Mayor Bing, others need input from residents before wholesale change is forced upon the city

By: Robert Goodspeed

Detroit is facing big problems: declining population, budget deficits and a stagnant economy.

Discussions about fixing the city has generated dramatic ideas, including the Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing's roadmap for the city's future. The plan calls for closing neighborhoods, cutting services and cultivating new industries. But even with the best of intentions, if city leaders don't learn from the city's urban renewal mistakes of the past, Detroit will be doomed to repeat them.

Although Detroit's population has declined by more than 1.3 million since 1950, the problems of how to make tough decisions remain unchanged.

After I moved to the state to attend the University of Michigan, I fell in love with the city of Detroit. I chose to write my senior thesis about how the city had made decisions in the past.

In particular, I sought to answer a simple question: Why had Detroit demolished Hastings Street, its culturally rich black main street, and other neighborhoods during urban renewal? I found a complicated story where flawed urban renewal policy and city politics came together at the expense of some of the city's most vulnerable citizens. As the city debates renewal again today, the history of Hastings Street offers lessons for Detroit's future.

In the 1940s, Detroit's city planners captured the era's best ideas about how modern cities should be designed. Captured by the 1946 Detroit Plan, this vision separated residential, industrial and commercial buildings by a network of freeways. The plans also proposed tearing down large neighborhoods that were deemed "slums," but also proposed building dozens of housing projects, a mass transit system and other public facilities.

The Housing Act of 1949 made federal urban renewal money available for Detroit to implement the plan, but the local political process intervened. When Mayor Albert Cobo was elected in the fall of 1949, the carefully laid plans were changed.

A white Republican, Cobo was the first mayor who won by splitting the electorate along racial — not class — lines. Advocates for housing and a more sensitive approach to urban renewal were forced out of city government. The slum clearance went forward. Public housing and desegregation of the housing market did not.

Within two years, Hastings Street was cleared for Interstate 75. The 120-acre "Gratiot Area Redevelopment Project" area was razed, displacing 1,238 dwelling units and more than 7,000 residents.

After sitting empty for over a decade, eventually the site would contain the Lafayette Towers project. Thousands were forced from their homes around the city, often in the poorest neighborhoods.

Continued at: http://detnews.com/article/20110602/...#ixzz1O8UjUtzO
About the author

Robert Goodspeed is a Ph.D. student in the MIT department of urban studies and planning. His research is in the use of the Internet and geographic information systems technologies for collaborative regional urban planning.