"Rightsizing": Not quite as stupid as originally advertised.

[brizee]

http://www.freep.com/article/20110727/NEWS01/110727019/Mayor-Dave-Bing-pinpoints-3-areas-receive-influx-city-services?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Why hasn't he been attempting to do this to the whole city from the beginning?

So if you don't live in this areas you're literally not as important.

[mwilbert]

Because the city can't afford a higher level of services everywhere.

[Lowell]

Being discussed on Craig Fahle right now.

These neighborhoods are described more as test areas for seeing what needs to be done to improve, not add, services. Rather vague but it sounds more like a way of saying they gotta start some where to see what service models might work or are not working.

[jsmyers]

Forward-thinking professionals within the city have been thinking about this sort of thing for quite some time. My 2005 UofM planning capstone project was for [[and with) the Department of Planning and Development:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/urpoutrea...&nextMode=list

You can download a PDF of the report from that link [[warning, it is ~24 mb).

My point is not to take credit. It took a lot of hand-wringing and careful thought, along with a lot of input that I had no involvement in to bring the city to where it has been in the Bing administration. My point is only to help people realize that there is a lot of planning thought that went into this and it isn't just a political plot by one city administration. Civil servants working in the city at the time were working out these ideas, and asking us to experiment with them a bit was one way that they worked things out.

A few disclaimers about the 2005 report:
-It was based off of 2000 census data, the city now has some 2010 census data available.
-It was based strongly off of census boundaries for technical reasons. A plan executed does not have to follow these boundaries, and probably shouldn't.
-Our field work was done in the winter of 2004-2005 and the spring of 2005. I'm sure a lot has changed in the last six years.

[jsmyers]

Another article:

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article...stration-areas

[Carey]

jsmyers,

I'm interested in reading your paper; thanks for posting the links. But here's a question: With your insight into the city's operations, what did you conclude about service delivery? Whether public safety or public lighting, services have been on a steady downward spiral in Detroit for several decades now, and they never seem to get better. The lack of stable services certainly is a huge hurdle in retaining and attracting residents.

Can anyone make the city work better? Get more working EMS and fire rigs? Is it just a money problem, or to what extent is poor management, union issues etc., involved? Please, take it away...

[rencense]

go bing! I really hope his plan works well and these areas see significant improvements. Unfortunately bing can't do anything like this without some crazy speculation and people complaining that their area isn't included. We all know he can't afford much right now so lets not bite off more than we can chew. I do have some thoughts on the areas he picked.

• Bagley/Detroit Golf Club/Green Acres/ Palmer Woods, Sherwood Forest and University District: an area bounded by Eight Mile, Woodward, McNichols and Wyoming.

honestly this one seemed like a bit of a copout. Sure, bagley could use a little help but palmer woods etc are already as nice as detroit gets. Regardless this section should be relatively easy to improve.

• Boston Edison/North End/Virginia Park: an area bounded by Boston Boulevard, Holbrook, I-75 and West Grand Boulevard and Linwood

makes a lot of sense and seems like the logical next step for improvements already going on in midtown/new center. The north end is in pretty rough shape so I'm curious what they have planned. Virginia park is nice but needs help. Everyone loves B-E and would love to live there if they can afford to keep up one of those mansions. I know not everyone would like this idea but I've always thought that a few of those empty BE mansions could be split up into apartments [[it would give them a purpose and way better than a vacant house. Heck I'd live in BE if I could do so without all the upkeep expenses.

Hubbard Farms/Southwest: an area bounded by Vernor, Toledo, I-75 and Woodmere.

The boundaries confused me a bit when they said hubbard but I guess they're planning to cover the few blocks north of vernor [[to toledo) from 75 all the way to woodmere. [[the boundaries are a little strange since toledo ends at livernois. [[I'm hopeful they mean also the area from woodmere to waterman between vernor and dix)

The hubbard farms area is doing ok for the most part but I really hope they can make some progress in the rest of the area. I love southwest but have been noticing more and more torched houses lately. I think investing along the vernor spine makes sense.

