Last Wednesday, members of the Steering Committee, Process Leaders, Street Team, and Advisory Taskforce—all instrumental groups in the planning process—came together at the HomeBase to meet with Detroit Future City’s new leadership team.

Both Dan and Heidi worked closely with these groups during the planning process; therefore there was a sense of familiarity around the table, which allowed the discussions to progress quickly.

After discussions about the roles of the leadership team and the stakeholder groups will have in implementation; the dialogue moved to topics that will be vital to turning paper into possibilities, including:

• the importance that continued community engagement will have in bringing the five planning elements to life;
• working toward identifying the necessary policy changes that will help fulfill the goals and objectives of the strategic framework; and
• looking ahead to the types of projects that can happen within this calendar year.

Overall, the first of what will be many interactions with community stakeholders proved to be fruitful dialogue that will help inform and advance the implementation of Detroit Future City.

Moderated by John Gallagher
Veteran Journalist at the Detroit Free Press and Author of Revolution Detroit

Tuesday, May 14, 7:30 p.m.
The Grosse Pointe War Memorial
32 Lake Shore Drive, Grosse Pointe Farms

Program is Free of Charge but Seating is Limited
Please Register on the Online Calendar www.gp.lib.mi.us
Or call 313-343-2074

Presented by the Wayne County Community College District & The Grosse Pointe Public Library

Detroit Future City names director, senior program manager

Crain’s Detroit Business
By Kirk Pinho
April 17, 2013

Detroit Future City will have two leaders effective May 6.

Dan Kinkead, 39, has been named director, and Heidi Alcock, 38, has been named senior program manager for the Detroit Future City Program Management Office.

George Jackson, president and CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., said in a news release that Kinkead and Alcock are “strong leaders” who “have the knowledge and the skills to translate the strategic framework into real progress revitalizing Detroit.”

“As we move this project from planning to implementation, the right leadership is critical,” Jackson said .

The 350-page Detroit Future City strategic framework plan was released in early January after years of research and community input.

It focuses on job growth, land use, improving neighborhoods and rebuilding infrastructure.

“We have a chance to begin something that will fundamentally change our lives,” Kinkead stated. “This is our shot, and I cannot wait.”

The Troy-based Kresge Foundation and the Battle Creek-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation are funding the office’s establishment and operation, contributing a  combined $3 million for the first two years of operating.

The DEGC will provide administrative oversight, but the Program Management Office will be “a distinct entity,” according to the release.

The office will develop and manage an agenda for implementing the Detroit Future City plan.

The Detroit Future City office is currently located at 2929 Russell St. in Eastern Market, but Kinkead and Alcock will explore other office location possibilities, according to James Canning, the group’s outside media relations spokesman.

Kinkead currently is a design principal at Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates, and Alcock is the CEO of Detroit-based Michigan Community Resources.

Both were involved in developing the Detroit Future City plan.

To read original article click HERE

Leaders for Detroit Future City team chosen

Detroit Free Press
By John Gallagher
April 17, 2013

The first team members have been hired to start implementing the city’s ambitious Detroit Future City vision.

Detroit Economic Growth Corporation President and CEO George W. Jackson Jr. announced the hiring of Dan Kinkead as director and Heidi Alcock as senior program manager for the Detroit Future City Program Management Office.

Kinkead was a leader of the team that produced the Detroit Future City report. As design principal at the Detroit architectural firm Hamilton Anderson Associates, he spearheaded the team that assembled the 349-page strategic framework, and developed the land use and neighborhood elements it contains.

Kinkead graduated from Harvard University with a master of architecture in urban design, and a bachelor of architecture from the University of Kentucky.

“As someone raising a family in this city, I know we need action,” he said. “As an urban designer and architect who has dedicated his career to improving cities like ours, I look forward to partnering with local leaders, community members, businesses, institutions and anyone else ready to effect change.”

Alcock served in a leadership role on the civic engagement team for Detroit Future City. As CEO of the nonprofit Michigan Community Resources, she was instrumental in developing the process infrastructure and philosophy for the engagement effort that helped shaped the strategic framework. Alcock has worked with and on behalf of Detroit organizations focused on community development for 16 years.

“Detroit Future City represents the best of Detroit’s current imagination and innovation,” said Alcock, “and no single person or organization can achieve its aims alone.”

“As we move this project from planning to implementation the right leadership is critical,” said Jackson. “Dan and Heidi were both strong leaders throughout the planning process, and I am confident that they have the knowledge and the skills to translate the strategic framework into real progress revitalizing Detroit.”

Two Named to Lead Management Office for Detroit Future City

D Business

APRIL 18, 2013

DETROIT — Detroit Economic Growth Corp. President and CEO George W. Jackson, Jr. announced the hiring of Dan Kinkead as director, and Heidi Alcock as senior program manager, for the Detroit Future City Program Management Office.

“As we move this project from planning to implementation the right leadership is critical,” Jackson said. “Dan and Heidi were both strong leaders throughout the planning process, and I am confident that they have the knowledge and the skills to translate the strategic framework into real progress revitalizing Detroit.”

