 Good afternoon everyone. Appreciate you braving this tent to join us to have a conversation about the revitalization of the city of Detroit. I'm Benjamin Kennedy. I'm a senior program officer at the Kresge Foundation. Before I get into the particulars of our conversation today, I'm just going to tell you a little bit of why I'm up here moderating this panel. The Kresge Foundation is a large national foundation. We do work in cities all over the country and are committed to expanding opportunities in America cities. We call Detroit our hometown. It's been our hometown for almost 90 years. We are deeply committed to the city and we frankly think it's some of the most innovative and creative work being done in community development in this country right now. I'm fortunate to have three of those innovative creative folks here with me today to maybe give you a bit of a glimpse as best as we can in just an hour into what's going on on the ground in Detroit. You know my sense sort of traveling the country talking to people about about Detroit is that people sort of are familiar with two broad well known narratives. One is the Detroit is dead narrative right so it's just a you know series of disasters culminating in this bankruptcy which is the final nail in the coffin well worn you know hackneyed narrative. The other is a very positive narrative but it's a sort of silver bullet booster narrative that some billionaire foundation or some other institution is going to single-handedly change and save Detroit. You know there are elements of truth in both of these narratives you know but my sense is that actually what's going on in the ground is far more complex really far more interesting far more dynamic than those two narratives would suggest. So with that little bit of preamble the way we're going to we're going to go today here is we're going to I'm going to ask each of each of the panelists just to introduce themselves and describe a little bit about what they do what their organizations do in the context of Detroit's revitalization and then we're just going to cycle through you know three big categories of discussion. The first is kind of dimensioning the challenges in Detroit dimensioning the problems. The second is talking a bit about the solutions and some of the innovative things going on on on the ground in Detroit and then third we're going to we're going to kind of think a little bit about the future of the city and and try to look forward a bit to to what the city might look like coming out of bankruptcy and over over the long term and then of course we'll make make sure there's plenty of time about 15 minutes at the end of this session so that all of you can join the conversation and ask questions. So with that I will begin at the end with Scott Sporty so Scott want to introduce yourself please. Hello I'm Scott Sporty with NCB Capital Impact we are a large national community development financial institution based in Washington DC with a major office here in Oakland and until recently have really not focused a lot on place but instead have focused most of our lending efforts on specific market sectors like healthcare education affordable housing and Detroit presented us with an opportunity actually an invitation to join the other people on this panel as really our first major significant place-based economic development initiative and we've been working on that now for three years we're moving into the second phase we're really excited and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we move into the panel. Hi I'm Leslie Smith I'm the president and CEO of Tech Town which is an accelerator located in midtown Detroit which focuses on two pretty interesting things one is technology-based economic development movement of intellectual property to market which is not terribly innovative in and of itself but the second is really the movement of acceleration strategies into the creation of place and place-based businesses in the city of Detroit and really bringing the base economy that occurs with the creation of new tech startups with the creation of new place-based startups together to start to create an expanded economy which offers opportunities for employment but also products and services that start to create a more vibrant city in and around the midtown and broader neighborhoods. Sue? My name is Sue Mosey and I'm the president of Midtown Detroit Inc and we're a community development and planning agency for the neighborhood that's just north of the downtown that houses our major museums our university our two major health care centers a lot of big social agencies your typical kind of you know civic corridor the work that we do is really revolves around a lot of real estate and planning activities small business development activities infrastructure sort of community building a large arts programming so we do a lot of pretty broad set of work around place and really try and look at all the different supports and programs that need to be there to sort of move the whole neighborhood revitalization agenda forward in the neighborhood and we work closely with all three of the other panelists here with Scott on deploying capital that's raised nationally and locally for a lot of the efforts in the neighborhood and Leslie as our TA provider for a lot of our small business development and Kresge as a funder and also a partner in some other national initiatives that's great so thanks all so let's just begin again with I'm mentioning the challenges of Detroit right this is a set of complex and messy and interconnected problems and we could probably tick off quite a number but I'm going to ask each of our panelists just to to provide two or three of the the really big hairy challenges facing Detroit right now so Sue why don't we start with you and tell us what you think two or three big challenges are right now well I mean I've been working doing community development work in Detroit for about 35 years and 26 in this particular geography so I have a long horizon I think over you know what's really happened in terms of the infrastructure there and you know I still feel that the biggest challenge has been for Detroit is really the rise of a lot of really strong leadership in a wide variety of the sectors so you know starting with our mayoral leadership for many many decades and then that impacts all of your senior governmental leadership and then eventually has an impact on your local neighborhood leadership because the system in Detroit has struggled for many many years I think due to a lot of lack of capacity to really take advantage of the remarkable opportunities that exist in Detroit I mean Detroit's got a gorgeous river it's got a beautiful Olmstead Park some of the best architecture in its downtown high quality you know legacy arts and cultural you know major urban universities Carnegie one research facilities I mean it's got a huge amount of iconic infrastructure there but it's not been leveraged in the face of a lot of the loss of the job space over the years to reposition it in other strong employment areas so that's been a huge challenge I think you'll probably hear you probably hear a lot or read a lot about how much of the work in Detroit now has really fallen to many of the other sectors to really move forward whether it is