I look forward to seeing plans/progress here and am keeping my fingers crossed that nothing shoots down bing's plans. I know the city can't afford to do much at a time but the best we can hope for is to provide better looking neighborhoods with better services like streetlights and the demo of torched houses.

looking forward to hearing other's take on this plan

[Rocko]

This Detroit News article has a map which may clarify some of the target area boundaries:

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...-city-services

[mwilbert]

• Bagley/Detroit Golf Club/Green Acres/ Palmer Woods, Sherwood Forest and University District: an area bounded by Eight Mile, Woodward, McNichols and Wyoming.

honestly this one seemed like a bit of a copout. Sure, bagley could use a little help but palmer woods etc are already as nice as detroit gets. Regardless this section should be relatively easy to improve.

Note that this area also includes the apartment district and the fairly dismal area north of Pembroke and west of Livernois.

[Rocko]

I hope this plan has A) more long term support and B) better long term results than the Kilpatrick administration's "Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative," which if I recall correctly did something kind of similar which trailed off after a few months.

[Autoracks]

Its seems like they tried this a few years back. EEV, Brightmoor and a couple other areas. What is different? Did it work last time? Im asking because i dont know

[DetroitPole]

Its seems like they tried this a few years back. EEV, Brightmoor and a couple other areas. What is different? Did it work last time? Im asking because i dont know

This is what pisses me off. What IS different? You know as an EEV resident I am sure I am not alone in that many of us, from the signals we have gotten in the past few years, that WE were going to be a target area.

Now where are we on this list? Not to sound selfish, because, again, we've gotten signals in the past that we were being "targeted" - recycling pilot, Next Detroit neighborhood, Project 14 - and also these programs covered more than the sliver that is EEV proper.

Are they just trying to fucking panic and confuse residents, as usual? Are we not one of the favorite sons anymore? Have they decided to give up on us and let us go the way of the rest of the eastside? Did the person/people who favored us before escape with the rest of his administration?

As usual, no coherence or consistency. Fuck Dave Bing.

[Fnemecek]

Two thoughts come to mind on this...

#1. How quickly can Team Bing show results in these 3 areas?

#2. How quickly can they duplicate them in other parts of the city?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Mayor Bing basically has until this spring to show significant results. If he isn't able to, there will be so many knives out by then that he'll essentially be a lame duck mayor.

[jsmyers]

Can anyone make the city work better? Get more working EMS and fire rigs? Is it just a money problem, or to what extent is poor management, union issues etc., involved? Please, take it away...

Carey,

I don't think it would be fair to say that we concluded anything about service delivery. [[You have to realize that I haven't thought carefully about this report in about 5 years and that I was part of a team of 10 students, so there were parts I wasn't as familiar with.)

From my memory, there was a strong desire to take things that had been done in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia and tweak them to fit Detroit. It was more about helping to reach a tipping point in the private market by concentrating some types of funding into an area for a period of time. The focus was less on day-to-day services [[which I'll call operating expenses), and more on the use of CDBG and HOME funds along with projects like street paving or tree planting [[which I'll call capital investments). So instead of fixing up 100 old folks' homes all over the city [[for instance), 100 old folks' homes in one or two neighborhoods would be fixed up that year. The idea is that neighbors of that home will invest their own money when they see a lot of improvement around them. These improvements can often become self-sustaining.

**One thing to realize is that a lot of "shrinking cities" stuff happened after all of this. What we outlined in that report is no where near as radical as what was being talked about the last few years, with talk or relocating etc.**

If I remember correctly, I [[personally) wanted to focus more on consolidating transportation service [[mostly fixed route bus) and planning for BRT and LRT, therefore targeted areas should be organized around the existing transit system and/or anticipated future transit systems. I felt that this should be done in conjunction with planning for neighborhood retail at the center. I really felt [[as I still do) that good transit does wonders. Because of the long-term and uncertain nature of these types of changes and improvements, these ideas don't make it into the report in a strong way. I can certainly understand why planning for TOD wasn't really a part of our project's purpose.

I'm really not qualified to comment on "poor management, union issues etc." When I was doing the project and living in AA, I felt that the biggest issues for the city were:

1. a backward self image [[big three factory town of single-family homes, a regional issue), and
2. an oversupply of new development in a region that wasn't growing much [[another regional issue)

Both of these then feed into a poor transportation system.

