 Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome. I'm Barry Rabe. I'm a professor here at the Ford School And I'm the director of close-up the Center for local state and urban policy one of the research centers here at the school I want to begin by thanking our co-sponsors for this event the Taubman College of architecture and urban planning The urban and regional planning program the Detroit school series and the residential college as we both Reflect on the topic the city after abandonment but also celebrate the publication of this book by the same title and Welcome the two co-editors and as well as authors of some of the important chapters Margie Dewar and June Manning Thomas This is an incredibly salient question for us to be thinking about in southeastern Michigan But for urban areas throughout the Midwest and really throughout many parts of North America this entire question of transitioning large cities as they go through different stages and one of the things that I find really intriguing about this book in addition Just the richness of the chapters it divides this topic into three large sections one What does the city become after abandonment? To what makes a difference in what cities become after abandonment and three I think the most interesting topic of all what should the city become after abandonment What we will be doing today is touching probably on each of those three areas to different degree Want to begin by inviting both Margie and June up to offer some comments remarks reflections on the book We're also absolutely delighted to be joined today by John Gallagher from the Detroit Free Press Who has written? Extensively on this issue particularly as it affects the city of Detroit and even within recent weeks Front page stories about Detroit and its evolution and land transition issues At a very very significant point So we are please get again to have John involved in a close-up event and he will follow Margie and June with offering reflection of his own We will then move to Audience Q&A. So hopefully despite this large audience, which we welcome There'll be opportunity for discussion would only note finally then that once we conclude there will be a reception Out in the Great Hall and indeed a book purchasing opportunity along with a book signing event So there's much much to be excited about here, but let me begin by welcoming Margie Dewar Margie welcome Thank You Barry and thank you to close up for inviting June and me to To talk about our book, you know if any of you've written books You know this is the most fun thing that one can do have the book done, but then get to talk a lot about it so Why did we do this project now? Let me see if I can many central cities of the northeast and the Midwest have lost substantial shares of their peak population since 1950 and Initially they declined after World War two because manufacturing firms changes in manufacturing technology meant that Manufacturing was more efficient in large suburban sites rather than old multi-story central city sites with railroad access and The housing post-World War two housing boom meant that many people moved from the central cities into the suburbs mainly white people because of extreme restrictions on the movement of African-Americans into white neighborhoods and restrictions on mortgage availability for African-American homeowners In addition retail moved out of the city people no longer Shopped downtown. They shopped in Used their autos to get to stores and they shopped in increasingly in malls So that all this led to the urban crisis of the 1970s with severely abandoned neighborhoods But this was a neighborhood problem. So the South Bronx was shocking But there were neighborhoods in Camden, New Jersey and Philadelphia and Baltimore Detroit Chicago that were also very disinvested Then the decline continued and it Was accelerated or in some cities the decline stopped because of restructuring of the economy So Chicago and New York City for instance Reinvented we're reinvented based on producer services instead of manufacturing But cities like Detroit Cleveland Pittsburgh. I could name keep naming them. It's a long list didn't find ways or Did that didn't happen to them and so their population decline continued and until really By the late 1990s and the early 2000s. It was clear. This was not a neighborhood issue This is a city issue. This was an issue about rethinking what should cities could and should cities become how could we reinvent Large areas of fairly vacant land. How could we assure quality of life for people who remained who were increasingly? low-income and increasing and more and more increasingly minority race So that was the issue that prompted us to think about this book because as we were thinking about these issues in the early 2000s we did not find People who had already written about it and it seemed as if in policy and in city planning most the emphasis was still on growth and still on bringing in stadiums and convention centers and casinos and Any big plant that might suggest it would come with subsidized and so forth. So Urban planners traditionally their job is guide manage and courage growth But that didn't seem to be the issue that most any of these cities were facing. So what should we do and And this map shows you can see the cluster of the very The white area across the northeast and Midwest of the United States are cities that lost large amount of their populations From 1950 to 2000 You can see how many there are and how much they Have and the cluster so therefore as Barry said we set out to answer Three questions. What does a city become after abandonment? And we were most interested in what was going on in the vast Disinvested neighborhoods. How were the residents remaking the places where they lived? How were people coming in and remaking the city? What were community-based organizations doing what had made their efforts possible and So that was one question second one was What makes a difference in what such cities become? We saw that different cities with the same indicators of low market demand for land and the same Losses of population were having different experiences and as planners were always looking for what are the levers that one can use to bring about