philanthropy or local leadership but it's very very difficult to scale redevelopment in a large city without that you know intrinsic infrastructure being in place so that's one challenge you know we continue to challenge be challenged I think in terms of the capital stacking Scott will talk more about that but because we don't yet have values built even in the center city which is by far the the area of the city that's experiencing a really robust comeback at this point benefiting from a lot of national trends like all the rest of the cities are but we aren't quite to the point where we built the values to where a lot of financial subsidy is not required and so you know that continues to be a challenge I think for all of us doing work in the city is just simply having the proper level of resources for people to be successful whether you're a small business operator or you're a housing developer great want me to go next so I think Sue makes a really great point about this political leadership and decades of kind of a lack of courage and bold thinking around that leadership which you know clearly has some kind of macro orientation to some of the problems we have on a really kind of tactical level though that affects the work we do on a day-to-day basis and and while some of the story in the narrative about Detroit is you know an open landscape and is a great place to create make your own opportunities while that's true there is this kind of wall that we ultimately hit when the infrastructure fails to meet the needs of the new business owners and the development that is occurring or the residential folks that have decided to move in and dig in and our failure to address this challenge long term I think will continue to limit us and our ability to really exploit this interest and enthusiasm and in the opportunities that exist in Detroit by the kind of hard-cold reality of those limits right and some of those limits are about safety security lighting the basic kind of you know public infrastructure that many of us take for granted that has to be solved if we're going to ultimately thrive in this organic development opportunity second which is an interesting thing to think about is something I've been dealing with over the last five or six years in Detroit was just a restoration of the entrepreneurial culture and a willingness to take risk and thrive in that risk environment it would seem a natural place for us to live and be given our automotive roots and the fact that Henry Ford and others kind of created their entire careers and an industry upon which we thrived for a hundred years but moving people to a place of willingness to invest in that entrepreneurial culture and move themselves to a point of risk after having lost those those very stable employment circumstances that they enjoyed for so many decades has been a real challenge for us and and as we exit kind of a retraining of an entire generation of people we're starting to see the intergenerational opportunities where the young folks that are coming into the city are new are engaging with the folks that have been there a longer amount of time and you're starting to see a new developing belief in that in that adventure and opportunity is kind of economic replacement and so those two things I think have been our biggest challenges and opportunities frankly. Our challenges are really the challenges of capital and when when we came into Detroit about three and a half years ago that was a time when when banks weren't lending at all and we came in and worked with an existing pipeline of transactions that had been stuck for 12, 24, 36 months because banks had committed to them and pulled out or they were unable to assemble the capital and it is the challenge of having to raise 18 levels of structured debt in order to get a single project done and that's hugely inefficient things get done but it takes forever and it takes too much brain power on the part of people like Sue and and Benji and Leslie here and we came in to try to bring the scale that we had to unstick stuck transactions so now a few years later we came in with the tools that weren't quite right for what we wanted to accomplish we came in with a capital from traditional financial institutions it wasn't priced well it had a fairly short term and we're trying to overcome a challenge that you wouldn't imagine is a challenge but actually where we're we're basing most of our work there's about a 93 occupancy rate in rental housing and if you pick up Time Magazine or any other traditional media piece about Detroit no one is going to show you a photograph of a neighborhood in Detroit that has 93 occupancy they'll show you the train station or one of those neighborhoods where grass is growing in the middle of an abandoned house but unfortunately that image of Detroit is the image that investors see so when you try to bring an outside investor into Detroit site unseen essentially their image of what they're investing in is the prairie and instead we're bringing them into a vibrant community we're trying to expand in concentric circles out from the place where people want to be so the challenge we have right now is really the one that the cost of a project exceeds the value that an appraiser is going to give to it and that's just sort of the economic fact despite the fact that that a building has 100 occupancy it has a waiting list 50 people long it's still being appraised at a 1995 valuation and you just can't finance a project that way and hence the need for 18 different sources of capital that made it work so what we're doing right now is sort of a second iteration bringing in investors that aren't afraid to bring capital into Detroit adding in a layer of subordinate debt that's important and some subsidized capital but it's only two layers and that should we hope be the single solution to many of these projects and and we hope to build from there to help projects happen more consistently and more predictably and make better use of the subsidy that's available that's great thanks you know what I think is interesting and I promise you we didn't we didn't I didn't prep them earlier but I think what's really interesting about that sort of list that that's just been compiled as you you have actually a set of issue areas or problems that are that easily translate to other sort of revitalization efforts across the country and elsewhere actually in the world you've got the issue of of sort of weak public sector leadership or inconsistent public sector leadership you've got private market dislocations and other kind of basic market failures you've got limited infrastructure city services etc so you've got essentially a weak enabling environment a mono economy and the sort of inverse of that is a lack of sort of economic diversification and new venture creation just lack of capital and lack of the right type of capital and then the last piece that I think Scott was talking about is sort of the delta between perceived risk and actual risk that's sort of working against bringing new capital and new players to the city I think that's a fantastic list I think the obvious question is well what about the thing everyone's reading about right now is the bankruptcy not a big challenge so Sue is the bankruptcy a big challenge or not well I think