A shuffle forward, maybe one and one half steps backward

Todd McInturf / The Detroit News. Trase Kreucher snaps a photo of her future home, a loft development overlooking the Clinton River in Mount Clemens.

In "Lofts remake Mount Clemens: Official says development in downtown is another step in turning the city into a hot spot for the affluent," the Detroit News reports on another "Get Urban" like venture in Detroit's suburbs. From the article:

Trase Kreucher loves downtown living, including walking to quaint art shops and other nearby amenities. "Downtowns appeal to me," said Kreucher, 35, a technical support specialist at Crain Communications in Detroit. "I don't like taking care of a yard." That's why she's packing up and selling her two-bedroom Eastpointe house and moving into a one-bedroom loft this spring in downtown Mount Clemens. She's one of two tenants signed up to live in the River Lofts phase II, a 24-unit building that overlooks the Clinton River...

"People really love the proximity to downtown," he said. "It helps the entire city. This is really an establishment of a tax base on property that was underused. "It's bringing a new product into Macomb County."

All the lofts in phase II include one bedroom and one bathroom and range in size from 900 to 1,370 square feet, said developer Ted Schollenberger, president of Mineral Springs Development in Grosse Pointe Park. However, because of the 17-foot-high ceilings, a second level can be added to each unit providing a 300- to 400-square-foot bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in closet. The lofts, which range in price from $148,000 to $225,000, also feature 8-inch concrete block walls, stained concrete floors and exposed duct work, he said.

"It's another step toward making downtown Mount Clemens the hot spot to be in Macomb County," said Schollenberger, chairman of the DDA's Board of Directors. He's hoping to revitalize the city's downtown by mimicking communities like Royal Oak and Ferndale, which have eclectic pedestrian-friendly downtowns. The lofts are geared toward singles, 20-somethings and empty nesters. ... Kreucher said all she can think about is hosting cocktail and fondue parties and decorating her loft in modern furniture...

Schollenberger said he ultimately hopes to construct 1,000 lofts and condominiums in downtown Mount Clemens in the next five years. Construction of two additional loft projects will likely to begin in late 2006, he said. They include two 52-unit mid-rise loft buildings along the Clinton River.
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This is a step forward in a couple ways. (1) It broadens the availability of types of housing. If everybody has to live in a four bedroom house in a subdivision, because that's all that's constructed and is available, many people are closed out of the "American Dream." Sprawl is produced in part because there are few other options. (2) It allows for denser development and walkable neighborhoods that reduce reliance on the car. (3) It helps revitalize one of the centers of one of the many "towns" that have been supplanted by subdivision suburbia built throughout the Detroit Metropolitan area.

The downside is that (1) Ms. Kreucher is adding to her work commute at least 8 miles each way, by moving farther away from her place of employment in Detroit. Of course, in the Detroit area car-culture reigns supreme even if GM and Ford no longer do. Crain Communications, where she works, got its start publishing magazines about the auto industry, and publishes Advertising Age, the trade magazine of an industry still dominated by the advertising spending of the automobile industry.

(2) it continues to add population to other communities at the expense of the center city. Detroit has plenty of opportunities for downtown living, albeit in Detroit she would be an urban pioneer for a long long time, although the recent Brookings study "Who Lives Downtown?" found plenty of new life in Downtown Detroit. (In fact, PPS picked Campus Martius square as one of the 12 best in North America--although PPS was retained to help create this square and that might have colored their judgment.)

Campus Martius, Detroit, 2004 Winter Blast. Photo from the pro-Detroit blog Girl-in-the-D. How many people do you see on a Downtown DC street like this (excepting 7th Street NW of course)?

Probably Detroit needs to do what Philadelphia did -- as pointed out in the Tuesday Philadelphia Inquirer article "Center City Renaissance," in "1997, the Philadelphia City Council passed a 10-year tax abatement to spur redevelopment of old office buildings for residential use.... [and in] 2000 [the] City Council amended the tax abatement program to include new construction." (For a somewhat negative take on this for Detroit, which misses the point about the necessity of adding population, and adapting, see "Lofty residential visions," from the MetroTimes.)

Lofts on Woodward, Detroit Michigan. Photos from Downriver Detroit.

Center cities need to pursue a wide variety of policy initiatives that begin to rebalance development vis-a-vis the suburbs. It's not so much about the revitalization of an entire city as much as it is about stabilizing, improving, and adding new residents to the neighborhoods that have the best ability to attract new demographics.

In re-reading the above paragraph, it sounds like I mean "gentrification," but that's not it. What I meant is that you can't revitalize an entire city (especially one that is 177 square miles) simultaneously, you have to focus, and work incrementally. In the Cleveland examples below, Cleveland continues to leak population, even as they attract new residents to high-rise living or in cool areas such as Tremont or the Old West Side. But they are stanching the hemorrhaging of population.

Note as I have written before, Wayne Oakland and Macomb counties today have only 200,000 more people than in 1960. The difference is that 1 million people moved out of the 177 square miles of Detroit into the other 1,600+ square miles of the counties, bringing deconcentration and sprawl, and destroying the value of much of the extant property in Detroit.

The MetroTimes writer was misguided. Cleveland has been particularly successful with such a strategy in the Warehouse and Gateway Districts, as well as the Flats, with large office or warehouse buildings able to be converted. A similar form of development has been the basis of success of the LoDo District in Denver, and certainly in various parts of Brooklyn, such as DUMBO, among others.

Warehouse District, Cleveland. Cleveland photos from Urban Planet, taken by lakelander. These photos were taken on an early Sunday morning so they undershow the activity and vitality of normal hours.

The Flats, Cleveland. Like the Pearl District in Portland, there are many new residential housing construction projects, and this area has been connected to other parts of the city through transit expansion. In Cleveland it was the Waterfront Rapid line, in Portland, the Portland Streetcar.

In Detroit, there are plenty of buildings available for conversion into lofts, and unfortunately, many great buildings are still being demolished because the political leadership can't see the value of adaptive re-use. In a region where sprawl and deconcentration is a way of life, it's difficult for people to change their mental maps and paradigms of what is the right way to do development. For many, new construction is the only construction there is. (After all, two of the largest residential home manufacturers in the United States, KB Homes and Pulte, started in Michigan.)

Across the street from the old Hudson's site in Detroit, no doubt some of that dust is now being cleaned out from a lineup of buildings that are now called the Lofts of Merchant's Row. The development calls for Turner Construction and the building trades to gut and transform the row of buildings - most of them about 90 years old - into retail and loft space. The $30 million project will have about 157 units in several buildings along the west side of Woodward. Plans call for the construction of a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments ranging in size from 820 square-feet to 1,500 square-feet. The lofts will have 12- to 15-foot ceilings with exposed duct work and floor plans. Photo and text from the Detroit Building Trades newspaper.

Whereas the developer in Mt. Clemens talked of plans to build new buildings of loft housing, Detroit has plenty of buildings able to be converted (albeit after a lot of hard work and money) right now.

Putting in a streetcar system that is usable (unlike the People Mover, which is not) might seem like a stretch for Detroit, but it's worth considering, given how such systems and public investments generate and accelerate significant amounts of private investment, which can be upwards of 15 times greater than the amount invested in transit.

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization; housing; car-culture