The Kresge and W.K. Kellogg Foundations are providing funds to establish and operate the Program Management Office as a distinct entity with Detroit Economic Growth Corp. administrative oversight. The PMO will also work with funders, an Implementation Consortium, and other community partners to develop and manage the Detroit Future City implementation agenda. The agenda will include continued civic engagement, regulatory and policy reform, and the execution of early actions and pilot projects. The agenda will also build on important efforts already underway, working with community stakeholders to coordinate decision-making with the strategic framework to maximize impact.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the unprecedented planning and civic engagement efforts completed over the last three years,” said Kinkead. “Given the shared direction we’ve defined with Detroiters, and the breadth of change we see across the city each day, now is the time for well-informed, innovative, and impactful actions to improve our quality of life and create a sustainable, fiscally viable city.”

Kinkead, a long-time Detroiter, served in a leadership role on the technical planning team for the development of Detroit Future City. As Design Principal at Hamilton Anderson Associates, he spearheaded the team that assembled the 349-page strategic framework, and developed the Land Use and Neighborhood elements it contains.

He has 16-years of experience leading complex architecture, urban design, and planning projects in Detroit and many other locations nationally, and internationally. His experience also includes mentoring designers and planners to become leaders themselves, adding to the robust pool of talented urban innovators in the city. Kinkead graduated from Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design; and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kentucky.

Alcock served in a leadership role on the civic engagement team for Detroit Future City. As Chief Executive Officer of Michigan Community Resources, she was instrumental in developing the infrastructure and philosophy for the engagement effort that helped shaped the strategic framework. That effort was the most robust participatory planning process in Detroit’s history.
Alcock has worked with, and on behalf of Detroit organizations focused on community development for 16 years.

Under her leadership, Michigan Community Resources quadrupled its budget and staff, creatively expanded its programs to benefit the community, and successfully built and led the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign, which works alongside the community to address Detroit’s vacant property crisis. A graduate of Wayne State University with a Master of Public Administration, Alcock also served six years as a planner for the Detroit City Planning Commission.

 To read original article click HERE

 

“As we move this project from planning to implementation the right leadership is critical,” said Jackson. “Dan and Heidi were both strong leaders throughout the planning process, and I am confident that they have the knowledge and the skills to translate the strategic framework into real progress revitalizing Detroit.”

The Kresge and W.K. Kellogg Foundations are providing funds to establish and operate the Program Management Office as a distinct entity with Detroit Economic Growth Corporation administrative oversight. The PMO will also work with funders, an Implementation Consortium, and other community partners to develop and manage the Detroit Future City implementation agenda. The agenda will include continued civic engagement, regulatory and policy reform, and the execution of early actions and pilot projects. The agenda will also build on important efforts already underway, working with community stakeholders to coordinate decision-making with the strategic framework to maximize impact.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the unprecedented planning and civic engagement efforts completed over the last three years,” said Kinkead. “Given the shared direction we’ve defined with Detroiters, and the breadth of change we see across the city each day, now is the time for well-informed, innovative, and impactful actions to improve our quality of life and create a sustainable, fiscally viable city.”

Both Kinkead and Alcock will begin May 6, 2013. Their first few months will be dedicated to completing critical staffing assignments, confirming the location for their home base, and outlining the implementation agenda. They will also begin the process to establish the Implementation Consortium.  More details on each of these efforts will be available as the team is formed.

Dan Kinkead

Kinkead, a long-time Detroiter, served in a leadership role on the technical planning team for the development of Detroit Future City. As Design Principal at Hamilton Anderson Associates, he spearheaded the team that assembled the 349-page strategic framework, and developed the Land Use and Neighborhood elements it contains.

He has 16-years of experience leading complex architecture, urban design, and planning projects in Detroit and many other locations nationally, and internationally. Dan’s experience also includes mentoring designers and planners to become leaders themselves, adding to the robust pool of talented urban innovators in the city. Kinkead graduated from Harvard University with a Master of Architecture in Urban Design; and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kentucky.

As Director of the Program Management Office, Kinkead will set and maintain the implementation goals, priorities, and strategies for fulfillment of Detroit Future City recommendations.  He will also establish the Implementation Consortium, and define the strategic means and methods for action and decision-making. This will include close coordination with Alcock, and staff members, to execute continued engagement, policy changes, and pilot projects. Kinkead will also foster and maintain important collaborative relationships with stakeholders across the city, region, and state.

“I am honored to be a part of the implementation team for Detroit Future City,” said Kinkead.  “As someone raising a family in this city I know we need action.  As an urban designer and architect who has dedicated his career to improving cities like ours, I look forward to partnering with local leaders, community members, businesses, institutions, and anyone else ready to effect change.  We have a chance to begin something that will fundamentally change our lives.  This is our shot, and I cannot wait.”

