Downtowns versus neighborhoods as a revitalization conundrum | Detroit

Hudson’s Detroit, the Motor City’s first new skyscraper in nearly half a century, is a symbol of Detroit’s transformation from bankruptcy to boomtown.  Photo: Steven King/Icon Sportswire.

I wrote about Detroit a few weeks ago ("Dan Gilbert and the state of Detroit revitalization | phases") and CNN has s similar story, "Detroit is back from the dead. But not everyone is feeling it."

CNN references a report (Allowing the Detroit DDA’s Captured Tax Revenues to Again Fund Government Services, Citizens Research Council of Michigan) on the city's economic development and tax policies from the bankruptcy in 2013 to today, and generally finds

• that while there has been plenty of economic development, the costs still have been greater than the benefits
• that the creation of downtown development authorities in Michigan was a good thing because it provided for a dedicated stream of local revenue to support economic development without impinging on other revenue streams
• but it does come at the cost of lost tax revenues for other government authorities like school systems and counties
• that in Detroit, the primary focus on downtown revitalization as being justified to bring revenues to neighborhood improvements hasn't been realized.

View of Downtown's Renaissance Center office complex from the window of a vacant industrial building.  Photo: Jeff Kowalsky, Bloomberg/Getty Images.

I think this is true sure, but like I write about economic impact studies of transit needing a thirty year or longer time frame to truly be able to measure results, the same goes for revitalization of a cities like Detroit, Pontiac, St. Louis, Oakland, etc.

In the words of the Doors song, "Been Down So Long":

… Well, I've been down so Goddamn long

That it looks like up to me 

Well, I've been down so very damn long

That it looks like up to me 

Yeah, why don't one you people 

C'mon and set me free

The current time frame of 12 years for generating conclusions and making recommendations shouldn't be seen as an endpoint but a midpoint.

From the report:

Wellbeing of the City

The idea of “two Detroits” is rooted in part in the perception that the CBD (and midtown) has prospered by channeling property tax revenue back into economic development activities while the balance of the city, including the neighborhoods, have suffered from the lack of investment and economic struggles.

This narrative existed before bankruptcy but has become more acute since.

It is clear that downtown and midtown have fared better than many of the neighborhoods. While abandoned houses have been demolished throughout the city, new buildings have been constructed downtown. Downtown has had a level of vibrancy that is not present in many other parts of the city.

Likewise, it is clear that investments in the downtown have not lifted the city to share in any levels of prosperity. Hopes that investments in downtown would lead to housing nearby and throughout the city have not been experienced except for anecdotal recent developments. 

It is not the DDA’s duty to save the whole city and many factors contributed to the exodus of people, including crime, auto insurance rates, the struggling school system, and the high cost of construction throughout the city.

Rebalancing a Downtown focus vis a vis neighborhood improvements.  In some respects the text reminded me of the point that Rolf Goetze makes in Building Neighborhood Confidence, that the point of focused public investments in neighborhoods (or Downtowns) is to reorient the neighborhood trajectory so that residents once again are confident to make investments on their own.  

Detroit.  Rock City.

In Detroit, while there is tremendous investment as mentioned in my blog entry, as massive as it is, it hasn't been enough to hit critical mass so that the private sector is the predominate investment actor.  In Detroit, the DDA, the State of Michigan, and private foundations remain heavily involved.

I think that even though Downtown improvement requires still more resources, a reset is required to simultaneously pursue more focused neighborhood efforts, even though there is already so much going on at that level already, with improvements in the functioning of the County Land Bank and neighborhood revitalization programs--to me, it's an astounding amount of action and involvement.

Vacant houses are shown in Detroit, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011. Wrecking crews in the Detroit are well on their way to knocking down 3,000 vacant and abandoned homes promised by Mayor Dave Bing. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

One of the problems is that there is only so much population in-migration going on.  Sure the city has added 7,000 residents the first gain in a long time.  But that's equal to about 1% of the city's population.  

It's not nearly enough to power residential development in Downtown or in key neighborhoods.

Another problem is just how much vacant and abandoned land there is, many dozens of square miles, an area larger than the City of San Francisco.

Still, residents need more skin in the game to feel like they are part of the process, that their long term sacrifice has meaning, that their communities are receiving visible benefits, that all the benefits aren't going to just the Greater Downtown.