most people in Detroit quite frankly view it as an opportunity more than a challenge I mean Detroit's been dealing with this you know sort of accounting tricks every year for you know decades and decades I mean everyone's known sooner or later the population loss the tax break loss the strategy of just raising taxes on all the survivors that have stayed the businesses and the and the folks the really dedicated folks that have stayed and want to be part of the rebuild is not a sustainable economic frame for coming back and taking care of the basic city services needed in Detroit so most people feel like you know now's an opportunity let's figure it out let's start over with a with a new kind of economic frame for the city and how it can deliver the services to its citizens that they deserve and they're paying for through their taxes and for those of us who I think do are doing the revitalization work it's also a good thing because again for those of us who are working to get businesses started get residents moving in we also need to be able to give them insurances that their investments in the city are going to be you know ones that you know they can rely on longer term so it really takes away a lot of the uncertainties and concerns I think going forward provided that the new that between the emergency manager is a short term and the next mayor which will have a new mayor in January so taking you know you know assuming that we're going to get folks in that are going to really be able to leverage this time and this opportunity for this full restructure and relook in especially as it relates to the new city plan that was done which is a citywide plan that pretty much everyone now has signed on to so there's a roadmap so you combine a new roadmap that's based on a lot of data and and community engagement and you combine it with a full restructure and new leadership I mean there's potential there that this could be a game changer for Detroit going forward Leslie what about you I mean you you interact with a lot of entrepreneurs are they do they even think about the notion of Detroit in bankruptcy versus Detroit not in bankruptcy it's an interesting question and I hadn't even paid attention to the fact that none of us listed it until you highlighted it because I feel like it's almost everybody else's news even though it's about us because we've been living in that kind of pre bankruptcy space for so long with you know a deficit public sector that we've all kind of worked to create solutions around and for us as well as our client base I think they see the opportunity is having a new partner in the game so a third partner beyond you know the private and philanthropic partners that already exist as a real upside and so I think we've learned to live in the deficit situation and adding a functioning public sector can only be perceived as adding new value and I think that's how entrepreneurs see it that's how we certainly see it I look at this as an opportunity to have a productive vibrant partner in the work that today doesn't exist Scott you guys aren't even based in Detroit surely some surely someone on your board said Detroit thank you more than one the challenge is does come from mostly from outsiders and it's attempting to to raise capital from outside investors who probably somewhere in their corporate level are standing to lose money on Detroit back bonds and again they're coming back to an image where they believe that the city functioned in some way before that actually made a difference to the deals that we do and it doesn't hasn't and we hope we see this as an opportunity for the city to truly become functional again and actually contribute to the public you sue for example she installs their own street lights that what kind of city requires a community development corporation to install their own infrastructure to make their neighborhood work so let's pick up on the image issue because I think this is something that you've been working on for a while with in midtown so talk a little bit about you know going back even 10 15 years sort of the the the overnight success the overnight 15-year success that is that is midtown Detroit and how it's shifted the image of a place yeah I mean I think both midtown and downtown have unique revitalization efforts that have been at work for quite some time they've been sustained over quite a long period by organizations that have had some resources and capacity going forward so the but you know clearly you know 20 25 years ago you know people no one was really looking seriously as making much of an investment in Detroit I mean whether it was out in the neighborhoods or it was really in the downtown there were of course your few really committed corporate folks that came from Detroit and so there were always going to be a few of those but probably 10 maybe 10 years ago things started you know before the bust things started really picking up a lot of speed as they did many other markets but in Detroit as well around people really beginning to view that Detroit was finally benefiting from national trends and younger demographics and people who are not like caught into that you know same old frame where you know we're really proud that you know nobody in my family has been down to the city of Detroit for 30 years you know I mean that's what you used to hear in the suburban metro districts like over and over again today you're much more frequently going to hear well you know I hear there's some really good stuff going on there you know we went down there and explored that new river walk you know we went down there and participated and went shopping at all these little boutiques and restaurants that have opened up so it really has changed a lot of the folks image that that reside in the in the suburban districts and it's taken a long long time and they you know quite frankly they had to see physical visible evidence that things were changing you know for a lot of times you know Detroit would just be out there with I mean we were always about the Silver Bullet project you know it was always about the rent center the new arena or whatever you know people just don't buy that and they understand that that's not necessarily giving them the package of urban lifestyle they're looking for but today you can come down to that corridor and there's enough of it now that's there it's not fully developed but there's enough that's there that people now can see where the city core is going and everybody has jumping back on board now so Detroit's a very iconic city and many many people have come through Detroit or come from Detroit and there's a lot of allegiance even nationally to that city so you know you give people an opening and you can demonstrate that you know Detroit's getting its act together and it's really redeveloping appropriately it's amazing how quickly media and lots of folks in the surrounding areas and throughout the state have really turned you know I'm really talking a whole different conversation about Detroit today give us an example well I mean I'd say there's all sorts of people that I talk to all the time that come into Detroit you know I heard about I was reading an article I mean constantly I was reading an article about all this really interesting work being done in Detroit I have relatives