I am concerned that the conversation in Detroit today is focused on remedial measures, rather than the kind of resiliency-building strategies needed to grow and strengthen our community. As such, I am thinking about how to organize a change in the conversation, and how to create an infrastructure for advancing a new agenda.

Building demolition, community gardening, and new parking lots are remedial strategies, in my opinion. They are meant to solve short term problems like blight caused by a single, structurally deficient house on a block, or the need to fill and utilize a single vacant lot in a neighborhood.

In conversation, at least, these measures are taken as whole-city strategies. The Mayor, Dan Gilbert, the media, and many residents are promoting wholesale and widespread demolition of buildings; many neighborhood leaders think covering the whole of the city in farms is key to our future success.

A better, longer term strategy, I would argue, would be to focus on attracting residents and businesses, filling empty properties, promoting beautification, and leveraging the potential for walkable urbanism that exists in a place built for high density development. In this approach, empty buildings are existing assets to be redeveloped, rather than destroyed.

It feels like this city has given up on trying to grow, trying to be a healthy CITY, and it is instead focused on mitigating the problems that are overwhelming it.

I am reminded, however, of something that billionaire Mark Cuban once said - he said that you find out what a customer needs from your customer, but you don't let them prescribe the solution; it is your job to develop a visionary solution. For example, if Steve Jobs had listened to his customers, he might have just gussied up the walkman.

A nonprofit I was working with recently gave me a list of their funding needs. On it was a large number budgeted for purchasing and demolishing buildings around their facility. This, to me, is an example of what Mark Cuban was talking about; the problem that my customer identified was vacant buildings, but they also tried to prescribe the solution: demolition. It took me, an outsider, to see how demolition would just further undermine their center, which was already in an empty neighborhood.

With all of that said, we need to change this conversation. Anyone who is serious about growing and improving Detroit knows it needs more people, more businesses, more buildings, and more of everything to become a healthy, viable community where crime, blight, and decay are not the norm. I am considering organizing a group to begin this conversation in a meaningful way in our city, and welcome the thoughts and opinions of members from this forum on this topic.