Heidi Alcock

Alcock served in a leadership role on the civic engagement team for Detroit Future City. As Chief Executive Officer of Michigan Community Resources, she was instrumental in developing the infrastructure and philosophy for the engagement effort that helped shaped the strategic framework. That effort was the most robust participatory planning process in Detroit’s history.
Alcock has worked with, and on behalf of Detroit organizations focused on community development for 16 years.

Under her leadership, Michigan Community Resources quadrupled its budget and staff, creatively expanded its programs to benefit the community, and successfully built and led the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign, which works alongside the community to address Detroit’s vacant property crisis. A graduate of Wayne State University with a Master of Public Administration, Alcock also served six years as a planner for the Detroit City Planning Commission.

As Senior Program Manager, Alcock will work with the Director to set implementation goals and priorities. Her daily responsibilities include developing and executing strategy to achieve goals; leading the day to day operations of the PMO; coordinating the work of PMO staff and partners; establishing and strengthening stakeholder relationships; and tracking the performance of all internal and external implementers of the Detroit Future City Agenda.

“Detroit Future City represents the best of Detroit’s current imagination and innovation,” said Alcock, “and no single person or organization can achieve its aims alone. As we move from planning to action, we will rely on partnerships with community leaders who are already making the change Detroit needs. Detroit wants to see action, and, together with our community partners, action is what we will work tirelessly to deliver.”

Detroit Future City

Detroit Future City is a comprehensive strategic framework that outlines recommendations to leverage Detroit’s strengths and assets and coordinate investment and resources regarding economic growth, land, neighborhoods, infrastructure, and civic engagement.  Detroit Future City is a guide for decision making that helps stakeholders –– community groups, philanthropy, business entities and economic developers, government, investors, and more –– make decisions using a shared vision that improves the quality of life for all.  Visit www.DetroitFutureCity.org for more information.

Detroit Economic Growth Corporation

Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC) is a non-profit organization that serves as the lead implementing agency for business retention, attraction and economic development initiatives in the city of Detroit. DEGC is led by a 60-member board comprised of business, civic, labor and community leaders. Its 40 professionals provide staff services for key public authorities that offer tax credits and other forms of financing for projects that bring new jobs or economic activity to the city. Among them: the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), Detroit Brownfield Redevelopment Authority (DBRA), Economic Development Corporation (EDC), Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC), Local Development Finance Authority (LDFA), and Tax Increment Finance Authority (TIFA). DEGC also provides planning, project management and other services under contract to the City of Detroit and manages projects for its affiliated non-profit, Detroit Economic Growth Association (DEGA).

Reason #2 The Detroit Future City Plan

It may not be a household name yet, but it will be. The Detroit Future City Plan was commissioned by Mayor Bing and is the first plan in Detroit’s history to concede that the city will probably never again contain 2 million people. Having shed the burden of that delusion, the Future City Plan is allowed to dream big and propose truly revolutionary ideas that are unique to Detroit. The plan calls for lining the freeways with mini-forests and small-scale agriculture, encouraging economic growth in the neighborhoods, and an overhaul and upgrade of public transit. If even 10% of the Future City Plan is implemented, Detroit will be put on the map as the most innovative city in America

To read the entire article click HERE

Years in the making, a new report recommends maintaining some parts of the city’s infrastructure, removing others, and taking full advantage of its unused land.

April 2, 2013—Detroiters have been working for years on finding ways to retool their ailing city for the 21st century. City leaders have long pushed the idea that the city needs to shrink its services to better reflect its smaller population. A comprehensive new report, three years in the making and completed late last year, is finally providing a sound, strategic framework for how the city can reduce, decommission, and retool its critical infrastructure.

Entitled Detroit Future City, the 349-page report takes a serious, unflinching look at the city’s challenges. From its peak population of 1.8 million in the early 1950s, Detroit is now home to only 714,000, and it is predicted that by 2030 the city’s population will have stabilized somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000. Yet even with the drastically reduced numbers, at present there is only one job for every four Detroiters.

“When we look at the scope of things within the city of Detroit, we see over the last roughly 50 to 60 years, when balanced out for inflation, . . . a 60 percent decline in tax revenue since 1950,” says Dan Kinkead, AIA, a design principal with Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates, one of the planning firms that worked on the report.

The city is the same physical size as always, but its needs are clearly changing. It is becoming more and more fiscally insolvent; its newly installed “emergency manager,” a bankruptcy lawyer selected by the governor of Michigan, has been charged to sort out Detroit’s crumbling finances. Still, Kinkead says, the report is about showing Detroiters that the success of their city does not depend on an increase in population over the next 10 to 20 years. What it does depend on, the report concludes, is integrating economic planning with land use and overhauling systems to reflect the city that Detroit is becoming—not the mid-century behemoth it once was.

“Detroit’s systems, public and private, are aging,” Kinkead says. “Within the next 10 to 20 years, significant capital renewals are going to be necessary. We need to find a way to handle the renewals to keep the city moving and to provide a high quality of life to Detroiters, at the same time being very strategic about how we do this to minimize unnecessary uses of resources.”

