Detroit Works project to offer vision for city: Turn liabilities into assets

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By John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press Business Writer


Two years into its often rocky and controversial process, the Detroit Works project is about to unveil its draft strategies for remaking the city -- steps that might include everything from training unemployed people on dismantling derelict homes to creating artists' colonies in empty factories.

Between now and Sept.20, the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning Team will host a series of community meetings, open houses and other events to acquaint Detroiters with its ideas. The team then will take their feedback and work it into final recommendations by the end of October.

An advance look at some of the ideas provided to the Free Press last week reveals an overall vision, along with dozens of specific recommendations.

The overall vision is clear: Detroit should make assets out of its liabilities -- rotting factories, derelict houses and dozens of square miles of vacant land. Empty factories could become "live-make" spaces for artists. Vast stretches of vacant land could be turned to urban farms, reforestation projects, greenway recreation paths, rainwater retention ponds and other "blue-green" infrastructure.

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Full story at: http://www.freep.com/article/2012080...xt%7CFRONTPAGE

Who would pay?: http://www.freep.com/article/2012080...Who-would-pay-

Plans of action, by neighborhood type: http://www.freep.com/article/2012080...ghborhood-type

The group has identified seven parts of the city in which to potentially leverage land and infrastructure:

• Mt. Elliot focused on traditional industry
• McNichols Corridor focused on education and medicine
• Southwest focused on global trade and logistics
• Eastern Market focused on food and beverage processing
• Downtown focused on IT and creative
• Midtown focused on education and medicine
• Corktown focused on creative and light industry

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/in..._to_begin.html

map

http://media.mlive.com/news/detroit_...bd10e4b914.jpg

Why not turn a liability, the Detroit Works program, into an asset -- by defunding it and putting that money into city services?

While I will withhold final judgment to allow the planners a chance to present their plan and final recommendations, the information available in their presentation is troubling in a number of respects:

1. The Plan Largely Ignores Fiscal Realities. While the plan acknowledges some fiscal realities [[e.g., most vacant land in Detroit has low, if any, market value), it does not describe how efforts to achieve its general planning goals will be funded. Considering that Detroit has no money to fund large scale programs and that the state of Michigan is not flush with money, this presents a significant, perhaps fatal, obstacle to achieving the group's goals. Some money might be available from the federal government, but given fiscal realities and politics at the national level, there will not be enough to enact even close to all of these changes.
2. Zero Focus on Public Safety. Perhaps the planners do not view public safety as a planning issue, but it remains one of THE crucial problems facing the city. Some of the changes suggested, such as centering neighborhoods around a center, may indirectly improve public safety. That said, the plan does not explain how to improve public safety with increasingly limited resources.

3. Too Much Emphasis on Trendy Ideas. "Green" and "sustainable" approaches are all the rage in the planning community, but will they produce any results? I think that repurposing vacant land in Detroit will be really important and "greening" this land is a reasonable approach. However, economically, an emphasis on green industries has largely meant government funding of businesses that cannot make a profit. Whether this makes any sense is a question for another time, but even putting that aside, where will Detroit get the money to do this? Even if some money is set aside, does it make sense to be allocating money this way when the police do not respond quickly except in the most dire of emergencies?

4. Economic Development. I would like to see more analysis regarding how these plans will promote economic activity and job creation in the city. Perhaps we will hear more about this in the future.

5. Implementation. Given that the city cannot use eminent domain to force people to move from more sparesely populated areas, how will it implement its goals? One way to do it, though callous, would be to provide even more minimal services to these areas than already exists. Since that does not seem to be on the table, how will we accomplish these aims?

I do not want to be too hard on this group, as I am sure they have worked very hard on their work. Additionally, the presentation linked to in the news article is necessarily vague. Nonetheless, I think there are some important questions that need to be answered. I hope they are, because I would like to see some progress made instead of having this document become a dusty relic representing the 2010s vision of a never-realized master plan for the city.

^^ So in a nut shell, you're point is,"where is the money going to come from?"

My reasonable guess would be that large funding streams will come from the foundations that are funding the Detroit Works Project [[DNerd), which are:

1. Kresge 2. Knight 3. Ford 4. Kellogg

These folks, for a few years now, have been heavily influencing the planning and development process by picking and choosing which people and their businesses/non-profits/CDCs etc. will receive financing. It's been going on in the 7 areas that are listed as target neighborhoods for strategic investment.

The whole "short-term/long-term" outreach portion of this project is just a formality, and an intellectual property theft from those who aren't part of the in-crowd.

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Originally Posted by detroitsgwenivere

^^ So in a nut shell, you're point is,"where is the money going to come from?"

