Detroit’s Fight Against Blight. At one level, a new report about blight in Detroit can be seen as a cartographic inventory of the abandoned homes, vacant lots and rundown industrial sites that have spread through the once-thriving Motor City like a metastasized cancer.
But there is another way to look at this important document: as the starting point for fresh conversation about what needs to be done to stabilize and revive Detroit and other declining cities around the country. The report, which is based on an ambitious building-by-building census conducted by paid surveyors and volunteers, shows that 78,506 buildings, or 30 percent of the city’s structures, are dilapidated or at risk of becoming so. An additional 114,000 parcels of land are empty. At its peak in 1950, Detroit was home to 1.85 million people; it now has 700,000 residents. Given the depths of the decline, reviving Detroit will take many years.
Any comprehensive plan to address that will need the help of the state and the federal government. As Detroit breaks down, scourge of arson burns out of control. Bankrupt Detroit's downtown renaissance creates trickle of hope. Beyond Bankruptcy: How the Detroit Economy has RecoveredEMSI. Even though “failing forward” has become clichéd jargon around conference tables, it’s still both exciting and encouraging to watch someone (or something) rise out of a slump and come back stronger.
And there’s no better example than Detroit, Michigan: the nation’s underdog upstart. In 2013, Detroit declared bankruptcy and became the media’s go-to example for struggling cities. But despite great difficulty, it has managed over $2.4 billion in investment and development since January of that year. And in many key economic categories—including gross domestic product, private sector job growth, and per capita income—the Detroit region is now outperforming national averages. So how did Detroit do it? Inside the Crisis. In early August, Lawrence H.
Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, accompanied Vice-President Joseph Biden aboard Air Force Two on a trip to Detroit. Michigan has a fifteen-per-cent unemployment rate, the highest in America, and Detroit has become virtually a ward of the federal government: the United States now owns ten per cent of Chrysler and sixty-one per cent of General Motors. The purpose of Biden’s trip was to announce an additional $2.4 billion in federal grants, to help jump-start the electric-car industry; more than a billion will go to battery and auto manufacturers in Michigan.
Summers, who is the director of the National Economic Council, the White House office that coördinates all economic policy in the Obama Administration, has rarely travelled outside Washington this year, and was in Detroit on a fact-finding mission. Michiganders were thankful for the largesse. Particularly this one. Summers looked exhausted. Motown Down. If you were to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts, home to Diego Rivera’s magnificent murals depicting scenes at the Ford Motor Company in the early nineteen-thirties, and then take a stroll through the surrounding streets, you might be surprised at what you would find: coffee shops frequented by young hipsters; old warehouses being converted to lofts; bike racks; houses undergoing renovation; a new Whole Foods supermarket.
After decades of white flight, black flight, and urban decay, Detroit is being spoken of, in some circles, as “the new Portland,” or “the new Brooklyn.” This gentrification extends only to a relatively small area, but it is worth keeping in mind when reading about the city’s bankruptcy filing—by far the biggest municipal-bankruptcy case in U.S. history.
Detroit, as everyone knows, has a lot of problems. Great swaths of the city have been left to crumble, or return to pasture. Detroit is broke—it can’t even afford batteries for its parking meters—and broken. Drop Dead, Detroit! For the past twenty-one years, L.
Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit. Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan. Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Detroit's Creative Corridor Sparks Small Manufacturing. TechShop CEO Mark Hatch speaks at Techonomy Detroit 2012.
Detroit may be known for its automobile manufacturing, but lately it has seen a burgeoning class of small manufacturers and makers of watches, bicycles, jeans, and other goods. This is happening “just as the country experiences increasing consumption of domestically produced goods,” Crain’s Detroit reports. There is rising interest in making and sourcing products domestically, and U.S. manufacturing is rebounding. In Detroit, the urban manufacturing resurgence has been guided by organizations like the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, which has expanded its mission beyond creative-industry entrepreneurs.
The city also has ample space for makers in old warehouses; Ponyride, for example, is a 30,000-square-foot space that has been transformed into an incubator for small businesses and artisans. This flourishing DIY economy mirrors similar trends in cities like Brooklyn and San Francisco.