy-independent, cultural hub for its neighborhood. In another city, the government or developers would have come in long ago to fix it up or knock it down. But Detroit doesn’t work that way. So the artists are fixing it themselves, bit by bit, with scavenged parts and help from the neighbors. They’ve taken Detroit for what it is and are making it a little better, for themselves and for the rest of us. It’s a lesson in self-reliance (and community spirit!) we could all learn from.
After seeing “Beyond the Motor City,” the new PBS documentary on the future of mass transit in Detroit, I’ve been thinking more about what light rail can realistically do for the city. The first segment, after all, will only run 3.1 miles along Woodward, from Downtown out to the New Center. So won’t this end up being the People Mover Part Two — a monorail to nowhere, a la The Simpsons?
I firmly believe the answer is no. For one thing, the light rail line actually goes somewhere. Unlike the People Mover, which circles an area that’s already walkable without adding anything besides a view, the light rail line will bridge several distinct neighborhoods that collectively include nearly all of Detroit’s major institutions. For another, unlike the People Mover, the light rail line has a built-in constituency. Thousands of people already take the bus along Woodward every day.
Most importantly, though, the light rail line has the potential to revitalize the urban core in a way that the People Mover never did. That’s because the area is already undergoing slow, steady, undeniable progress. Unlike downtown in the 1980s, the Woodward corridor is not a dying district. Despite the national recession and the decade-long local depression, the area continues to rebuild, one storefront at a time.
I see it everyday as I walk through Midtown: Leopold’s Books, Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes, City Bird, Kim’s Produce, Shangri La, the Burton Theater — six new businesses in just the past year! And many more projects are underway, from the Green Garage business incubator on Second Avenue to the Garden Block restoration on Woodward. This is a walkable, urban area that has only begun to realize its potential.
And yet … it still lacks density. Despite all the development, despite the tight urban street grid, it’s hard to shake the sense that so far it doesn’t quite cohere. That’s where light rail comes in. Until it’s extended, the 3.1 mile starter line will be too short to bring in waves of new commuters. But it can serve as the backbone to the corridor, bridging its disparate parts and focusing new development along its twelve stops. It may take another decade or more to get there, but Detroit’s urban core can once again be a dense, thriving area, just as it was through the 1950s, when streetcars last crisscrossed its streets.
Someone posted these clips of Detroit in 1954 to You Tube recently. In many ways, downtown looks much the same today as it did then. Most of the stores have closed, and some of the buildings have been lost to the wrecking ball, but the basic infrastructure hasn’t really changed. What’s missing are the crowds of people. While I don’t harbor any special nostalgia for the era (my first memory of Hudson’s was seeing it fall on live television), I’d still love to see the day when Detroit’s streets are once again bustling with crowds of people going about their daily business.