Detroit's made great strides in turning its industrial waterfront on the Detroit River into a place of recreation and enjoyment. But today's workers want more, and Detroit needs more of it. Source: detroitriverfront.org
(Forgive me! I bring lots of new eyes to the new site and then don’t add any content! New content is on its way, as soon as this weekend. In the meantime, feast on this piece I posted on the Blogger site last August. -Pete)
Were Rust Belt cities ever really attractive? Cool? Livable?
No.
Rust Belt cities weren’t built for beauty, they were built for enterprise. Sure, there was wonderful beauty incidentally built along the way, but usually never in the majestic or monumental ways you see in some East Coast cities. There’s plenty of understated natural beauty in many places, but little of the spectacular scenery (and great weather) found in Sun Belt or West Coast places. Rust Belt cities were built principally as production centers, not commercial centers. However, once they lost the economic luster that brought millions of people to them, they emptied out as people sought economic opportunity and an improved quality of life elsewhere.
An emphasis on improving aesthetics could go a long way toward bringing them back.
I’m often reminded of this whenever I revisit Detroit, as I did last month. I noted this in the very first post of this blog back in 2012, Reasons Behind Detroit's Decline. One of the reasons I cited was Detroit’s lack of commitment to actual placemaking and aesthetics, during the period of its greatest growth. In fact, this was something noted in a prescient 1961 Time Magazine article that saw a city already past its peak:
“If ever a city stood as a symbol of the dynamic U.S. economy, it was Detroit. It was not pretty. It was, in fact, a combination of the grey and the garish: its downtown area was a warren of dingy, twisting streets; the used-car lots along Livernois Avenue raised an aurora of neon. But Detroit cared less about how it looked than about what it did—and it did plenty.”
Detroit’s inattention to aesthetics continued well beyond 1961. Several metros have since surpassed it in scale, but Detroit was one of the earliest developing sprawling metros. Excessively wide arterial streets, an over-engineered landscape because of a commitment to highway construction, an inability to establish a first-rate public transit system, and a post-1950 housing boom that focused on single-family home development within and beyond the city’s boundaries, all contributed to the city we see today.
At the same time Detroit’s sprawl exploded, the city leveled much of its pre-WWII housing stock. The housing types that would later appeal to 1970’s urban pioneers, 1980’s yuppies, and 1990’s/2000’s creative class types, serving as a catalyst for revitalization, ended up being the wide expanses of urban prairie Detroit became known for. If you wonder why some cities that suffered economic decline didn’t fall as far as Detroit did, that’s one explanation.
I’ll note here that I toured downtown Detroit and nearby neighborhoods extensively last month, for the first time in about five years. I came away quite impressed by the ongoing work in the city. I stayed at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel, a 31-story neo-Renaissance that opened in 1924. The structure sat vacant for 22 years before reopening in 2008. The hotel is in the midst of a $20 million renovation now.
As for the rest of downtown and adjacent neighborhoods, I wrote about what I saw in a post last month. I’ll quote myself here:
"There were signs of renovation and new construction all around, reminiscent of Chicago’s Loop in the 2000’s. We ventured through much of downtown and tarps and scaffolding were everywhere. Heading northward into Midtown much more new construction is visible. You’ll see plenty of recently built and under construction five-over-ones along Woodward Avenue, as well as infill single family homes and townhouses on side streets.
From my perspective downtown Detroit’s revitalization has expanded greatly in the last five years. However, it’s clearly not widespread throughout the city. A couple of graphics below illustrate how I see Detroit then and now. When I visited in 2018, revitalization seemed to be tightly focused on areas immediately adjacent to downtown, coming to rather abrupt halts on three sides (see green area in the map below). Today I’d say revitalization efforts continue to move further away from downtown (yellow in the map).
But the truth is, when you look at the city overall, revitalization still hasn’t impacted the majority of Detroit. The second map, showing all of Detroit, illustrates this:
The area that's witnessed the bulk of revitalization so far (in green above) covers about 8 square miles, in a city of 140 square miles. Beyond the city’s revitalizing core, there’s still an inner ring that includes pockets of renewal surrounded by vacant land and decay (in yellow above), and an outer ring extending to the city's boundaries (red and white dotted line) that’s in an uneasy stasis – witnessing little change, aging rapidly, and looking eerily similar to how it looked 50 years ago."
Back in May, the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce hosted its annual Mackinac Policy Conference. This year’s conference coincided with the release of a report by Richard Florida’s Creative Class Group entitled Michigan's Great Inflection. The inflection point Florida referred to was the integration of technology in the automotive industry that was leading to widespread electric and autonomous vehicles in the upcoming decades. Michigan and Detroit, he said, should position itself to capitalize on the transformation. In fact, because of the state and city’s particular assets, it was there for the taking.
Yet, I’m concerned about a fundamental issue that Michigan and Detroit suffer from and could potentially hamper its ability to capitalize on the transformation. From the report:
“Though Michigan does well on talent retention overall, too much of the most crucial talent it generates leaves the state. For example, just a quarter of University of Michigan’s computer-related majors are working in the state five years after graduation; indeed, a significantly larger percentage (36 percent) of them are working on the West Coast.”
But even more importantly:
“Talent attraction is an even bigger challenge. Michigan lags badly in attracting young, college-educated tech talent from elsewhere.”
Improved economic opportunity alone might not be enough to sustain Detroit’s revival. Improving the quality of life and quality of the built environment is just as important.
Detroit’s population and economic fall from grace has been well documented. However, the entire state of Michigan is impacted. Between 1970 and 2020, the nation’s population grew by 63 percent, rising from 203 million to 331 million. Over that same period Michigan grew by just 13.5 percent, rising from 8.9 million in 1970 to 10.1 million in 2020. I’m not sure where Michigan would rank nationally, but the state is ranked 10th of the 12 Midwestern states, ahead of only Iowa and Ohio.
Even in a notably slow-growing region of the country, Michigan ranks low.
I’d argue that Detroit and Michigan’s half-century laser-focus on regaining well-paying manufacturing jobs, in the mold of what existed 50 years earlier, kept political and business leaders from addressing the quality of life issues that became much more prominent over the years. For today’s middle class, livability is every bit as important as the economy. With the housing affordability crises on the coasts, there’s an opening for affordable spaces that offer a high quality of life – if those spaces are willing to create it.
Immediately following the Mackinac Policy Conference, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer took major steps toward making Detroit and Michigan more attractive to the talent needed to advance its economy. The governor rolled out her Growing Michigan Together Initiative, intended to establish a set of long-term policies that can reverse Detroit’s acute population decline and Michigan’s 50-year population stasis. The governor appointed Hilary Doe to be the nation’s first and only chief growth officer. The governor also created the Growing Michigan Together Council, whose initial charge will be to set a population target for 2050, and lay out the kind of economic, social and quality of life policies that can help them reach it.
Here's hoping that Detroit and Michigan work hard to rebuild quality livable and affordable communities, places that look and feel good, instead of simply the prospect of good jobs, or being a value proposition it could never win. The Rust Belt cannot compete with the nation or world on the economy (yet), or climate. It's affordable, but not quite enough to overcome current economic and climate factors. That's why quality placemaking must be a crucial component of a Rust Belt comeback.