Photo credit: Nick Antaya, The New York Times
The New York Times
Oct. 12, 2024
Neal E. Boudette
On a sunny Friday morning last month, Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, got behind the wheel of his black Jeep Grand Cherokee to give a tour of the city he has led for 10 years. Not far from Michigan Central Station, the former hulking ruin that was recently transformed into a gleaming office complex, he slowed to point to a construction site of vertical steel girders and yellow earth-moving machines. It will become a 600-room JW Marriott hotel, linked to the city’s convention center and scheduled to open by 2027, when college basketball’s Final Four will be played in Detroit.
Farther west, more earth movers were crawling along a mile-long stretch of riverfront land, adding contours that will soon be a spacious, green recreation area, with elaborate play structures, a water park, basketball courts and outdoor workout equipment. It will be one of the final links in a 3.5-mile chain of parks, open spaces and bike paths that have replaced the warehouses and industrial yards that previously lined the Detroit River.
Just beyond the park stood a vestige of Detroit’s troubled past — a crumbling, boarded-up building that was once the Southwest Detroit Hospital, which closed 18 years ago. Detroit City FC, a professional soccer club, hopes to raze it and build a new stadium.
A mile or so away, Mr. Duggan, 66, pulled up at another construction site that will be the home of a University of Michigan research and innovation center focusing on software, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. “This is where we are going to create the jobs of the future,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Duggan stepped out of the Jeep at a small park off Rosa Parks Boulevard, north of downtown. In 1967, it was the site of an unlicensed after-hours club that was raided by the police. The action provoked a violent uprising that raged for five days, left 43 people dead, 1,200 injured, and more than 14,000 homes, buildings and stores burned or destroyed. The episode spurred the flight of thousands of residents from the city and marked the start of Detroit’s long, painful decline.
“We had tanks in the streets,” Mr. Duggan said softly. “This is where the violence began in 1967. So standing here now is very powerful.”
On this day, though, Detroit’s mayor strode into a bustling coffee shop nearby — called The Congregation — housed in a former small church. He was quickly recognized.
“Mr. Mayor!” a blonde woman with a nose piercing said, standing from a pew to shake his hand. Adelaide Welden, 34, is an example of the optimism building in Detroit, and the kind of young, urban pioneers the city is starting to attract. A Texas native, she moved to the city and bought a duplex that she and her fiancé are renovating. “I’m getting married next week!” she told Mr. Duggan with a smile. “I love Detroit.”
For more than half a century, Detroit has been widely viewed as the most troubled and seemingly unfixable example of urban decay in America; to many, it was the murder capital of the country. (And as recently as Thursday, former President Donald J. Trump, addressing the Detroit Economic Club, called the city a “mess.”)
At one point about 40% of its streetlights didn’t work. The city lost about two-thirds of its population, from nearly two million people in the 1950s to just over 600,000 in more recent years. The downtown was dotted with boarded-up office towers and apartment buildings left to rot. When the Super Bowl came to Detroit in 2006, organizers painted over storefronts to make them look occupied.
In 2013, the city hit its nadir: Burdened by $19 billion in debt, Detroit became the largest city in the United States to file for bankruptcy protection.
Since then, however, under Mayor Duggan, and with the help of some billionaire investors, Detroit has made progress reviving the downtown area as well as a nearby district known as Midtown, home to Wayne State University, and the Corktown neighborhood, once a stronghold of Irish immigrants. More than a half-dozen upscale hotels, dozens of restaurants, and refurbished apartment buildings have opened in those quarters, bringing life back to the city’s center core.
And now Detroit’s comeback seems to be gaining serious momentum and spreading out to other neighborhoods farther from the city center. In the last nine years, the city has provided grants to help more than 170 small businesses open up, most in outer-lying areas — a sign of economic optimism that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
More than 35,000 vacant and dilapidated homes that had long depressed neighborhood property values and attracted crime have been razed or renovated. A recent report by the University of Michigan estimated that the value of Black-owned homes in Detroit increased by nearly $3 billion from 2014 to 2022. And another sign of progress: In 2023 Detroit’s population grew by nearly 2,000 to 633,000, a slight uptick but the first yearly increase since 1957.
Like the city’s scrappy and newly competitive football team, the Lions, Detroit seems to have its mojo back.