When I moved to the city [[Cass Corridor) later that year, I started to see a certain brokenness or paralysis in the city. While it is true that Detroiters have a great spirit, I think it is also true that there is too much expectation of failure and a distrust of change. A lot of that is very understandable. All but the most optimistic of life-long Detroiters in earlier generations [[I just turned 31), have been repeatedly let down and often walked over [[Poletown for instance). When your experiences tell you that change either always hurts you or fails outright, you become very cynical and distrustful of change.

A lot of that plays out in management/union issues [[and is very hard to work around), but also in NIMBYism and many other ways.

While I followed love out of Michigan only a year after I moved to Detroit, I try to keep up on what is happening there. [[My folks live in SW Michigan.) I'm pretty optimistic about the ability of Gilbert et al, along with Tech Town, transit [[finally!) and a continued vibrancy of the constantly evolving creative "hipster" scene, to turn central Detroit around in a big way.

WRT other neighborhoods: While I think that there are a lot of positive steps being taken, and I think that a vibrant core is a necessary condition, I think that the long term health of Detroit's other ~130 square miles will rest more on the regional economy and whether the region keeps insisting on paving more forests and cornfields for people and businesses who are only shifting around in the region.

I've heard/read the metro Detroit housing market being described this way: A new McMansion is built on an old farm, and a family from a nice suburb moves out of their slightly smaller house in an already built suburb. A middle class family moves out of a 1950-60s neighborhood and into the vacancy. That neighborhood is hurt by the loss of wealth and their house is occupied by a hard-working family that is trying to escape ghetto conditions. When they leave, their old neighborhood goes from not great to bad, but people with few options find the old place better than their current home. At the bottom of this chain is a home that finally nobody wants to rent or buy. It is destroyed by neglect.

The only people who benefit from this system are property speculators and home builders. If this system continues forever, they get to charge a lot for a house that in all likelihood will be abandoned. Many of the owners over the years lost money as the oversupply of new houses erroded the value of theirs. In 1950, when metro Detroit was growing fast, it made sense to build houses on farms like it is going out of style. Since about 1970, the region has all but stopped growing, but yet we've built millions of new homes. Wouldn't that investment been better spent on improving existing property of all types?

In some ways, the great recession [[or lesser depression) and the tight credit markets may be a long-term blessing, as they seem to have hit reset on metro Detroit's development path. If recovery focuses inward to areas that are already built up [[in the suburbs and Detroit) instead of outward, then I think neighborhoods will see a lot of improvement over time.

Realize that will our memory might be that everything has gotten worse constantly for the last 50 years, there were recent times when Detroit as a whole was showing a lot of improvement. In the mid 90s, the region prospered, and Detroit property values rose in many areas. If the region hadn't sprawled so much in that time, Detroit would be a much better place today.

[jsmyers]

It is not clear to me:

When "steady," "transitional," and "distressed" are discussed, are these with respect to neighborhoods within these areas? It seems to me that this is the case, but the coverage isn't really explicit.

[jsmyers]

Looking at the Detroit News map, it occurs to me that one of these areas is basically a nice inner ring suburb within the city limits [[Palmer etc), while the other two are the inner-city neighborhoods immediately next to the central core were so much is happening [[rightly so). I'd agree with DetroitPole that a similar area on the east makes sense as well [[the "villages").

[Rocko]

Its seems like they tried this a few years back. EEV, Brightmoor and a couple other areas. What is different? Did it work last time? Im asking because i dont know.

This is the Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative which I spoke of, which was unrolled by the Kilpatrick crew in either 2006 or 2007. Here are some more details and what some of us said about it at the time:

http://atdetroit.net/forum/messages/...tml?1199256874

[jsmyers]

Not to continue to discuss this with myself....

But I would expect that these boundaries either were misrepresented by the media or they will be tweaked as this moves forward. For instance, the northern boundary of the SW district would logically go to Dix.

[Novine]

I didn't see any details from Detroit about how they are going to measure the success of this program. How will they measure whether this program is working or not in the targeted neighborhoods?

