Detroit Was Ready For Its Closeup
Can a three-day sports media event boost a city's revitalization efforts? Yes it can.
Above: scene from Day 1 of the 2024 NFL Draft in downtown Detroit, April 25. Source: prideofdetroit.com
So far, one month into the new version of the Corner Side Yard. Thanks to you for joining in. If you’re a new follower or subscriber (and there have been many!) I often write about my hometown of Detroit. It’s what kicked off my blogging 12 years ago and figures prominently in my writing. Growing up in and rooting for Detroit is what got me interested in cities. It’s why I study the challenges and potential of the Rust Belt.
Well, Detroit just completed a pretty good weekend for itself. The city hosted the National Football League’s 2024 Draft, and by most accounts it was a roaring success. The event broke the Draft's all-time attendance record with an estimated 775,000 spectators viewing the three-day event. Of course, many metro Detroit natives showed up and showed out to celebrate the event, but tens of thousands of out-of-towners also attended and left with positive impressions about the Motor City.
Strangely, as trivial as the draft’s attendance might seem to others across the country, this is pretty significant for Detroit, and the state of Michigan. Events like this break down the perceptual barriers that have plagued the city for a half century.
Detroit’s hosted its fair share of large events over the years, but mostly they haven’t been paradigm-shifting events. The biggest is the annual North American International Auto Show. Started as the Detroit Auto Show in 1907, the show introduces new and updated models, as well as futuristic concepts, to car dealers and an admiring public. Since 1965 the Auto Show has been held at the Huntington Place (formerly Cobo Center) convention center, taking up more than one million square feet of exhibition space. The event would bring in upwards of 800,000 attendees over 10 days.
But the Auto Show’s impact on national and international perceptions of Detroit has been limited. Historically the event has been held in January – not the best time to have people from around the world convene in the Midwest. Recent efforts to move the exhibition into the summer were thwarted by Covid pandemic restrictions. Also, obviously the Auto Show is first and foremost a trade show, where automakers and dealers talk about marketing and selling cars. The Auto Show was also created to demonstrate the prowess of American technology, design and engineering. But when American cars, then all cars generally, fell out of favor as the representation of the height of technology and replaced by the hardware and software of the tech boom by the 1980’s and 1990’s, the Auto Show lost relevance.
Other events regularly bring outsiders to Detroit, like the annual Movement Electronic Music Festival held every Memorial Day weekend, and (intermittently) the Detroit Grand Prix. Detroit has also hosted large singular events, like the 1980 Republican National Convention, Super Bowl XVI in 1982 and Super Bowl XL in 2006. But an argument can be made that techno music and IndyCar racing are niche activities that Detroit already has a strong footing in (electronic music, and again, cars), the GOP convention was a political move to secure the votes of a perennial swing state. The Super Bowls? It’s been said that the 1982 Super Bowl was an NFL reward to GM, Ford, Chrysler and AMC (remember them?) for their strong advertising support over the years. The 2006 Super Bowl was the “new domed stadium” reward that many cities have gotten after opening one.
The 2024 NFL Draft seems different. Football is a bigger deal than electronic music, car racing, and, dare I say it, U.S. politics. There’s no game, but it’s a celebration of the sport. Because it’s all about the introduction of college players into the league that many casual fans have never heard of, it’s forward-looking. And it’s all positive. It’s completely a media event.
That makes this event a major departure for Detroit. Just eleven years removed from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Detroit has made a magnificent rebound. The city received an investment-grade rating from Moody's Ratings last month, and home values, long depressed because of market failure, have dramatically increased and stabilized an unsteady housing market. Development in Detroit’s downtown and adjacent neighborhoods has accelerated. Municipal services have improved. Local city and suburban residents who once avoided Detroit’s attractions are now returning in greater numbers.
The rebound is clearly not complete. While home values have gotten stronger, there are still a substantial number of vacant and abandoned homes throughout the city (about 78,000 representing 20% of Detroit’s housing at the time of bankruptcy in 2013, and 68,000 and 22% as of 2022). The city’s population is still falling, though not as dramatically. There’s still much to overcome, but the city is in a better position than ever to thrive.
The return of city and suburban residents to the city core again is a point that should not be lost on anyone. I’ve argued for years that Detroit’s fall from grace was as much social one as an economic one, perhaps even more. Sure, the 1973 OPEC oil embargo opened the door for fuel-efficient foreign auto competition in the U.S. High rates of inflation and a disruption in global oil supply sparked by the 1979 Iranian Revolution fueled the 1980-82 recession that hit the auto industry especially hard.
However, the tumultuous years between 1967 and 1974 saw significant events that cast Detroit as an urban dystopia:
o 1967: the 12th Street Riot in July, stemming from a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar;
o 1968: another riot on 12th Street just nine months after the 1967 event, in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.;
o 1971: the creation and spread of the Detroit Police’s STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) special tactical unit, which adopted a “proactive” approach to policing that’s more recently been termed racial profiling;
o 1973: the bitter and racially divisive Detroit mayoral election of that year that pitted Detroit Police Commissioner and STRESS unit creator John Nichols against eventual winner Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor; and
o 1970-1974: the mounting tension of the Milliken v. Bradley school desegregation case, initiated by the NAACP in federal court in 1970; lower courts ruled in favor of metropolitan-wide school desegregation before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 1974.
Detroit suffered from a well-documented physical abandonment but suffered a psychological one in the process. People, mostly white, fled the city for the suburbs and beyond. But in the process, many disassociated themselves from the city. Longtime Detroiters who moved to the suburbs no longer identified as Detroiters, but as Oakland or Macomb County residents. Detroiters who moved to other metro areas would say they moved from “Michigan”. If pressed to say where, they’d say “southeast Michigan”.
It’s like white Detroiters told Black Detroiters, “you broke it, you bought it.”
The bankruptcy showed that there was plenty of culpability regarding Detroit’s fall. But I think it was the event that made Detroiters look inward and deeply consider how the city went from being the nation’s wealthiest large city in 1950, to become the nation’s poorest large city fifty years later. It wasn’t only because of economic conditions, corporate mismanagement, or even local government misconduct. Detroit’s collapse was unique because of the stigma and sense of abandonment the city attained, first from its residents and later from the rest of the nation. The success of the NFL Draft in Detroit tells me that the city’s comeback has crossed a significant hurdle. Detroiters and ex-pats heartily embraced the city again.
Early in my planning career I worked on a neighborhood planning project where I was trying to drum up community support for revitalization efforts. However, cynicism and skepticism was hurting us from the outset. I remember residents expressing their frustration with downtown revitalization that just wasn’t reaching them, and would never reach them. I naively said that it could, because “cities revitalize themselves from the inside out,” meaning that a strong central core was necessary for a healthy city.
I had no idea then that my comment had a spiritual dimension to it. The fall and comeback of Detroit shows it did.
I realize 775K is not your number, but there must be some fluke, like counting each person's attendance at multiple events as multiple people. If you work back to, how many hotel rooms, how many parking spaces, how many highway lanes, how much space on streetcars, people movers and buses....it's just impossible. It would take several days to move that many people. It's a great event, but the hyped numbers just force everyone else holding major events to overstate their crowds.