“I’m excited about how much pride is back among Detroiters,” Mr. Duggan said. “I grew up in Detroit when it was a beautiful city. We still have a long way to go and it’s not going to be easy, but I think we are on our way to becoming a beautiful city again.”
A Tough Balancing Act
Detroit still faces many thorny issues. Its schools remain underfunded, with low proficiency rates in reading, math and science. Last year, there were 252 criminal homicides in the city — the fewest since 1966 but still a significant number. About a third of its residents live below the poverty line. Blight persists in many areas. Keeping and creating affordable housing as new developments grow and housing costs rise is a tough balancing act, Mr. Duggan acknowledged.
The Detroit Free Press recently uncovered financial strains at a Michigan low-income housing authority that hasn’t issued a federal housing-assistance voucher in more than a year, despite some 85,000 names on a waiting list. The problem stems in part from a shortage of affordable housing that has pushed up rental prices, and insufficient federal funding.
“Housing affordability is a big issue,” said Patrick Cooper-McCann, a professor of urban studies and planning at Wayne State University. “Detroit’s No. 1 problem is still the prevalence of poverty. Lower-income people struggle with basic costs.”
Many Detroit neighborhoods that have been cleaned up still haven’t seen much new development, Mr. Cooper-McCann added, and the local transit system hasn’t restored service to prepandemic levels. Filling all the renovated office space in the downtown area has also become a challenge now that many companies allow employees to work from home at least part of the week.
“I think there have been a fair amount of improvements but a lot of basic stuff is still deeply underinvested,” he said. “In Detroit, there was a lot of optimism in the late ’90s, but then things took a dark turn in the 2000s,” he added, referring to a time when the population and tax base was eroding, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted on corruption charges, and a national recession was compounded by bankruptcy filings by General Motors and Chrysler.
“This comeback is more broad-based than what we’ve seen in the past,” said Mr. Cooper-McCann, “but when the next recession hits, what’s it going to be like?”
Some big-name employers have moved operations and thousands of jobs to Detroit. They include Ford Motor, Microsoft, Google, Stellantis and most notably Quicken Loans and other financial businesses owned by Dan Gilbert, a native Detroiter who has invested several billion dollars to buy and renovate more than 100 properties in the city. The Ilitch family, founders of the Little Caesar’s pizza empire, have also invested billions in Detroit real estate around the downtown hockey and basketball arena that is named after the company and opened in 2017.
Similarly, the Ford family built Ford Field for the N.F.L. team it owns, the Lions, while Ford Motor has invested in renovating office space in Corktown and spent $1 billion renovating Michigan Central. G.M., which defied a corporate exodus and kept its headquarters in Detroit, will soon move to a new building in the heart of downtown.
But the city will need further job creation to keep its revival going, especially jobs that city residents can fill.
“We have to work to attract entrepreneurs,” said Kevin Johnson, chief executive of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, the city’s economic development agency. “We have a lot of open land where new industrial opportunities can be housed.”
One entrepreneur who’s betting on Detroit is a different Kevin Johnson — the former NBA All-Star who later served as mayor of Sacramento. Since retiring, he’s become a restaurateur, building a string of upscale soul-food eateries called Fixins. In August, he opened his newest location a few blocks from Comerica Park, home of the Tigers, and Ford Field.
Mr. Johnson said he was attracted by Detroit’s large African-American population, its history as a center of Black culture — the city was, of course, the home of Motown Records — and its recent upswing. “I knew what the mayor and Dan Gilbert had done, and I thought if I could be part of that resurgence, why not?” he said.
In May, Detroit celebrated a major step forward in its recovery. The 18-story Michigan Central building, a Beaux-Arts train station that had been a notorious eyesore for four decades, was reopened after a $950 million restoration by Ford Motor, which plans to move about 1,000 employees into the edifice and other nearby buildings. The project was backed by William C. Ford Jr., the automaker’s executive chairman.
Located in Corktown, the building features a soaring, vaulted ceiling in its main hall that was modeled after New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Next to it Ford also renovated another building that is the home of Newlab, an innovation center housing 100 start-up companies.
Ford is hoping the chance to work in a unique building in a city on the rise will help attract software developers and other young technology specialists — the people who typically gravitate to Silicon Valley. “Success begets success, and you can see it,” said Peter Stern, president of Ford Integrated Services, one of the divisions that will soon move to office space at Michigan Central.