Better outcomes in the same market conditions and so we were intrigued by that question looking at political relationships social relationships policies laws regulations and so forth and Then the third question is what should a city become after abandonment as planners? We're supposed that's our job We're supposed to envision. What's the future of cities and? Figure out how to get from here to that vision of a better city So we set out to organize our book around these three questions and we found started looking for authors we looked and looked at the abstracts from loads of conferences that Like geography planning public policy urban affairs and so forth and we didn't find people doing this work and so we Thanks to and this is where close-up really came in close-up enabled us to reach out to people who were doing Research on issues that might be related Who hadn't thought about their issues their topics in the way? We suggested so for instance We found people studying New Orleans disaster and we said New Orleans was losing a huge amount of its population before the hurricane How about thinking about this as a city after abandonment in a different way and they started Doing so so we had a wonderful symposium. Thanks to Close-up that where we critiqued each other's papers and we aren't tried to reorient our thinking It was so exciting that I really I Was so high on ideas. I couldn't really sleep for three days. It was so fun So So what did we come up with so what does the city become after abandonment and throughout this talk? What we're going to do is mainly use Detroit examples in the book there many other cities mentioned and Discussed but we're because we're closest to Detroit. We're going to just mainly talk about that So first you've no all no doubt Her community gardens are a major topic and thinking about what cities are becoming so Laura Lawson and Abilene Miller estimated there were eight hundred seventy five gardens in Detroit. Thanks to information from the community The garden resource collaborative. I actually think they're probably more but they're impossible to count because Of the institutional arrangements that are difficult just to give one example of these institutional difficulties Uh-huh. Yes, right a technical difficulty not a not a I Hope anyway so These gardens in Detroit are May or may not be on land owned by the gardeners and So there and they have not acquired or rented the land in part because it is so Difficult to do so and often expensive. So what how could institutions really the question is how can institutions be established so that People's F huge amount of investment and effort in making gardens such gardens in these Disinvested areas. How can those be reinforced so that the People who want to garden don't lose their prop their investment when other people want the land So another Other people who are remaking the cities that you've no doubt heard about our artists and Andrew Hersher looked at What was the relationship between art and The neighborhoods around them the art and what was the relationship between the artists and the neighbors and he concluded that critique urban critique can't Coexist may not be able to coexist at least does not coexist in Detroit with Collaborative art efforts so efforts that where neighbors and artists work together to use art to Strengthen neighborhoods lose the critique aspects of art. So for instance in the case of the upper left See if this works in this case, that's Motor City Blightbusters Chas Miller butterfly and This is the powerhouse. These were collaborative efforts that where they did work with neighbors But Heidelberg project and object Orange have been largely Often and tagging the neighbors have been antagonistic about what those groups have been doing in So and done without any consultation with people who lived in the area community-based organizations also have tried to remake the city and Landung who's right one of the chapter authors put your name your hand up is Looked at the effects of the low-income housing tax credit program on Detroit neighborhoods the federal that's a federal program whose major aim is to increase the supply of affordable housing in in the country in Area in cities like Detroit. There's a huge supply of affordable housing or what? HUD would define as affordable housing but The program gets used in such places to strengthen neighborhoods and so did it all over the city their community development organizations working on using this program or did they did this before the Recession undermined all housing development, but So did it work and what land found? Was that the strengthening of neighborhood housing markets only happened where the low-income housing tax credit projects were accompanied by a lot of other Projects as well a lot of other efforts to strengthen Neighborhoods or strengthen areas so in this case it was This area where there were a lot of low-income housing tax credit projects and a lot of other efforts. That's midtown Here Elmwood Lafayette Park and Urban Renewal area since the 1950s and here Jefferson Chalmers or Creekside where Also, there've been loads of efforts So you can see though from the dots that there were low-income housing tax credit projects scattered throughout the city so What this shows really is that having the clusters of them is more effective in actually achieving neighborhood strengthening So second question what makes a difference why our outcomes different in different situations We looked at two issues of that concerned What is it that a city government can or should do or city government can do? What is the capacity of government to make changes in the future of the city? That's declined so much Youngstown's a great example of us is the was for a long time the only city That had adopted a plan that said we accept we're going to be smaller We are smaller and we're probably going to be smaller in the future And so how did that happen when no other cities facing similar situations had been able to so an author named Laura shats looked at how a governance a governance coalition emerged We're made up of a new generation of city officials some Youngstown State University leaders Youngstown States now one of the two biggest industries in the city and