that live in Detroit I mean this is like classic I've relatives to live in Bloomfield Hills which is a very affluent you know neighborhood in Detroit it always goes that way and I want to you know because of everything I'm reading and it sounds like there's really good values and interesting work I want to come there and make an investment I mean I cannot tell you how many of those emails I get I get a week and these are people who actually do come there and look for investment opportunities and many have invested so the you know the narrative is the first door that has to the first thing that has to change he even get these people in the you know in the door to to really searching for the right opportunity but there's lots of those stories out there every day so these people land they come knocking on your door they say Sumozi sent me over here and they said you're going to help me start a business in Detroit so give give us some examples of folks you've worked with particularly dynamic sort of new entrepreneurs in Detroit yeah I mean I think what's really cool about Detroit at this moment in time is that over the course of that 15-year overnight success we've built an image of opportunity for those who think outside of the box so a city that once was so insular and siloed in its very behaviors is now perceived as this really complex and dynamic opportunity and so the folks that we see at tech town who are interested in starting businesses in the city of Detroit are not your average entrepreneurs right and so they want to start something that's new and interesting and different and really start to create a place that is expressive of their interests and and those are primarily a younger group of folks that are moving into this experience which is good in terms of the residential stock and the and the commercial opportunity it also creates enhanced walkability and and things that we all know are good I think Sue makes a really good point about the the perspective of time though because I do think that as we start to imagine the impacts that have occurred in the downtown and midtown beyond the downtown and midtown which is where many of these entrepreneurs are starting to think they'd like to go how can I move out into one of the neighborhoods of the city we have to really think about solving some of the problems that that Sue and others have solved in the midtown and downtown that are not yet solved in the neighborhoods and the beautiful opportunity for us I think is that we've now modeled tested and tried a whole number of innovative solutions that we're working together now to expand out into the neighborhoods and really targeted ways which will allow you know folks at tech town to move new entrepreneurs with intention into safe places not only within the midtown but also starting beyond the midtown because they think one of the knocks that you'll regularly hear and if we allow you to ask the question you may ask is you know what about the rest of the city and and I will say that this roadmap that Sue talked about the Detroit Future Cities roadmap and and how we're going to expand that healing beyond the corridor is very real and prudent for all of us and the lessons we've learned will help us do that the caution is that this took 25 years right and so this is a long-term engagement that we're all committing to and entrepreneurs get that they're kind of ripe and ready for that experience which is why I think this this startup culture is really good as we expand our vision and version and Leslie you all at tech town have rolled out a really cool program that seeks to do exactly this begin to migrate some of this great entrepreneurial energy from the core out to neighborhoods can you talk just a little bit about about that program sure I mean I think it became real clear to us when we had kind of repeated visitors to tech town say you know this is all great and we love the work that you're doing here what how can we move this into the neighborhoods how can we translate this into the neighborhoods because remember I mean 70 percent of the jobs that are occupied in the city of Detroit are still occupied by people from outside of the Detroit the small business ownership is still you know less than 10 percent african-american owned in a city that's 83 percent african-american and so there's a real you know economic imbalance that exists there and a failure to kind of address social equity and small business and enterprise creation and so our program was really designed to take the acceleration and development strategies that have worked so well in the midtown and downtown into neighborhoods with a couple kind of key elements at play one we don't show up and say we have the answers for you we actually ask you know what does a healthy vibrant neighborhood look like to you and engage with the neighborhood to ask those questions and then bring to bear the suite of tools and resources that we've developed in partnership with dozens of organizations across the city and region to start to build that version of community for them and so you know Sue and I are currently working in in a very large neighborhood called Breitmore in Detroit which has suffered disinvestment for 60 years and is really trying to figure out how do we make a comeback and the answer is you can make a comeback but we have to do it in very targeted and thoughtful intentional ways and the process will be long and if we're if you're honest and bring that conversation to the neighborhoods with integrity I think you get really productive partners that exist within the neighborhood who are who are thoughtful and engaged in the process one of the challenges that exists in the city is this whole suburb city thing that has occurred over the course of the last you know 100 years and so Bloomfield Hills really isn't the city of Detroit and there's some very kind of strong negative feelings about that the work that we get to do in the neighborhood starts to heal that negativity and bring economic opportunity to the neighborhoods and that's just really important if we're going to heal on the whole you know what one thing that we always say at the Kresge Foundation when we think about sort of strengthening this the city vis-a-vis the the suburbs is that you really need to focus on the city itself and so we pretty intentionally invest within the city limits at Kresge but as we sort of you know evolve our strategy and our thinking about how we remake and reconstitute a place we begin to realize that you know it can't just be about working in the corridor aiming at individuals of a certain demographic that's certainly where you got to start but then you have to sort of translate and migrate to new geographies and also to new demographics right and you got to have families you got to aim at kids and so Scott you've you've been involved in some of that work in terms of financing charter schools and the like so you know what's what's your sense of the possibilities that exist with respect to creating a Detroit that serves families well not just individuals well I think you point to a really key challenge that we have right now because this cannot be an economic development strategy built on coffee bars and yoga it has to be it has to be more about making sure that families want to come to