Planning for no growth requires a completely different mind-set than usual, says Lawrie Robertson, RIBA, a partner in the London office of the international engineering and consulting firm Buro Happold, which is a member of Detroit’s planning team. Robertson, who is also the firm’s head of strategic planning, says most urban plans are based on a growth model.”

“That growth model runs very deep in the way that things get engineered, the way that things get procured, the way that things get funded, and the way decision-making models are set up,” Robertson says. Whereas cities ordinarily scrutinize decisions about making investments, “decisions about disinvestment,” he says, are something “there isn’t a framework for.”

Initiated and funded in part by the Kresge Foundation, which is based in Troy, Michigan, in partnership with Mayor Dave Bing, the report brought together hundreds of stakeholders and consultants not just from Detroit but from around the country and from abroad under a planning process called the Detroit Works Project. (Funding was also provided by the Ford, W.K. Kellogg, and Knight foundations.) “There was a great deal of concern that this was just going to be another plan,” says Kinkead. Cities turn them out all the time, and the fear going in was that the report might be perceived as just one more publication, something that would probably sit on a table and gather dust or, worse, undermine the nascent progress in the city. But between its inception, in 2010, and the end of 2012 the Detroit Works Project engaged in hundreds of community meetings, held 30,000 conversations, and contacted citizens more than 163,000 times. Kinkead feels the production of the report has brought together enough stakeholders to provide the kind of “catalytic action” the city needs if it’s going to remake itself. “In a city that is as challenged as Detroit is,” he says, “with such a wealth of interested parties to help turn it around, you have an even greater proportion of planning efforts that are done here, perhaps, than other places.

“This is going to go down as not only one of the more important comprehensive strategic plans for a major U.S. city,” he says, “but also one of the most robust engagement and participatory planning efforts.”

The city’s plans for strategic infrastructure renewal involve a complex mapping of the city’s population, land uses, and economic priorities to determine which parts of the city require infrastructure to be maintained or expanded, which parts require it to be maintained but reduced, and which parts would benefit from having their infrastructure “decommissioned.”

“Detroit didn’t have the luxury of reconfiguring infrastructure to support new activity on a cost-free or even cost-neutral basis,” Robertson says. “This is all about finding ways of providing that service to people with a fundamentally lower cost of delivery.”

The report highlights one pilot project already under way that may serve as an example. The city’s gas utility, DTE Energy, is pulling out every second gas main in one depopulated Detroit neighborhood. “Once the vacancy levels fall to a certain point, it makes a lot of sense to take out and retire the gas mains, many of which are coming to the end of their design lives,” Robertson says. “You take them out [of] every other street and then you just reconnect the few properties that are left on the street where the main has been retired” to those pipelines that remain, he says. “It took a bit of detailed engineering to figure out whether that would save money or would work,” he adds. “It definitely does.”

The report also envisions a network of “green” and “blue” infrastructure to improve respectively air and water quality. The high cost of upgrading the city’s sewer system in part dictated this approach. “You can build a tube underground for $3 billion, and it serves no purpose for people other than the fact it’s dealing with the water,” says Scott Bishop, an associate principal in the Boston-based landscape architecture firm Stoss, another member of the planning team. Instead, Stoss proposes to address vacant land, polluting industries, and storm-water runoff—the city is largely built on nonporous clay—all at once. The idea is to plant “carbon forests” alongside roadways and create complex networks of bioswales and retention ponds. “The green-blue infrastructure tries to address all of these issues simultaneously,” says Chris Reed, a Stoss principal, “and also [to] create landscape spaces of value to nearby communities, just as a kind of visual amenity—never mind a kind of environmental amenity, never mind a kind of recreation and landscape amenity.”

“We’re looking at a landscape as a way to achieve all those goals and not just put things underground,” adds Bishop, who sees the latter approach as a “kind of 19th- and 20th-century idea of infrastructure that needs to disappear.” The problem, he adds, is that “eventually people forget about it and it’s not serviced.” But adding aboveground, nature-inspired systems makes the infrastructure and its functions obvious to all.

But the plan doesn’t call for a one-size-fits-all approach. Some sustainable infrastructure can be linked to, for example, the city’s network of radial boulevards. Designers have proposed taking large roads that have excess capacity and shrinking them by adding a series of drainage areas and retention ponds. “In other places, the topography doesn’t allow that,” says Reed. “You can have small-scale dispersed areas that can collect water within neighborhoods at very, very small scales. You have edges of neighborhoods, transition areas that can be utilized to collect runoff, or you can also look at larger-scale surface lakes or river marshland, where you’re devoting a much larger contiguous area to bigger ponds, which perform an ecological function as habitat or even as recreational areas.”

Another idea is to “rubbleize” underused roads, breaking up asphalt to make impervious surfaces pervious. “Techniques like that are really small scale and modest [but] can also contribute to the general bigger project of blue and green infrastructure,” says Reed.