City council members they wanted to identify directions for more positive change and they Created a very community engaged process remarkably so it won a national award for its Citizen participation from the American Planning Association the private sector business community was absent and Be in in large part because that is Youngstown situation its private sector has Largely disappeared So is that what kind of the kind of coalition that's necessary to rethink direction or can this be replicable this effort be Replicable elsewhere, and I think we'll see that with the what the fortunes of Detroit future city the plan that came out a couple weeks ago In Detroit which has not been adopted as the city's plan But that is a decline for a plan that accepts that decline has happened and then second a second look at Governance issues or governing issues was by Dale Thompson who's raised your hand who's Who looked at how can't how has targeting of resources happened in cities as you can see from this map Targeting in Detroit hasn't meant Really targeting or focusing. It's really the target zones have covered nearly the entire city but a lot a fairly a moderate amount of evaluation research has shown that That targeting resources focusing more research sources and certain kinds of areas than others does lead to positive effects on those neighborhoods because especially if they're sort of the sort of neighborhoods that are not the worst stuff but are kind of experiencing blight and what Dale called middle neighborhoods and The reason they do that the investment has such an effect is that it Restores neighborhoods neighbors confidence and makes them reinvest in their property so Dale looked at Baltimore Cleveland in Detroit and pointed to the huge political difficulties in choosing to focus substantial resources on certain neighborhoods that weren't the most needy and The weak institutional structure in place like Detroit where the CDC sector for the community development corporation sector for instance is not Terribly strong and where rules governing the use of different funds Really make it Forbid certain kinds of Targeting so with that I'll Turn this over to June Say something good afternoon everyone I See one of my oldest colleagues from Michigan State A colleague of old well he's always one of the others So please John, please come So this is John Schweitzer and thanks to MSU people who came So I'd like to pick up we're still looking at this whole issue of what makes a difference And so as Markey was saying Dale Thompson's Chapter looked at what makes a difference in terms of city-wide targeting But we also wanted to know what makes a difference in terms of what happens with CDC's Because CDC's are the ones that are quite often using the low-income housing tax credits and using the other funds To essentially make decisions So my chapter for the book looked at a case study of three CDC's and they're pictured up here the one on the far Left sorry Well, where is the red sea we should have had a little tutorial. I'm so sorry Next time we will have a tutorial for ourselves But this one is Indy Indy, which is the Breitmoor neighborhood. There's another one, which is the you snap back Neighborhood and then there is Jefferson Chalmers And we were looking at why are certain kinds of decisions made that seem to be counterproductive in terms of trying to make a visible difference in City neighborhoods and in this particular case What you see there is the pattern that that CDC the one Breitmoor in D&D Chose to construct housing for its particular neighborhood They constructed over 300 units and yet it was apparently somewhat Modified dispersion in terms of its pattern and in quite frankly if you drove down the street You were likely to see two or three vacant lots and then a Burnout house and then a boarded-up house and then a brand new house that they had constructed and then another a few vacant lots and so this particular chapter was looking at why why this outcome why are they essentially apparently Building housing in a way that doesn't seem to make a difference for a neighborhood in that particular case What we found was that there were very good reasons one was the market was essentially disappearing from under their efforts And so as they tried to build more and more units were being abandoned. That's one problem Another problem was the nature of the organization So sometimes the organization was not able to Essentially function in a way that would allow it to make the decisions that would give critical mass to its efforts and in some cases it was a matter of policy so one of the policies for example for the city of Detroit was That you essentially because of the zoning ordinance you had to have a certain lot with You couldn't use the old 25 Foot lot with you had to have a larger lot and so these organizations in order to assemble appropriate land were Acquiring something like a hundred and thirty lots in order to build fifty houses So they were moving around from place to place to try to find enough land to build that amount of housing So we found Examples like that that were showing that it wasn't just that That CDCs didn't understand targeting or didn't understand the need for critical mass But that there were some institutional barriers that were keeping them from doing so in contrast One of the other organizations you snap back had favorable demographic Attributes so that for example it had a mostly vacant portion of its area that it could use to amass housing and so the effects of that were that Mayors would drive people through the you snap back area showing this is a successful project because it seems to be all amassed Whereas really it was partially a result of the environmental circumstances So what makes a difference up? So as she mentioned we looked at other cities as well So one of them was New Orleans and here was a situation where you would think in such a clear case of Abandonment that this would be An effort to really see a city come together Not just in terms of its own efforts a city government, but also with CDCs and of course many of you have seen News really of essentially lots of people coming in with resources Well, there was actually enough of a problem that we had two chapters on