Detroit and stay in Detroit and it's it's easy when you're single recently married to find yourself a cool place live in the city for a while enjoy the amenities of the city and then move out to suburbia at some point because you you're concerned about schools or safety or the other issues and that's really the key issue that we need to be focused on here and I think there is some opportunity as we're seeing high performing mostly charter schools and some magnet schools start to attract kids from outside of the city and within the city it's really built along a nice corridor of area good bringing a number of students into this part of Detroit it's the beginnings of the kind of amenity that people are expecting for their own kids and a lot of times what we're seeing is people who live in the suburbs who work in downtown Detroit they're bringing their kids into a school in Detroit because it's close to the parents office and we hope at some point that will help bring the parents to actually live in the city once they get a little comfortable with the concept that there actually are really nice places to live in the city of Detroit but I think we really do need to focus on making them feel safe making them feel like there are many there are options there's healthcare nearby there's a workforce housing readily available this this cannot be about attracting the upper income highly mobile individual because it's not going to last it won't stick so you know see the the interesting thing is that midtown and even to some extent increasingly downtown our central business district are safe and in some ways provide the services that families need and certainly midtown has a ton of schools and early childhood system etc but you know historically people just don't associate midtown and downtown with residential family living you're working to change that I think but talk a little bit about how you get people to sort of see a different sort of mix of uses in the in the core you know relative to what what they've experienced in the past well I think we're trying to do a lot of different things because it is very frustrating sometimes when you do have really high performing schools in your area but they're still not acting as an attractor for people it's like they're sort of discounted because they're in the city and you know anytime you have a really high quality amenity you really want to be able to use it as part of your traction strategy so it is it is one of those areas that I think we continually struggle with trying to leverage appropriately but you know green space public spaces that's a big thing you know our area was not built with you know any kind of real infrastructure much for public spaces very small little park at parks but not anything of scale really and I think that's sort of as an issue that we have to continue to work on for families you know it's becoming a much more bicycle friendly and pedestrian friendly environment clearly that's important for families and I think that has helped us to attract around some of these anchor schools families back to the district we're really seeing some growth there is in some of the workforce housing areas and developments that we have where a lot of those folks are working at the medical complexes or the universities or others other positions and they have kids and they really do want to be able to walk to work and we've also put together a incentive program which is a residential incentive program that's funded for about 10 million dollars by a whole group of funders to incentivize people to move back to the downtown and midtown and some of the adjacent neighborhoods around the core and that's done a tremendous amount in terms of changing I think people's narrative about the city and the opportunities and we've attracted a good number of families back to the neighborhood because a lot of the geography is really close to these big institutions that have really strong security and police forces and you know have the basic amenities in place for families. Let's return to public sector leadership for a moment so you know we talked about a lack of strength in the local sort of civic leadership and public sector leadership in particular but the state and the federal government actually play a key role in Detroit and each of you has interactions with both of those levels of government and different agencies etc so why don't we just actually start with Scott and just go on down the line but how would you imagine the federal government in particular and to some extent the state government to the degree you have a lot of interactions with them how would you imagine them playing differently at this moment in time in in Detroit or what do you think they're doing right or maybe not getting right? I think there are a couple of answers to that I think one is that people working into Detroit need to change their assumption that because they're in Detroit they're entitled to a greater share or a a share of federal resources they need to show that there's a reason why the federal government needs to invest in the city and I think there have been a lot of proposals that have been very attractive or have have seemed on the face of it to be attractive but they have basically laid out there this is Detroit we deserve it and I think there needs to be a little bit more thoughtfulness a little more scale to sort of back that up and I think that's been one of the challenges in some of the larger federal programs recently and another challenge is the apparent reality that a lot of federal funds or you can go through the city of Detroit and they seem to just sort of disappear or get stuck there so the city itself or government itself needs to be able to create some sort of infrastructure to make sure the money gets to where it was intended to go in the first place because sooner or later the federal government is just going to give up sending that kind of resource this way but what do you think Leslie yeah I would say from the fed's perspective that's certainly been our experience that they a perceive a sense of entitlement in a lot of the proposals they get from the city especially in the kind of innovation economy stuff we've gotten that feedback repeatedly we've been successful in getting some capital deployed in our district through HUD and that's been really productive for us our stronger relationship has been with the state who has repeatedly increasingly stepped up and filled the gap that the city has laughed in terms of funding and support for economic development either in the in the place-based economy or the innovation-based economy and the city has has failed to kind of participate in in that work at least productively and the the state has always kind of been there I think the concern and you mentioned a little bit what you know I think of as funder fatigue from the fads if you can't deploy the funds we've given you why should we give you more or if you can't be effective and efficient at that deployment then why should we give you more I think the state really would like to have a partner in that work because they also don't want to be the sole kind of agency on the hook for everything that has to happen in the city and so we see a bit of pushback from the state about wanting to fund entire programs or