Bishop notes that an analysis of common strategies for dealing with storm water—whether through infiltration, conveyance, or retention—revealed that such natural infrastructure systems could handle 99 percent of runoff during large storm events.

Now that the report has been completed, the Detroit Works Project is keen to establish a permanent implementation team to help move things forward. Robertson says that it’s important that the changes to infrastructure, which may unfold over 20 years, work within existing plans. Downsizing infrastructure is not something that’s carried out rapidly and all at once. “Doing that in the right way means rolling with existing cycles,” he says. “The more you can work within typical maintenance and renewal cycles, the more you can work within budgeting and approval cycles [and] the more easily this can be integrated into the way of doing things.”

Coordination also will be important. Robertson notes that investment strategies for different districts of the city need to be linked to the fundamental land use and economic development strategies that the report lays out.

It is assumed here that reducing, decommissioning, and, in some cases, retooling infrastructure will be affordable investments. Robertson says there are real savings to be made, although he did not want to give details.

“This is a problem that stretches way beyond Detroit,” Robertson notes. When infrastructure systems are installed, he says, people are most often worried about the investment needed to build them. Very little thought is given to sustaining and maintaining the infrastructure, much less decommissioning it.

Cities or countries may install great systems that can scale up to meet the needs of large populations. But then economic growth inevitably slows, and population growth slows as economies develop and mature, Robertson says. “The revenues just aren’t really there to support those systems in the long run. Detroit definitely has that problem, but it’s a problem that it shares with many cities in many parts of the world.”

Of course, as Robertson concedes, it’s hard to see 50 years into the future. No one in Detroit in 1950 would have imagined the city could lose half its population. Still, he notes that U.S. cities have invested in a “space-extensive and resource-intensive” infrastructure system that has created expensive legacy costs. It’s important, he notes, to hold on to the core engineering value of frugality [and to try] hard not to saddle the next generation with high costs.

The report may represent a new start and help to revive Detroit on the basis of the city’s two greatest assets: its people and its vacant land. “One of the characteristics of Detroit as we know it now is this huge asset of available land,” Reed says. “In the past, vacant land has been seen as a problem. We see it as this enormous opportunity, an opportunity other cities would love to be able to have.”

To read the original article click HERE

Four years ago this week, I put the deposit down on my first apartment in Detroit. I had been spending an increasing amount of time in the city on weekends, and every time I visited, I felt—at the risk of sounding corny here—a connection forming. The city had just plain gotten under my skin. Something was pulling me toward Detroit, and as I signed my name on the lease, my heart pounded with an exhilaration I hadn’t felt since leaving my parents’ home at age 18.

I moved to Detroit in the first half of 2009, when its prospects never looked shakier. Certain family members, friends, and co-workers struggled to understand my decision. Laying eyes on my “fortress of solitude” gated, high-rise apartment building along the banks of the Detroit River often blunted their misgivings, but still—why would I choose to relocate to a place so “bombed out,” so broke, so dangerous?

I was moving to Detroit from Lansing. If a city could be a piece of cardboard—flat, humdrum, boring—Lansing, to me, is it. I find Detroit to be its opposite: colorful; flavorful; never a dull moment. It’s a fascinating place unlike any other in both good ways and bad, but it’s never boring.

During my four years here, I’ve watched a steady stream of other young professionals fall sway to Detroit’s charms and put down their own roots. What I imagine we all have in common is a feeling of optimism about the future of Detroit. In my line of work, I meet some of the city’s best, brightest, and wealthiest, and I often have the pleasure of reporting the most positive stories about startups and innovation Detroit has to offer. I tell everyone who will listen that moving here was the best decision I made in a decade.

Terina Davis, my friend and a lifelong Detroiter who is in the middle of her 69th year living in the city, sees the past four years here a little differently. She’s watched the east side apartment complex near the corner of Harper and Whittier that she’s called home for 17 years disintegrate before her eyes. She’s moved from one apartment inside the complex to another as she’s watched a block that was once lined with beautiful, well-kept buildings fall apart under the perfect storm of an absentee landlord, squatters, drug dealers, a police raid, and fires. Two young men were gunned down in the middle of the night on the steps of one building about a year ago, but by then Terina’s surroundings had become so chaotic that the noise didn’t even wake her.

I began visiting Terina at her apartment complex in the fall of 2010, and I, too, can attest to the horror of its current condition, and how quickly it became that way. Once it became clear that nobody with any power was interested in the fate of this little block on Whittier, things went to hell fast. But the fact is, this type of spiraling neglect is replicated all over the city. In fact, in many parts of the city, this is simply everyday life.

Despite the positive things happening along the Woodward corridor in the city’s center and the emergence of a nascent tech scene, Detroit is also under the watch of an emergency financial manager, a supposedly last-ditch step to right the ship before Detroit becomes the first city of its size to declare bankruptcy. The murder rate in 2012 was the highest since the ultra-violent era a generation ago, when crack swept through and decimated the city.