My reasonable guess would be that large funding streams will come from the foundations that are funding the Detroit Works Project [[DNerd), which are:

1. Kresge 2. Knight 3. Ford 4. Kellogg

These folks, for a few years now, have been heavily influencing the planning and development process by picking and choosing which people and their businesses/non-profits/CDCs etc. will receive financing. It's been going on in the 7 areas that are listed as target neighborhoods for strategic investment.

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The lack of funding is a significant problem, but the problem I tried to highlight is that this planning effort does not appear to acknowledge and address the lack of funding. For a planner in a cash rich city, giving little attention to money makes sense. But in Detroit, funding issues must permeate the entire planning effort. While politicians will ultimately have to make decisions regarding allocation of public funds, the Detroit Works plan should at least make proposals, which it does not appear to do.

I hope that the charitable foundations continue to fund projects in Detroit and they have done some great work so far. In the end, though, a transformation of the city will require more resources than non-profit money can provide. For example, improvements to public safety throughout the city, and particularly in neighborhoods, will largely have to come through public action and public funds.

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Originally Posted by detroitsgwenivere

^^ So in a nut shell, you're point is,"where is the money going to come from?"

My reasonable guess would be that large funding streams will come from the foundations that are funding the Detroit Works Project [[DNerd), which are:

1. Kresge 2. Knight 3. Ford 4. Kellogg

These folks, for a few years now, have been heavily influencing the planning and development process by picking and choosing which people and their businesses/non-profits/CDCs etc. will receive financing. It's been going on in the 7 areas that are listed as target neighborhoods for strategic investment.

The whole "short-term/long-term" outreach portion of this project is just a formality, and an intellectual property theft from those who aren't part of the in-crowd.

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It never ends, and the people in charge never even shed their arrogance when faced with actual people who refuse to be ignored. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I talk to some of the old-timers who moved out in the 1950s and 1960s. Surprisingly, many of them loved Detroit. They wanted to live in Detroit. They just felt that the city didn't respect them, and was instead too interested in catering to executives, companies, conglomerates, institutions, academies. These people actually wanted to stay and sweep their porches and take out their trash and send their kids to school. But they increasingly felt that the city was not responsive to their needs. I've heard the tale of how, with heavy heart, they sold the old house they'd lived in for a generation or more, said goodbye to the neighborhood institutions they cherished, and moved out to a modest home, actually quite similar to the one they'd just left, where the government would listen to them instead of bigwigs. Talk to old people, sift out the racists, and you hear this story quite a lot!

And now we have a new generation of Detroit leaders. Sure, they're a little different. They're not all-white. They're more diverse. And instead of carrying water for the big corporations, they're carrying water for the big corporations' tax-free foundations. But the message is essentially the same: "We have talked to the people who are important, and we have decided to enact a plan. Here is the plan. The plan will help the city."

And what is the mentality of the plan? Not so different from the bad old days. The mentality is that, essentially, individual Detroit residents are a problem. They are in the way of our grand plans to improve the city by working in partnership with high-profile stakeholders. In the old days, all you little householders sweeping your front porches were considered nuisances. Now we also regard hardy people who've hung on in tough neighborhoods -- not only sweeping their front porch but mowing vacant lots, unplugging their own sewers, installing their own lights -- as a nuisance. They all must go. "Leave. Take your good energy and go somewhere else so these important deals can be cemented and your neighborhood can be cordoned off so that, eventually, we can also offer that to our high-profile stakeholders. They'll know what to do with it. You do not."

How many times does a city have to re-enact the same bad policy before it recognizes that individual residents, mom-and-pop business owners, neighborhood groups and longtime residents are the foundation of a city? Who knows?

As Lewis Mumford once said, when you try to solve a problem by deepening and expanding the problem, you know that a deep-seated process is at work.

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Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

Why not turn a liability, the Detroit Works program, into an asset -- by defunding it and putting that money into city services?

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I was thinking the exact same thing. Spend the money on making the city safe and livable.

I thought the GM plant was in Hamtramck?

Looking at the map plan it becomes clear why there was so much discouragement from the city for Packard,but now I guess it is okay to put the worlds largest gentlemen s club in Corktown if one is creative about it .

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Originally Posted by Richard

I thought the GM plant was in Hamtramck?.

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Some of it. Most of it was in Detroit. But that's not the only abuse of the "little people" by the "planners." They demolished thousands of buildings to build the freeway system, for instance, often without reimbursement. Urban renewal under the 1950s and 1960s Housing Acts would be another example.

Thats the problem,when they say opps maybe that was not such a good idea after all,to many things cannot be reversed.

detroits gwenivere was pretty much spot on,add a few more names to the list,but most making the decisions would not be caught dead living next door to most of you and seem to be abit disconnected.

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Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

Why not turn a liability, the Detroit Works program, into an asset -- by defunding it and putting that money into city services?

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I was thinking the exact same thing. Spend the money on making the city safe and livable.