continue to fund programs that they've funded over a long period of time so I think we have some work to do and convincing them to stay in the game longer philanthropy has filled a lot of those gaps and I know you didn't ask about that specifically but for the grace of philanthropy and filling out the capital stack much of this work if not most of it would not have occurred and so I think you know the the state and the fads have been partners not necessarily always willing and would like to see a reduced role or at least a different role and I think you know new city leadership can help us get there but what's your experience been I think Detroit generally we've had good experience in a couple of the federal areas one would certainly be transportation funds you know tiger grants and all sorts of enhancement grants and I mean those are dollars that flow through the state and the city that you know there's always you know lots of good non-motorized and greenway trails and park developments and there's lots of activity on the ground in those kinds of projects because again those aren't the ones that are dependent necessarily on a market dynamic so that's been I think where we've probably had the most success with with federal funding HUD has been a huge challenge I mean HUD has been in trying to fix the HUD problems in Detroit for the last three years and you know at this point the emergency manager announced that they're going to bring in an outside grants management company to just try to help move the 300 million dollars worth of annual funds that come to Detroit out into all the different program areas that they need to go so for all of us who put projects together who really have gaps that should be filled by a lot of those dollars they have not been accessible to folks in any consistent way for many many years and so that's you know certainly been problematic I agree the state has stepped up in you know trying to strategically partner on the ground around certain areas of play space work and that certainly helps some but you again it's just like you really need a city with a mayor that is going to be effective you need HUD to be effective in your city as a partner as well and we're not doing very well on either of those right now so before we we take questions from the floor let me just ask one more question of each of you so let's just you know look out 10 years look out 20 years and I get actually asked this this question quite a bit so what are you aiming for and I don't care if you talk about your specific kind of corner of the world district or sector or if you talk about the city as a whole but what's the end game here in Detroit what what what are we trying to create 20 years from now Scott we came into Detroit trying to do deals trying to get transactions done get them done as quickly and effectively and efficiently as we could I think right now what we're turning ourselves into seeing is being able to show that we are actually creating a hub of development bringing thousands of people into a part of the city and from there radiating out and with the type of financing that we're assembling the the work that we're doing here that's really focused more on making a change in the neighborhood changing the spirit of the neighborhood and not just about getting the next deal done I see in 10 15 years from now we're going to have a whole different city a whole different situation than we have right now so five years ago I would have answered that question differently and and it would have had a lot more to do with you know a technology based economy and you know all of the hope and promise that exists there today I answer that question by saying the Detroit I imagine 20 years from now has economic economic opportunities for people of all race ethnicity gender and age because I don't see that in all places today in my city and I'd like to see an economically sustainable at least certain you know swaths of the city have sort of an economically sustainable model going whereby people are accessing jobs and also being able to provide the purchasing power attracting and providing some of the residential base back into the city that's necessary for any of the work I think that all of us are trying to do to ever really work long term with a functional scaled city government federal partners because ultimately I think that's what's going to be able to move Detroit from you know the constantly struggling battling on all sides to something that's just going to begin to be able to operate like under a normal set of parameters like most other cities and there's still you know a good decade or two's worth of work to get to that kind of a plateau I think all right well now it's your turn have at us and I would I think we have two microphones and all I would ask is that you just wait till you have a microphone to speak so that we can pick you up on the live feed okay I'm Marisa Jenkins I'm with the cd group and MIT foreign board that was in Detroit recently and there was a group that I met with called the youth city planning group and you mentioned that there's a city plan that everybody is signed off on which is rare so how did that happen in the face of such poor city leadership you want to talk about Detroit future well yeah I can talk a little bit about it so the you know due to really the fact that Detroit had so many different single planning exercises going on around the city and they're really being nothing that was really connecting them or prioritizing where investment should be made or really trying to leverage opportunities or to just really take a look at the huge land mass that Detroit is and trying to figure out a roadmap to you know where can investments and what types given different typologies in different neighborhoods like what makes sense in the neighborhood that clearly isn't economically going to come back but what what sort of interventions could be made in a neighborhood like that that improves don't quality of life for folks that still are going to be there what are you going to do in terms of the corridors the six economic corridors of the city where there is economic still functioning and where there's potential that these corridors have you know job centers along them and how are you going to connect them to the neighborhoods where people who are unemployed are still living and really taking a look at the transit corridor models and before there was a lot of one-off you know like everybody was doing their own thing in the city and there wasn't any way for like a funder like a kresge or even the a HUD to come in and say look we we don't know we want to invest in Detroit I don't know how many times I've heard that we want to invest in Detroit but we don't know where or what or what's going to be impactful or what's going to work so three years were really spent funded by kresge and ford foundation other foundations to really have a huge community citywide engagement program that's why it took so long to make sure this really bubbled up from all these different neighborhoods and sectors to create something that in the end everybody pretty much has signed off on as being this is the plan and when people now are going and looking at asking for funding for different parts pilot projects or infrastructure investments you you