In 2012, fire stations were revealed on the evening news to be seeped in raw sewage leaking from the pipes in bathrooms where firefighters were forced by shrinking municipal budgets to buy their own toilet paper. Streetlights are out in large swaths of the city, the buses are never on time (and are the settings for sometimes fatal fights), and the schools are among the lowest-performing in the state.

So, whose Detroit is the “real” Detroit, mine or Terina’s? How will we decide what course the city should take when it seems like Detroit is actually two separate cities? Is there any other city in the nation where a toxic stew of race, power, and provincialism does so much to impede growth, even as it’s so clearly in the interests of everyone involved to work together? Is Detroit doomed, or is Detroit shaping up to be the blueprint for what a truly progressive post-industrial American city can look like?

Checking in on the side of optimism are a pair of sprawling initiatives launched this year: Detroit Future City and Opportunity Detroit.

Detroit Future City’s Strategic Framework Plan is the culmination of two years of outreach, information gathering, and analysis by the city planners at Detroit Works. It’s a 50-year roadmap to Detroit’s turnaround, and its suggestions are as comprehensive as they are far-reaching.

Less all-encompassing but just as forward-looking is the Opportunity Detroit initiative announced last week. Led by Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, the Downtown Detroit Partnership, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, Opportunity Detroit is a “visionary placemaking and retail plan for Detroit’s urban core.”

Whether you count yourself as an optimist or a pessimist about Detroit’s future, what most experts agree is that a healthy Michigan—some would even argue a healthy America—depends on a healthy Detroit. Detroit is an iconic city, once one of the wealthiest, most full-of-promise places in the free world, now struggling to survive. People have strong feelings about Detroit, whether for or against, but everyone seems to be waiting to see how we chart our course for the next generation and beyond.

Orchards, Ponds, and Housing Swaps: Detroit Future City

Detroit Future City’s Strategic Framework document is 345 pages of maps, graphs, charts, statistics, and well-informed suggestions for what a healthy Detroit could look like and how we might go about getting there. Some of the highlights include focusing investment on seven corridors where job creation is already happening by emphasizing entrepreneurship and digital, creative, and “eds and meds” job growth. There’s also an emphasis on improving public transportation, including the creation of a high-speed bus line; turning vacant land into forests, orchards, and ponds meant to keep air and water clean; creating dense, walkable neighborhoods; removing roadblocks to getting business licenses from the city; repurposing vacant land as a tool for neighborhood stabilization; a house-for-house swap program meant to shift the population out of vacant neighborhoods to those more densely populated; and mixing art and industry in “Live+Make” neighborhoods in functionally obsolete areas of Detroit.

The framework document is divided into chapters that take a deep dive into the topics of economic growth, neighborhoods, city systems, land use, public land, and civic engagement. The framework is the product of “30,000 conversations, over 70,000 survey responses and comments from participants, and countless hours spent dissecting and examining critical data about Detroit.”

One can read the entire Detroit Future City document online in English, Arabic, Spanish, or more than a dozen other languages, or walk in to the Detroit Works office in Eastern Market and view the Detroit Future City exhibition. There’s even a toll-free number (1-800-234-7184) people can call for more information on the Detroit Future City plan.

Detroit Works itself is not technically a city office, though it considers city government a major stakeholder in the project. The final Detroit Future City document is an offshoot from the 2010 “rightsizing” effort attempted by Mayor Dave Bing that outraged Detroit residents, particularly those living in neighborhoods targeted for resettlement. Detroit Works split from the city’s department of planning and went on to produce the framework plan.

Dan Pitera, co-leader of civic engagement for Detroit Works’ office of long-term planning and a professor at University of Detroit-Mercy, says now that the information-gathering and analysis portion of the Detroit Future City project is over, the next task is trying to define the tactics of engagement necessary to unpack it.

When the framework document was released in early January, the Kresge Foundation immediately pledged $150 million in existing grants for work that furthers any of the Detroit Future City objectives. “It’s not new money, and that’s a good thing,” Pitera says. “If Kresge would have put out a large sum, other foundations might not have aligned. It’s not about creating new money, but aligning in a new way.”

Pitera also wants to keep community skepticism that one community partner’s agenda will receive priority over another to a minimum because his office spent so much time building relationships and engaging with a variety of city residents. For instance, there was a “roaming table” set up on random street corners or places like the Rosa Parks Transit Center downtown where Detroit Works staffers would hold one-on-one city planning conversations with whoever sat down and wanted to talk. To appeal to younger people, gaming and social networks were incorporated into the information-gathering process. Telephone town halls were held to appeal to those age 75 and older.

Pitera says the data shows the exhaustively inclusive process paid off: 14 percent of respondents ended up being under age 17, an “unheard of” number; a good thing since they’re the ones who are more likely to still be living here in 50 years. More than 20 percent were in the age 18 to 35 demographic, and 61 percent were female.