just went wrong with efforts to rebuild New Orleans This slide is mainly from one of the chapters. It's the one that refers to the CDC efforts But in this case this was Jeffrey Lowe and Lisa Bates And what they did was to look at what had happened that had essentially Cut out a lot of the local CDCs from the reconstruction process for New Orleans and What they did was to kind of analyze what had gone wrong with this effort to try to get indigenous Community-based grassroots organ organizations involved in the process and what they discovered was that even before Katrina had hit the community development system was so weak that by the time the hurricane hit They already had something like 10,000 vacant housing units and they had CDCs or community development corporations that were building something like two houses a year so they were already fairly weak nascent organizations and Not only that but resources for those organizations had gradually been taken away year by year So they were even in worst shape in 2005 and they had been in 2000 so then what happened very interesting story these authors weave of Again this big crisis of Katrina This great this great debate in terms of should we rebuild all of the city Of course the low-lying areas were the areas where the poorest people lived racial minorities lived the higher areas where the areas the middle class and the elite lived and Sure enough the first plans that were coming out were suggesting that you rebuild in the higher areas has caused a lot of Difficulties so they weave a story of what was going on with this debate and what they suggest is that the CDCs were essentially outflanked by other organizations that came into New Orleans that Were had more visibility more appeal. I almost said sex appeal. It was sex appeal one of them was by Brad Pitt so Essentially this idea that these high-profile Organizations were coming in and they got a lot of the resources The foundations were channeling money to them and the indigenous organizations that had been there all along struggling Just could not get off the ground so That's a very interesting story of essentially what happened to that particular initiative We also have a fascinating story in terms of what happened in Detroit This particular chapter was written by Marty doer and what she did was to compare Just the way that we look at vacant property and why there's a difference between The usage of vacant property in Detroit compared to Cleveland Cleveland happens to be a very good Comparison for Detroit for a number of reasons one of which is that both have lost population between 40 and 60 percent over the past 60 years both are Midwest both are post industrial But they're very different terrains and her chapter gives a really debilitating critique of what had gone on in Detroit in comparison. It's actually kind of It makes you a little sad to read this chapter, but You should read it anyway It's really it's it's really amazing because She found different cultures and different institutional capacity between these two cities and in Detroit For example, the city government really did not play as Strong a role in supporting the community development corporations or the CDC's and In part that was because of the way city government was structured At that time Cleveland had had a ward-based system for some time Detroit as many of you know only recently adopted a ward-based system That's going to be put in place with the next election So there really was no sense of ownership by the council members for Any particular neighborhoods the mayors had very different? Concerns in terms of whether or not they saw the development of community development as an important kind of initiative So that was one problem. Then you had all Institutions that had existed for some time in Cleveland such as NPI neighborhood progress Which had essentially Channeled a lot of foundation money to community development in that city and working relationships It's actually quite cozy in in Cleveland The people who work for community development organizations and people for who work for the city They socialize they exchange jobs. They marry each other. I mean, it's really very very nice That's not the cat that's not in her chapter, but I happen to know that It's very different in Detroit No one accuses the community development community and the mayor's office in Detroit of being cozy so So what should cities become after abandonment? This was the last portion of our chapter really a lot of fun to read just different ideas about what people Were thinking should happen. This was of course this draft was written before As Marty mentioned the the recent plan was issued But we were already beginning to see some of the trends that needed to be encouraged at that time So what should city be cities become one is they should become strategic about vacancy We have a magnificent chapter by Robert Beauregard who Really gives critical thought to this whole idea of Addressing vacant property through campaigns There was at one point a national vacant property campaign Which has since been absorbed into the Center for Community Progress Which had a certain approach to the vacancy that you see in different cities around the country in the world And they had a series of steps that they suggested you should undertake and a lot of it of course built on the efforts of Genesee County the Flint initiative and some of the efforts in Youngstown and What Beauregard's chapter did was really offer a bigger view of what we should be thinking about His idea is that we need to be sure that we don't focus so much on land and on Vacancy and on how to redevelop that we forget that there are still a lot of social needs and social issues That have to be dealt with a lot of times unfortunately people when they start talking about Vacancy and redevelopment they forget that there are people involved here So he was saying what you really need to be sure that you look at social initiatives and not just land development initiatives He also suggested that you needed to understand that local politics play a role And we certainly have seen that That you can't just decide you're going to clear out a certain neighborhood because it's mostly vacant We discovered that in Detroit