better be able to defend in this plan that this really is a investment that makes sense given what everyone's working together to try to achieve in the city so it gives the important frame now that we really have never had there to make more informed decisions and decisions that the community all really rallied around together yeah it's uh i think i'm Detroitfuturecity.org yeah hello i'm james lawson the Kellogg foundation i'm a lifelong resident of Detroit so i have a vested interest in this discussion uh what are some of the specifics the specific efforts to address hidden costs in the city such as insurance rates uh residential property tax utility rates those kind of costs i will say that of course as you may be aware the state came in and took a look at the city assessments and was mortified with what was going on with assessment on residential values and opened up for tons of appeals that are being made right now believe me all sorts of people are going in for appeals again this was really a strategy that the city was employing to just squeeze the the few people that were that were still there and the new people coming in to sort of make up for all this other deficit issues that the city is facing which you know can't ever really work so i think you are going to see some action taken on the state's part working with working with the city assessor's department to rectify some of this property tax problem insurance rates i'm going to be clear are a huge problem huge problem and um we still continue i mean i i have residents owners that call me that tell me stories like you know i have no idea why but my residential insurance rate doubled in one year for no you know no claims no i mean just crazy stuff i mean it's really out of control and that whole insurance issue there has to be some rationale that's eventually brought to that that is just for people considering investing in the detroiter living there is got to be one of the top couple issues for people so there isn't really a good strategy yet on that politicians constantly talk about how critical is to come up with some kind of a strategy to deal with that but it is a really really big issue out there great question okay i think we've got one right here yep hi um lisa lill alone with mango networks a native of michigan so my heart is with you and i'm cheering for detroit i think there's a tremendous opportunity in detroit with the real estate prices being so low when you compare it to a place like san francisco where the rents and the housing and office space i wonder if you could talk a little about how detroit could be part of the made in america i heard a great mpr segment in may or june on uh maybe you can speak to some of the companies that are our startups they're very creative and they can afford to be there and they can manufacture in america in detroit and and they are socially the i wish i could pull up the npr link there was a company it might have been in tech town making clothing the women the women in the neighborhood the mothers could leave for daycare they had daycare there it was a whole it was really it was a fantastic social company as well so maybe you could talk about the new made in america possibilities for detroit so i think that's a beautiful question something we spend a lot of time on and we've had a kind of an organic and authentic outgrowth in the maker spaces and hacker spaces for people who want to make things i mean we're makers we literally build things that's what we do and a return to that is kind of critical to our psyche and so you've seen these kind of early adopters trying to bring that back and what tech town and our partners are trying to do is figure out how do we really formalize that in enterprise creation that goes beyond that kind of hacker movement to creating sustainable businesses and so we're doing that in food processing some kind of small lot food processing you know connecting the urban gardening opportunities to the manufacturing opportunities we're starting to see textile development so clothing being made in the city which is kind of a return to a past capacity and we're also starting to look at some of the opportunities within the automotive industry which sounds a bit like sacrilege but that's where we grew up right and so are there innovations in technology electronics and other component parts that can easily be made in sleeping factories that answer a question that's being asked by local industries so one really interesting fact 600 million dollars of electronic component parts are shipped into Detroit on an annual basis to the automotive companies and we are trying to figure out how do we create that product development within the city such that we're not buying that from somewhere else because we make stuff better than anyone else and so we are starting to really build out the second and third layers of that plan and know that it's critical especially in these neighborhoods because that the economic benefits of manufacturing jobs are exponentially higher than jobs in just about any other industry especially middle class jobs and so when you look at the workforce and connecting that workforce to the asset base manufacturing jobs are really highly productive in terms of the the exponential impact they have on the economy so great question and yes we think about it every day and we've seen this whole question of the low property values as well I mean well you don't have low properties as much in the midtown downtown corridor clearly in the neighborhoods you can pick up fantastic houses for you know an unbelievable amount of money and I mean this has brought in a lot of folks from other cities across the country that just cannot believe that you can buy homes of the quality that you can buy in Detroit in some of these neighborhoods for the pricing and you know lots of stories I mean I have someone who came to work for me who was doing consulting in Detroit never planned to move to Detroit and one day happened to be driving on Boston Boulevard in Detroit saw house he wanted and that was it he moved here overnight called his wife for moving to Detroit they moved in a couple of weeks and that was that I mean so there are a lot of people who these homes and the values are enough to actually bring them to Detroit we're also making nice watches in Detroit they can shine all the watches in Detroit and you know again these are folks coming in that are hiring Detroiters training and hiring Detroiters to make bikes and watches leather products a lot of small batch manufacturing and processing lots of that going on and again you can pick up a warehouse and open your own production facility for like 200,000 in some of these neighborhoods are less so I mean it makes it for a young entrepreneur even for an older one it makes it work if you only have so much capital but you really want to do something that you've always had a passion for and you want to do it in a city that's important to America and you want to help rebuild yeah look I mean the bottom line is Detroit has brand equity that you just can't buy right I mean when you're talking about artisanal manufacturing in particular and you want that association with sort of muscular authentic manufacturing you know Detroit Detroit is your go-to place I'd say San Francisco there's