Detroit Works hosted meetings, but it also made an effort to go out and attend existing meetings held by block clubs, churches, and other community organizations. Detroit Works made itself part of the agenda, Pitera points out, and had three mandates: To be as transparent as possible, to be accountable, and to interrupt people’s lives as little as possible by going to them. The work was conducted much like a political campaign in terms of the amount of “shoe leather” expended and the effort to canvass every corner and demographic in the city.

The most surprising thing to Pitera about the whole thing was how enthusiastically people responded in a place that has already been “planned to death,” though often with hiccups along the way that eventually derail the planning. “To see people willing to engage and still be hopeful and excited drove our passion forward,” he adds. “A lot of the work was taking neighborhood-level engagement to a city-wide level, where the scale of the city can be paralyzing.”

Since so many of the Detroit Future City action items will require city participation and, often times, significant policy changes, Pitera says the Detroit Works staff held monthly roundtable discussions with government agencies. Detroit’s city government has the reputation of being a bloated, overly bureaucratic monolith, but he says that’s not entirely true.

“It’s not the folks in government who don’t want [reforms], but the systems in place that prevent it, particularly when it comes to land use,” Pitera notes. “There’s lots of criticism of our city government, so no plan should hinge on any one entity, including government—that’s really unsustainable.”

Marja Winters, deputy director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development, says that when her office first began meeting with Detroit Works there were a few surprises, but along the way the framework’s findings “validated points we felt but couldn’t quantify.”

One such point was whether it was more important to create jobs within the city of Detroit, or increase access to other places in the region where there were already more jobs. “The community overwhelmingly said it’s very important to have jobs within the city limits,” Winters explains. “Now it’s not just us who thinks that, the community does too. That was an ‘a-ha’ moment.”

Winters says work is already underway internally to amend zoning documents, but she points out that any official changes to zoning ordinances will have to be approved by city council, which is always a dicey prospect in the highly charged political atmosphere of today’s Detroit.

“It’s good that we have the momentum of the plan being done,” Winters adds. “Along the way, there are things that can be implemented now through pilot projects. It would be to the benefit of the city and state to work within the confines of the [framework] document. More good can come from going down this path than not, and I think the state sees the value of this work.”

According to the framework document, what’s key to the city’s future is focusing support to three or four strong core clusters of business—digital tech, eds and meds, design, and manufacturing—instead of relying on one industry.

“We disagree with the idea that industry will be gone,” Pitera says. “It will be present, but in a different form. It can be a clean and green industry making solar cells for cars, or a food and beverage development industry. Think of Eastern Market as a hub for the entire state, and that’s where urban agriculture fits in—processing, packaging, all of that. That’s what industry means. It’s not just things that relate to building cars— these buildings can be repurposed for other things.”

Also, in addition to the traditional downtown-Midtown-Corktown axis of development, Pitera says there’s an untapped opportunity in the corridor of northwest Detroit that includes Marygrove College, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and Sinai Grace Hospital. “If they coordinate and buy together, that will spur housing and retail development,” he says.

Housing and retail development is exactly what’s planned for the Opportunity Detroit project announced by Rock Ventures last week. Building on what Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures founder Dan Gilbert has already done downtown—purchasing 22 buildings with a total of 3 million square feet of commercial real estate and investing nearly $1 billion in the city’s commercial core since 2010—Opportunity Detroit envisions creating six distinct destinations that will draw visitors to the city.

And the amenities planned for those destinations are exciting: a beer garden and temporary basketball court for pick-up games and tournaments in Campus Martius; art installations, movie screenings, and concerts in Capitol Park; and new retail and office tenants along the Woodward corridor.

“Detroit stakeholders need to know this vision is real,” Gilbert said in a press release. “It is a wildly exciting, incredibly well-thought out plan that will be activated immediately. Residents, office workers and visitors will experience a dramatically different Detroit in two years. We are committed to impacting the outcome and we are relentless in getting every Detroiter to join us in this campaign.”

No Detroiter Left Behind

Every Detroiter, even my friend Terina Davis? She hasn’t set foot in downtown in years, thanks to the fact that she doesn’t drive and has a bad back, a bad heart, and bad eyes. What does she think of what Opportunity Detroit has planned downtown? How does she feel about Detroit Future City’s idea of turning vacant land close to her neighborhood into ponds and forests?

“If they’re building something downtown, does that mean extra taxes?” she asks. “They’re trying to bring people back, but if they don’t have good transportation, how are they going to get there? And the police? Fuck it,” she says with a dismissive wave, reflecting the cynicism many residents feel about the department and its ability to keep people safe.

Seventeen years ago, Terina’s block held seven apartment buildings that were neat, clean, and full of tenants. Then, suddenly a few years ago, when something went wrong, the landlord stopped fixing it. The streetlights went out three years ago. Families with three or four kids began moving into one-bedroom apartments. As the buildings became noisey and crowded, those who objected moved out.