that there are people that will still live there that will oppose that kind of initiative And that was foreseen by Beauregard in his thinking exercise about how should we think about these cities? What else should cities become we have another pair of authors Who essentially suggested that they should plan for sustainability That just because they have vacancy and abandonment doesn't mean that they shouldn't attend to issues such as sustainability So on the authors of this particular chapter looked at plans for sustainability by picking out those cities which had signed on as as Part of an environmental initiative or had created some sort of sustainability plan and Picked out for those cities and did a very nice content analysis of what were these cities that had lost population What were they thinking about in terms of sustainability? One of the conclusions of this particular chapter was that they were doing a great job in terms of thinking about environmental sustainability and business and economic development But somewhat of a less successful job in terms of thinking about social equity Which is unfortunate because those are the cities of course where social equity is still a major dilemma What should cities become we also have a chapter by Brent Ryan who is a designer urban designer and is at MIT and has also published another book design after decline that Kind of is a bigger version if you don't want to buy that whole book then you can read this chapter because it's But I'm essentially what he looked at was okay. So what do we need in terms of design? What are some of the design the ways we should think about urban design and what he suggested was One way we should think about it is to think about consolidation So this this particular image on the left is sort of he claims that this is not Detroit But look at that Really, you know, but anyway, so he says it's a generic city, but you know, so anyway So here you see on the left is typically what happens is you have this dense Portion the middle and then you have these other little developments that are popping up many of them by nonprofits And what he's saying is that we need a bigger picture where we begin to develop in a way that consolidates That all the institutions and all of the nonprofits come together and figure out Techniques for consolidation, which is a little bit of forewarning again of what Detroit Future City is saying in terms of investment And then what should cities become in terms of lessons that we've learned this far the last chapter Is a really quite extraordinary It's combination interview reflection by people that work that have worked in practice in Youngstown and Flint talking with Margie doer and the three of them are the authors of the chapter and they've come up with What did we learn from Youngstown? What did we learn from Flint and I thought the lessons for that were so good that I actually listed them and Basically and of course that picture is not Youngstown or Flint. I thought that's a really cool picture of day being But what are some of the lessons well some of the lessons include we have to plan for change and not growth We have to plan with the process that addresses past legacy What they discovered in Youngstown was that when they pull people together and try to get them to envision a different future that they couldn't they couldn't really start that until People were allowed to vent so the chapter describes the venting and it talks about all the issues and the past wrongs and the injustices and how people felt about those And basically what the authors say is you have to go through that you can't skip that you have to let people say What they really feel about the circumstances that they're living in and Then you have to move them to a sense of shared vision So once they get past that as happened in Youngstown then you can help them decide okay This is what we really want to see in terms of a smaller better city and of course focus on assets as well And then the last one you have to look at the landscape. You have to rediscover think about the land differently You have to think about it in a way that maybe goes back to its roots and reminds me of John's book You go back to ideas that were fundamental to the fabric of that particular city Find ways to reuse land Act I love that word Expeditiously to get rid of liabilities quickly that you can't just let them linger You guys have been really patient. Thank you so much Well, thank you first. I'd like to congratulate June and Margie on their book Margie mentioned one of the great thrills of being an author is to have the book done and you can talk about it And even greater one is to be able to autograph books that people are buying. So after this go out and buy their book It's right outside. I Like to make three three comments on this whole situation The first is by now the city governments in Detroit and all these post-industrial cities City governments themselves are almost incapable of providing the leadership that we need to address these problems. It's not that city governments are willfully Resistant it's simply that they were so broke at this point that there's not enough money to do very much I know we have some City officials or former city officials here from Detroit who have spent many many hours months years devoted to the city of Detroit And there there are dedicated public servants in all these cities But the fact is you're just no money left in the till if you look at the property tax base In all of these cities so much of it has been moved to the suburbs that there's just not enough left to fund municipal services By city government as we would expect that to happen Even just in tri-county Detroit Wayne, Oklahoma Detroit more than 90% of the tax base is now in Suburbia less than 10% is in the city of Detroit. So there's clearly just not enough to fund Municipal services as we would like to see them and now the city over the years has gone to heroic measures to try to adjust to this in 1970 or so there are about 30,000 Municipal employees at the city of Detroit now. There's probably 10,000 that number goes down all the time We have that and I live in the city of Detroit. We have the highest property tax rates in the state The highest