While that might slow Downtown momentum some, at the same time the whole could be greater than the current sum of the parts.  I've drawn an outline of such a program for St. Louis, which is worth considering.

-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 1: Overview and Theoretical Foundations"
-- "St. Louis: what would I recommend for a comprehensive revitalization program? | Part 2: Implementation Approach and Levers"

Another concept is leveraging the development of the Purple Line light rail program in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, both wrt transit and revitalization improvements.

-- "Codifying the complementary transit network improvements and planning initiatives recommended in the Purple Line writings," (2022)

-- Setting the stage for the Purple Line light rail line to be an overwhelming success: Part 1 | simultaneously introduce improvements to other elements of the transit network (2017)
-- Part 2 |   the program (macro changes) (2017)
-- Part 3 |   influences (2017)
-- Part 4 |   Making over New Carrollton as a transit-centric urban center and Prince George's County's "New Downtown" (2017, originally 2014)
--PL #5: Creating a Silver Spring "Sustainable Mobility District"
- Part 1: Setting the stage
- Part 2: Program items 1- 9
- Part 3: Program items 10-18
- Part 4: Conclusion
- Map for the Silver Spring Sustainable Mobility District
- (Big Hairy) Projects Action Plan(s) as an element of Comprehensive/Master Plans
- Creating the Silver Spring/Montgomery County Arena and Recreation Center
 -- Part 6 |  Creating a transportation development authority in Montgomery and Prince George's County to effectuate placemaking, retail development, and housing programs in association with the Purple Line (2017)
-- Part 7 | Using the Purple Line to rebrand Montgomery and Prince George's Counties as Design Forward (2017)
-- Revisiting the Purple Line article series after one year: Part 1 | a couple of baby steps (2018)
-- Revisiting the Purple Line (series) and a more complete program of complementary improvements to the transit network (2019)

Basically it's what I call Transformational Projects Action Planning, at the neighborhood scale ("S").

There are a few other best practice programs in action models to draw from.

Hennepin County Community Works 20 Years of Transforming Places for People

Hennepin Community Works.  When I was reading about how and why Downtown Development Authorities were created in Michigan, as a strategy to stoke city renewal, I couldn't help but think of Hennepin County, Minnesota's creation of a revitalization program in recognition that continued population leakage in Minneapolis was a serious threat to the county tax base.

Hennepin did an analysis of Minneapolis, and identified the factors that separated the stable neighborhoods from those that were declining.  They created a revitalization program focused on Minneapolis, to turn declining neighborhoods into successful and stable ones.  This journal article, 

"A COUNTY AND ITS CITIES: THE IMPACT OF HENNEPIN COMMUNITY WORKS," Journal of Urban Affairs (2006), describes the program.  What they found is that housing in areas by parks, rivers, and lakes retained the most value.

Faced in the nineties with a growing imbalance between the declining prosperity of its core city (Minneapolis) and suburban municipalities, Hennepin County, Minnesota, pioneered a different path. In 1994, Hennepin County launched an urban redevelopment program, “Hennepin Community Works” (hereafter HCW) that clearly supplemented the more common models of county activity. HCW devised an entirely new redevelopment role for the county, and has consequently had a major impact on Minneapolis and its suburbs. 

Since its inception, Hennepin County commissioners have committed close to $200 million of infrastructure spending into a targeted redevelopment program with five goals: (1) to enhance the tax base; (2) to reshape troubled neighborhoods; (3) to improve transportation within the county; (4) to protect and develop green space; and (5) to create new jobs. While much of the U.S. urban past since the eighties has featured decreasing levels of public sector funding and involvement with urban affairs, Hennepin County voluntarily took on substantial additional financial and political commitments with this program

... HCW began here in 1994 as a public works program initially intended to address declining property values. Since then, HCW has significantly transformed portions of the county through major housing, transportation, parks, and environmental restoration investments. Through 2008, HCW launched nineteen projects, totaling $197.5 million in investments.

Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program.  Separately, the City of Minneapolis developed the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, which sold TIF bonds on Downtown revitalization to raise $20 million per year for 20 years directed to neighborhood improvements (case study, "The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program: An Experiment in Empowered Participatory Governance," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, "Citizen-driven program led to more housing, stronger commercial corridors and better public infrastructure in Minneapolis," MinnPost).  