Since it seemed clear that the landlord wasn’t paying attention, squatters began moving in “and messed up everything,” she says, which drove more paying tenants out. The landlord came back and removed all the washers and dryers from the buildings. Scrappers came through after and took the radiators and the rest of the appliances. Soon, one building after another was taken over by drug dealers. During a police raid, a fire broke out that destroyed one building almost completely.

Now, there is only one habitable building left on Terina’s block where people pay rent. In another building, two former tenants-turned-squatters are living with an illegal electric hook-up but likely no running water, since one of the men showers at Terina’s apartment on the weekends. To keep other squatters out, they changed the locks on the front and back doors.

The rest of the buildings are utterly gutted—windows smashed out, trash piled everywhere, insulation and garbage billowing out of burned out hulks. Women and children avoid walking past them for fear of getting snatched and taken inside. If the rest of Terina’s neighborhood goes the way of her block, she could be looking at a city-sponsored relocation package in a few years.

“It’s downright disgusting,” she says of the current state of Detroit. “People don’t care. They won’t even give you a smile.”

But in the future Detroit imagined by the Detroit Works planning document, people do care. In fact, in that city, someone has built a thriving small business deconstructing blighted housing like the buildings in Terina’s crumbling apartment complex. The streetlights are back on, and you don’t wait an hour for a bus that takes you around the corner to the bank. I ask Terina to imagine it, and she does, hesitantly, and agrees that if it could ever be achieved, it would be amazing—like the Detroit of her youth.

Keeping people like Terina engaged is a major focus of Detroit Future City going forward. “We can never rest on our laurels,” Pitera acknowledges. “If we stop and say, ‘Now we don’t have to work,’ that’s our first mistake. I’m feeling more nervous about this since the plan was released because I want to make sure engagement continues to implementation, and make sure action occurs.”

Pitera says the plan will move forward by collaborating with and leveraging the resources of the 200 organizations that are stakeholders in the project, including corporations and foundations with real money to invest. “We’re convinced that if we don’t ignore the civic structure we built in the process and we let that become the infrastructure to implementation—that’s sustainable.”

Pitera believes that once people see good things happening, the momentum toward meaningful revitalization will build. The first things implemented will be small, but in five years, he predicts that things will begin to stabilize and people will see growth.

For a comparison, Pitera looks to Pittsburgh. In the 1980s, there were “little moves” being made toward rejuvenating an old steel town. Now, Pittsburgh is considered a bastion of arts, culture, and economic development. But in Detroit, it’s important to note, the city’s collapse has been much deeper and more widely felt.

“This work is unprecedented at this scale,” Pitera adds. “It’s not a civic engagement plan, or a land use plan, or an economic development plan—it’s all of that. I’ve been asked to speak all over the U.S., and I’ve met with people from Germany, Thailand, Japan, and Russia, and all of them are interested in this work for different reasons. We can be a premier example for people to follow. We say it’s a 50-year plan, but you don’t have to wait 50 years to get excited about the plan.”

Read the original article HERE 

District of Hope Northeast Detroit Fights for Respect

by Rochelle Riley
04.07.13

Detroit Future City team member Dan Kinkead spoke with the Detroit Free Press Columnist Rochelle Riley for her column about City Council District #3.  In this excerpt he talks about the potential of Coleman A. Young International Airport.

“We need to rethink the airport,” said Dan Kinkead, a design principal at Hamilton Anderson who is a consultant on Detroit Future City, the massive strategic project to help Detroiters transform their neighborhoods. “We tend to believe there’s an opportunity here for expansion. The airport may improve District 3′s relationships in the industrial core that includes Hamtramck and Poletown and up the Van Dyke corridor toward Macomb County. There is a lot of opportunity for regional growth.”

Read the entire article HERE

Trees to Boost Detroit’s Revival

by David Runk
04.06.13

Detroit Future City team member James Fidler talked with the Associated Press about the work of Greening of Detroit and how they can serve as a model for how to move forward with making Detroit’s environment better.

“James Fidler, a planner with Hamilton Anderson Associates involved in Detroit Future City, said groups like The Greening of Detroit are well-positioned to help make some of the projects detailed in the plan happen

Those include storm water management, tree planting along highways to dampen the effects of vehicle exhaust and buffer areas around industrial zones, he said.

“The project is so grand in scope that you have to have all of those different sectors really unified, working toward a common vision,” Fidler said.

Read the entire article HERE

Detroit Future City details five key elements of change: economic growth, land use, city systems, neighborhoods and land/building assets. Kyle Polk, ICIC Research Practice Manager and consultant on Detroit Future City, will take a deep dive into the economic growth element.

In this webinar, you will learn:

The four key economic growth pillars that offer the most promise for job and business growth—and how Detroit plans to align these cluster strategies

How Detroit will use place-based strategies to create core investment in employment corridors

Ways that the city can transform its land into an economic asset through the use of tools like land banking and master-planned industrial hubs

Lessons from the integrated planning process that can be applied in cities nationwide

Date: Wednesday, April 17th from 2:00-3:30 p.m. ET

Cost: Free!

Click HERE  to Register