Detroit's Introspection Paid Off

By the time the city filed for bankruptcy in 2013, Detroit was at least a decade into the internal restructuring needed emerge stronger. Today there's a solid foundation for growth.

A view of the Dequindre Cut Greenway in Detroit. Opened in 2009, the urban recreational path was formerly a below-grade rail line spur of the Grand Trunk Railroad. Today it links downtown and the riverfront with East Side institutions like Eastern Market, and several residential neighborhoods. Source: detroitriverfront.org.

Thursday I promised that on Friday I’d deliver some content that would detail the background activities that laid the groundwork for Detroit’s current resurgence. Before you know it, it’s Sunday, so here goes.

However, before diving into the background activities, I wanted to express some thoughts on the Detroit “shunning” narrative I noted. I firmly believe it had a devastating impact on the city, yet it’s hardly understood, especially by people who care about cities.

In my piece posted this past Tuesday, I noted that Detroit fell harder and deeper than nearly any other city in the country because it endured a local and national shunning. I didn’t get much negative feedback on that point, so I think most readers got my gist. But I do want to make clear that I view Detroit’s shunning period as deeper than simply a matter of “white flight”. Sure, flight to suburbia and general migration out of the Midwest, irrespective of race, figured into the city’s decline. Just as it had in so many other Rust Belt cities from Syracuse to St. Louis.

However, during that 1974-1994 period when Coleman Young was the city’s mayor, the city lost much more than just leadership in the global automobile industry that led to a weak economy. Perhaps even more importantly, Detroit lost the social infrastructure – the civic leadership whose networks and money made things happen in the city – to kick off revitalization. There were plenty of people who were willing and able to take on that role, and did so. But they did not have the social capital, at the regional, state or national levels, to catalyze Detroit’s rebound. There were neighborhood watch group members, school advocates, religious leaders, urban farmers, activists, artists, people of all stripes who rose up to the challenge of creating a better Detroit. Their grassroots efforts spread the message that the city was worth saving.

But the lack of connections and money in the city’s new civic leadership prevented the city from fully realizing its rebirth. For a good 20 years, maybe more, Detroit lost the attention of the corporate, political and philanthropic people who shape the narrative of a city. Detroit became America's whipping boy – the nation’s useful example of what not to become.

Soon enough, however, the work of the city’s new civic leadership made an impression on others with connections and money, and the reconstruction of a new social infrastructure began.

A couple weeks ago, some of my posts on Detroit caught the attention of John Gallagher, an urban affairs journalist who wrote for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years, before retiring in 2019. I followed his work for years at the Free Press, and thought his work covering Detroit’s slide toward bankruptcy in 2013, and emergence from it the following year, was absolutely amazing. Even more, I thought the deeply-researched How Detroit Went Broke article that Gallagher and colleague Nathan Bomey authored, in which they detailed that the city’s bankruptcy filing was a half-century in the making, was Pulitzer-worthy.

Gallagher thought so too, and said that and much more in his recently published memoir Rust Belt Reporter. Gallagher’s time at the Free Press roughly corresponds with the Detroit’s slide to its bottom and subsequent bounce-back. That gives him a unique perspective on what it took to get the city on the successful trajectory today that everyone’s celebrating.

In his chapter entitled Cities – A Recovery Begins, Gallagher writes about a Detroit in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s where residents realized no one’s coming to their aid, so they better make do on their own:

“(T)hings started to happen in the first decade of the 2000s that set Detroit on a path to recovery. Many of these trends happened off stage, out of the main headlines, and often nobody noticed amid the city’s ongoing problems. But in my daily work covering the city I saw more and more encouraging signs. And these disparate elements would set the stage for what the world finally noticed was a remarkable urban turnaround.

Not far from where I live on Detroit’s east side, an installation known as Earthworks Urban Farm had grown on some former vacant lots. It had been established by a Catholic order of priests known as the Capuchins, who operated a community kitchen nearby, and the food from the farm made up much of the fare served to the homeless. The farm manager at that time, Patrick Crouch, showed me his spreadsheets keeping track of dozens of crops planted on a rotation basis, from tomatoes and strawberries to eggplant and squash. Beekeeping to produce honey was a sideline, there and elsewhere in Detroit. Meanwhile, on the city’s far west side, the activist Malik Yakini had created D-Town Farm as part of an effort not only to feed people but to create a measure of restorative social justice for Black Detroiters. Elsewhere small community gardening plots wee sprouting on vacant lots throughout the city, hundreds of them. One I wrote about was tended by prison inmates awaiting their release at a halfway house. I found it driving by one day; seeing a man working the beds I stopped to chat with him.

And the world began to notice. Many of us who fielded calls from out-of-towners coming to visit the city – artists, architects, urban planners, economists, academics of various stripes – used to be asked for a tour of the burned-out factories and homes, what Detroiters took to calling “ruin porn”. But at some point, the visitors were asking to see the urban farms and other uses Detroiters were making of vacant and abandoned urban land.”

Gallagher then went on to say that a legacy of Detroit’s dominant position in the early global auto industry, extremely well-resourced philanthropic foundations, took notice and altered their approach to giving. According to Gallagher, “the involvement of the many different foundations taking a more activist leadership role in Detroit provided both money and talent when the city’s strapped municipal leadership could provide neither.”

Soon, Detroit’s philanthropic community extended its activism into other arenas:

“So beset with problems had Detroit’s city hall become that in the early 2000s the city began to spin off functions into a whole series of nonprofit conservancies, public authorities, and nonprofit corporations. Unlike the often disreputable practice of outsourcing public functions to profit-making companies, this spinning off of city operations in Detroit proved hugely successful. Two of Detroit’s great public places, the RiverWalk and the central downtown Campus Martius Park were built not by the city’s underfunded parks and recreation department but by nonprofit conservancies. The city’s beleaguered Eastern Market, the remnant of a farmers’ market dating back decades, was restructured as the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation in 2006 and, with cash from the Kresge Foundation, rebounded to become one of America’s best public markets, visited by thousands of shoppers each market day. The city’s convention center, Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place), was handed off in 2009 to a regional public authority that immediately reversed years of decline and deferred maintenance. There were many other spinoffs – the city’s historical museum, public lighting, workforce development agency, and others all slipped away from direct city control – not without controversy, of course, but ultimately ceded – and all flourished under their new nonprofit management structures.

Neighborhood nonprofits, the old block clubs that in many cases had grown into professionally staffed and funded community development organizations, did amazing work in neighborhoods where they were present. Most famously in Detroit, the nonprofit Midtown Detroit, Inc., led by the indefatigable Sue Mosey, led the turnaround in the city’s Midtown area – the museum, university, and hospital district north of downtown – making it the most notable of Detroit’s many revitalized districts. But there were many other successes attributable as well to the neighborhood activists.”

I’ve quoted quite a bit from Gallagher’s book, but I hope the reader (and Gallagher) will indulge me in one last quote that drives the point home. As I noted earlier, Detroit’s collapse was so complete that its civic leadership infrastructure was wiped out. Gallagher said the 10-15 years prior to bankruptcy saw the city rebuild it:

“In early 2000, there was no such ecosystem, virtually no venture capital available to bankroll startups, no training programs for entrepreneurs, no incubators, no culture of risk-taking in what had been the ultimate corporate town. Beginning thereafter, Detroit began to see all of that necessary ecosystem growing and flourishing, and numerous refugees from the auto industry and other parts of corporate America began to try their hand at startups.”

What happened behind the scenes in Detroit is absolutely critical to the city’s rebirth.