[Carey]

Is anyone else confused about what Bing announced?

[skyl4rk]

Sounds like grant and foundation money will be focused on steady neighborhoods and the surrounding transitional neighborhoods in the three Demonstration Areas. Sort of a triage approach where the hope is that the steady neighborhoods grow into the surrounding transitional neighborhoods.

City investment in road repair, street lighting and other street improvements will be focused in the three Demonstration Areas. Probably this means less improvements to other areas. Code enforcement will be stepped up in the Demonstration Areas.

The rest of the city would see the same police, fire and trash removal as they have in the past. It will also see less infrastructure improvements and code enforcement attention than the Demonstration Areas.

Not stated is how the city will repair infrastructure problems [[water main breaks, potholes, etc.), will that be based on whether a location is in the Demonstration Areas? For problems which can affect the entire system such as water main breaks, I doubt it but there may be some prioritization based on Demonstration Area status.

To make it easier to understand, think of the Demonstration Areas as villages, and neighborhoods outside of the villages as townships. The city is going to try to provide normal city services in the villages, and only basic services in the townships.

One question is whether this plan will affect services levels downtown, Midtown, and other relatively successful neighborhoods outside of the Demonstration Areas.

[donpablo]

This is what pisses me off. What IS different? You know as an EEV resident I am sure I am not alone in that many of us, from the signals we have gotten in the past few years, that WE were going to be a target area.

Now where are we on this list? Not to sound selfish, because, again, we've gotten signals in the past that we were being "targeted" - recycling pilot, Next Detroit neighborhood, Project 14 - and also these programs covered more than the sliver that is EEV proper.

Are they just trying to fucking panic and confuse residents, as usual? Are we not one of the favorite sons anymore? Have they decided to give up on us and let us go the way of the rest of the eastside? Did the person/people who favored us before escape with the rest of his administration?

As usual, no coherence or consistency. Fuck Dave Bing.

HA HA HA HA!
I just had to laugh at your post because as a resident of a Detroit neighborhood that was not in the targeted areas as well, you do sound selfish. Not to mention whiny and childish.

Now I don't mean to be so harsh because I do generally like your posts, I just couldnt help myself

[canuck]

jsmyers / I've heard/read the metro Detroit housing market being described this way: A new McMansion is built on an old farm, and a family from a nice suburb moves out of their slightly smaller house in an already built suburb. A middle class family moves out of a 1950-60s neighborhood and into the vacancy. That neighborhood is hurt by the loss of wealth and their house is occupied by a hard-working family that is trying to escape ghetto conditions. When they leave, their old neighborhood goes from not great to bad, but people with few options find the old place better than their current home. At the bottom of this chain is a home that finally nobody wants to rent or buy. It is destroyed by neglect.

The only people who benefit from this system are property speculators and home builders. If this system continues forever, they get to charge a lot for a house that in all likelihood will be abandoned. Many of the owners over the years lost money as the oversupply of new houses erroded the value of theirs. In 1950, when metro Detroit was growing fast, it made sense to build houses on farms like it is going out of style. Since about 1970, the region has all but stopped growing, but yet we've built millions of new homes. Wouldn't that investment been better spent on improving existing property of all types?

Yes, and it is a pity no political will ever amounted to much action to stop the folly of a spreadout region. We all know about the right to own land and build or dispose of it as one pleases, and so the developers will always invoke this as an elementary fact. The sinister result of this sprawl is that it has depleted resources in a forceful way, and the outcome for Detroit is that it became what some far out suburban cities often are; a mix of dense and loose fill.

[hamtown mike]

so wait.......

Is this a "plan" or a "study?"

Is this anything like the "study" to develop Africatown? How much did we drop on that obviously discriminatory and illegal idea?

I understand that charting the best course requires good information. I just hope this "study" yields good information. Information beyond what we already know.

And further, I hope that once the "study" is complete there will be funds remaining to actually act upon the study's findings.

[jsmyers]

My understanding is that what was described in the press yesterday is more of an experiment:

Do some things that previous studies have lead us to believe are a good idea, monitor the outcomes, and tweak the formula going forward.

IMO, this is how all things should be implemented.