The prospect of hundreds of Ford employees working in the neighborhood has raised property values, and a new hotel and apartment buildings are being built on what had previously been vacant lots.
Austin Baker, a real estate agent, said that 10 years ago even well-maintained homes in stable neighborhoods would sit on the market for months, and most sellers had to take any offer they got. But that has changed as Detroit’s improved outlook has coincided with a generational change — many Millennials want to live in the cities, and bristle at the prices of suburban homes.
“Now, homes that are renovated sell in two or three weeks,” he said.
‘I Wanted to be a Part of It’
Fifteen years ago, Torri Hicks left the Detroit area to build a career as a small-business consultant in Atlanta, which seemed to offer so much more promise and potential than the decaying, crime-ridden city where she’d spent part of her youth.
But in 2020, she moved back to help her ailing relatives through the pandemic, and was shocked by what she found. Detroit’s once-desolate downtown area was flourishing, buoyed by stadiums for the city’s four major sports franchises that drew tens of thousands into the city center every week of the year. Parks that had been overgrown with weeds were cleaned up and reopened.
Outer Detroit neighborhoods, once wastelands of abandoned homes and boarded up stores, were suddenly sprouting signs of life, with shops, cafes and restaurants opening here and there, many owned by city residents.
Before long, Ms. Hicks, 44, decided to move her Atlanta-based company — Youthnique StartUp Center, which helps fledgling entrepreneurs start businesses — to a formerly closed restaurant on a block of Livernois Avenue about five miles north of the downtown district.
“I was overwhelmed,” Ms. Hicks recalled. “I’ve never seen Black-owned businesses thrive like this in Detroit. And I wanted to be part of it.”
Mayor Duggan’s formula for turning around the city started with simply improving everyday life: fixing the streetlights, improving trash collection, shortening response times by police and other emergency services, reopening parks and building more recreation areas. Cameras installed at gas stations have helped cut carjackings. A system that detects the sounds of gunshots and alerts police immediately when they go off has helped reduce violent crime.
The city’s bankruptcy reorganization, which relieved the city from making payments on a portion of its $19 billion debt, freed up funds in its general budget for some of the cleanup project. Nonprofit organizations such as the Ford Foundation (which was founded in Detroit in 1936 by Edsel Ford before moving to its current home in Manhattan) and corporate donors have pitched with multimillion-dollar grants for affordable housing programs. More recently, the city has gotten millions in support from the Covid-19 stimulus package — the American Rescue Plan Act — that was signed by President Biden in 2021.
A critical piece of Mr. Duggan’s strategy was leveling or renovating 40,000 abandoned homes spread out across the city’s 139 square miles, a project that was started with $265 million in funding from the Obama administration. It’s been a long process, but only about 3,600 vacant houses remain.
“You make everyday life better and that gets people to stay in the city,” he said. “If people stay, then you can start to bring businesses back.”
In some areas, streets have been narrowed to slow traffic, sidewalks have been widened, and more on-street parking has been added. These new “streetscapes” create an environment where restaurants and retail stores can have a chance to open and build clientele.
It’s having an impact. Livernois Avenue, near Ms. Hicks’s StartUp Center, used be a wide street where cars sped by at 40 miles an hour or more, and storefronts were dark and empty. But since the roadway was reconfigured, a host of new businesses have opened, including a bike store, a yoga studio, an art gallery and a chic restaurant with a rooftop cigar bar.
Melvin Chuney, 55, a retired Detroit policeman who lives in the Russell Woods neighborhood, had been skeptical of Mr. Duggan’s approach at first and had more than a few heated exchanges with the mayor at neighborhood meetings over the years. But Russell Woods has benefited from the city’s beautification effort, and it is paying off for Mr. Chuney.
In 2013, he bought five rundown homes for a total of $35,000. Since then he’s fixed them up and now, he said, each has been valued at $200,000 or more. He’s also purchased three vacant lots for $3,200, hoping that at some point there will be demand for new construction in his neighborhood.
“I’ve lived my whole life in the city, and this is amazing,” Mr. Chuney said with a loud laugh. “I never thought I’d see that — in Detroit!”