a few other places in the in the country that have that sort of resonance but Detroit certainly has a sort of positional advantage there let's go I think where's the mic now okay right here yep it seems like a lot of these initiatives are focused on bringing people with money back into the city which is obviously an important part of creating a tax base and creating customers for small businesses I was wondering what can be done to address the skills gap of adults who need jobs but are currently excluded from the technology economy and also exposing children to things like computer engineering software programming so that they can participate in the future and gain interest in things that can give them a job in the future that's a great question so how do we how do we include folks in in in the economy that you know we're constructing here and how do we also make sure that we're constructing an economy that is inclusive right that that creates opportunities for a variety of people there's a couple of you know pretty robust program I say on the science and engineering side for youth we have a very large science and math accelerator school in our neighborhood that clearly is all you know about trying to get kids to go on to careers in science and and math and engineering there's also a huge I think now the state of Michigan and Detroit has a gigantic robotics program for high school kids I mean I think what I think that states the largest in the country now with number of teams and I mean so there's a very big again that goes back to that engineering base that maker culture we have in Detroit so I mean there is a lot of work I think going on in city schools around some of that on the youth I think it's a much bigger challenge and much less scalable work is being done for the unemployed and chronically unemployed low skilled population which is the largest bucket of unemployed in Detroit and you know we started a workforce program with Henry Ford Hospital a huge medical system that hires 4,000 people a year and they've now carved out numerous job categories where low skilled folks can get in and then they and then they get them into the programs where they train them up job categories and so clearly in health care that's a pretty established model that they find works and so in our area with two major health care we were at least trying to do that and then you have some of these manufacturers coming in investing a lot in training folks on assembly work and manufacturing kind of work and so there is some of that coming back but it's still next to the numbers of people who are unemployed it's a drop in the bucket really yeah I mean we have some the automation alley who's one of our regional partners does similar training for technology jobs kind of by industry they'll train folks to kind of close that gap and they do it in three to six months so there's proximity to employment it is a huge problem the youth are easier to engage and kind of redeploy and change their modeling and their prospects we're introducing entrepreneurship in the high schools in each of the communities where we work with our SWAT city programming to build a pipeline how we solve the you know generationally unemployed though is a larger kind of societal challenge that I think we're going to spend a couple decades trying to unpack okay one more quick question back here with the mic and one pithy answer and then we're done okay I'll make this fast my name is Angela Barbash I'm with Reconsider I'm actually in Ypsilanti which is a suburb of Detroit we're involved in a local investing movement and to your point about less than 10 percent of the businesses are owned by Detroiters and African-American Detroiters and you know 83 percent of the population are African-American and that skills gap if someone say wants to open a dry cleaner and if they find an SBTDC office to get technical assistance and and if they they stumble upon these resources and then they need the capital what we often hear is that they're just not fundable because they're a lifestyle business but it's those kinds of businesses that will attract you know everybody from the suburbs back in to start the larger businesses because they'll have all the support services so are you seeing innovations in capital sources because the community banks won't touch them the VCs and angels won't touch them we you know our solution is okay well local people have capital in IRAs that want to invest in the dry cleaner and can we make that happen so that's what we're working on but what are you guys seeing in Detroit that maybe we're not seeing yet yeah I mean that's a huge challenge for us because many of the businesses we starter support are exactly those businesses that you're talking about and we've you know come up with some creative solutions Kiva Detroit is extraordinarily active in the micro lending space and is a powerful partner in that work we have three other micro lenders who will work with us directly to understand what fundable means but we're also creating long-term pathways to fundability so we don't suggest that this micro loan is the last step and we make sure that we're building bankable companies at the beginning who are not bankable when we start with them but we hope over the intervening five or seven years they will be in the interim though all of these creative kind of innovation you know platforms around crowdsourcing and micro lending are really answering the questions and you're seeing a whole host of different people getting funding those models but it's working for us the investment that that dry cleaner needs in terms of capital is so small that if you're just creative about 25 to 500 to 5,000 bucks you've just launched a business we have a couple of funds that are established for the corridor a retail fund too actually and they're critical I mean nobody would be funded if they don't fund those higher risk businesses and they're not ones that micro loans will work for they need fifty to three to four hundred thousand dollars to get those businesses going so you know finding capital sources through you know cdfi partners or other kinds of state partnerships for funding I think are going to be critical to getting off the ground any significant number of these types of lifestyle businesses we've had 24 open in our neighborhood in the last year and another 12 in build out and pretty much all of them have been funded by these couple of funders along with funding that we brought in on the capital side with ncb and others to actually pay for the build out costs of a lot of these spaces and we've also subsidized the cost on that end for a lot of small businesses to actually get up and running so there's a really robust capital play to make these kinds of businesses I think get up and going well based on the the quality of those questions I mean clearly we could continue to have this conversation for quite a while here they're great questions unfortunately our time is up but I've really enjoyed this I want to thank our panelists for sharing their thoughts with us and thank you all for for spending time with us and you know come to Detroit check us out and spend some time with us some more time with us and we look forward to seeing you at some point all of you there so take care take good afternoon