Neighborhood associations were tasked with working with city agencies like the School System and Parks Board to make improvements.  Early into the program, they realized that most neighborhood associations lacked the technical capacity to lead the effort, so they developed a strong technical assistance program so residents could develop the expertise to successfully create and implement projects.  From the MinnPost:

The NRP drastically altered the landscape of neighborhood associations in Minneapolis. What were once underfunded, small groups that relied primarily on volunteer labor transformed almost overnight into organizations that had the financial resources to enact dramatic change in their neighborhoods. Overall, neighborhoods used just under half of their allocated NRP dollars to construct housing projects — in many cases affordable housing projects.

The third largest allocation of funds went towards economic development and efforts that aimed to revitalize commercial corridors and help support local businesses. The results show that neighborhoods channeled funding in a way that mirrored neighborhood needs, meaning investment was sensitive to the local context. The bottom-up design of the NRP led to increases in housing stock, revitalization of many key commercial corridors, improvement of public infrastructure such as parks and schools, and increases in the institutional capacity of many neighborhood associations.

This book discusses the MAP program in depth.

Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area Projects.  This is a little different.  OKC is more than 3x larger than Detroit.  So while it is funding "metropolitan" projects, they are limited to the boundaries of the city.  MAP is an impressive system that's been through a few rounds.  

Each round puts investments into major community improvements from the riverfront, recruiting an NBA basketball team by building an arena, to school physical sites, the beginnings of a streetcar network, etc. ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape," "Civic culture and organization as an element of community economic resilience").

Detroit's MAP so to speak is what it is doing downtown.  By contrast, it would be interesting to create a MAP 4 Neighborhoods just like the second phase MAP in OKC was MAPs 4 Kids on improving schools.

Other transformational project models include

• Bilbao ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning")
• Liverpool ("Liverpool regeneration as a process for regaining relevance at the regional, national, and global scales")
• Downtown Edmonton's focus on cultural asset development ("Downtown Edmonton cultural facilities development as an example of "Transformational Projects Action Planning"")
• Germany's International Building Exhibition and International Garden Festival revitalization programs ("Hamburg, urban design, and placemaking: big vision, big projects")
• Helsinki's Arabianranta district ("Developing Creative Quarters in Cities: Policy lessons from “Art and Design City Arabianranta, Helsinki," Urban Research and Practice) 
• Portland's developments in transportation and urban design ("Talk by Congressman Earl Blumenaur on "The Portland, Oregion urban revitalization story"")

• Kansas City's streetcar development ("Kansas City Streetcar’s extension is open! Now you can ride from River Market to UMKC for free," KCUR/NPR, "'I was so wrong': Main Street shop says KC Streetcar brought more business than expected," KHSB-TV, "Years before KC streetcar expansion on Main St., development begins to boom in Midtown," Kansas City Star, "UMKC Proposing Student Housing, Retail by Planned Streetcar Terminus," Flatland).  They use a special tax district on properties within 1/3 of a mile of the line to pay for operations.
• etc.  

Luis Hernesto Holguin, left, and his sister Resfa Holguin use outdoor escalators, newly installed at Comuna 13 shantytown as part of an urbanization plan to improve living conditions of residents, in Medellín. (AP Photo/Luis Benav)

Social urbanism as another approach to neighborhood revitalization: Medellín.  Social urbanism is an initiative launched by Medellín, Colombia, to improve neighborhoods and public safety by investing in civic assets like parks and libraries, urban design, new schools, and better transportation connectivity such as public escalators and gondolas in extremely hilly areas, to bike share to finish or begin a transit trip.  

Improvements include a reduction in murders by about 90%--likely, even in the face of the pandemic, crime and murders would have dropped, neighborhoods and life circumstances and achievements would have improved.  

Top-notch amenities like parks and libraries have been placed in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Photo credit: Jorge Gobbi via Flickr

Social urbanism isn't suggested here to deal with public safety so much as to focus neighborhood investments.

-- "Experiments in Social Urbanism"
-- "'Social urbanism' experiment breathes new life into Colombia's Medellin Toronto Globe & Mail
-- "Medellín's 'social urbanism' a model for city transformation," Mail & Guardian
-- "Medellín slum gets giant outdoor escalator," Telegraph
-- "Medellín, Colombia offers an unlikely model for urban renaissance," Toronto Star-- 
-- "Latin America’s New Superstar," NextCity