city income tax rates in the state We have a we are absolutely dependent on the casino tax money that comes in We have special fees for a garbage pickup and that sort of thing and the city borrows very very heavily and we still can't pay the bills and the city's still on the brink of bankruptcy and You know, there's problems with street lights a huge number of street lights don't work and the fire stations are not staffed adequately And all these things and this is mirrored by what happens to a greater or lesser extent in in all the cities New Orleans Cleveland Buffalo the smaller cities like Camden and Flint and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania so Some municipal government is not going to provide the answer and we do have a question of What should municipal government be doing then what is its core responsibility? Is it simply public safety or does it go beyond that and we're sort of debating that right now? Now second the second point is that even as the capacity of municipal governments to deal with these problems has gone down Other groups have stepped up and increased their capacity to deal with these issues And so I think the leadership on this whole, you know Reimagining what city should be comes from three areas the foundation community the university and the neighborhood groups the CDC's the community development corpse The foundation communities like Kresge, but also community foundation and so on You know Mott Ford night foundation or not only Writing bigger checks, which they are but they're also involving your people in day-to-day decisions In this whole question of reinventing cities so that at the Detroit Future City planning process, which was just published their report Excuse me Not only did Kresge and the other foundations write big checks to fund that But they also had their people in there on a day-to-day basis working on working on this stuff If you look at the community groups Take someone like Sue Mosey who runs the university? I'm sorry midtown Detroit, Inc. with the successor to the old University Cultural Center association When Sue joined that organization 25 years ago, there are perhaps one or two paid employees Today she's got a staff of 20 to 25 paid employees and they do all kinds of things Originally all they did is is sort of do marketing district marketing now They do real estate development. They're responsible for a lot of the real estate They put together the deals that go happen in the neighborhood They do a certain amount of code enforcement mainly by moral Swazian to try to get people to live up to what they should be doing They do grant writing They manage all these grants that come in from various organizations to help help the city the thank you the The the live midtown. Thank you Live midtown instead of program that's managed by by Sue Mosey's group And if you look at the other groups in the city the warrant counter development coalition Southwest Detroit Business Association They're all doing this this kind of work all capacity building. They've all staffed up enormously. They have a Lot more financial resources much greater skill sets and they're all taking over what amounts to Municipal governance by by another name one of the chapters in the books talks about the difference Maybe it's Dale's I'm not sure but the difference between governing and governance and governing implies That it's happening through city government itself and governance implies that there's this much more messy Process where all kinds of groups are involved in providing Leadership and that's what we're saying in Detroit and other cities This is really brought home to me when I visit Cleveland and I spoke with the people at Cleveland Circle Inc. Which is the The CDC that manages the area that that's the equivalent of the midtown area in Detroit And as the director drove me around he pointed out that the city streets, which are the responsibility of the city of Cleveland Were pitted and rutted and pothold and all that but everything beyond the curbs Which was the responsibility of his group were pristine Because they had their own funding source from the universities and cultural centers and the signage the the lawns Everything everything looked great and so you have a sort of a dysfunctional city, but a very very professional and up-to-date community group That's really You know taking taking care of the public realm we've also done this in a different way in Detroit We've taken chunks of city government away and sent them either upstream to regional groups or downstream to single-purpose Neighborhood groups so for example region a transit which has been dysfunctional in Detroit for for many for decades Is is about to be sent upstream to a regional transit authority, which is now in the process of being formed And things like the Kobo Convention Center, which was sent to a non-profit authority in 2009 an eastern market Which went to its own authority in 2006 and The Riverwalk and campus marshes are being built by private quasi public conservancies All these things are happening and doing really really well Because we got them sort of away from municipal government and into the hands of people who could handle them these of every one of These has been controversial and we often go through these these terrible debates at city council like we're having right now with Bell Isle Where where people fight tooth and nail to hang on to the jewels, but in fact once they move to the new entity Things seem to work really really well and in fact eastern market and Kobo have turned around completely like years ahead of where they were Just a few years ago So the third so so we are reinventing governance in the face of this this absolute inability of city governments and so many other cities That you know to do anything because they just lack the wherewithal at this point And then the third point is that the Detroit Future City plan, which just came out two weeks ago a Really massive report 350 pages and so on is really a wonderful document and It's going to take a while for people to absorb it and digest it but it really takes the best thinking in in sort of urban planning circles and in reinventing cities Thinking out there and applies them to Detroit in a very thoughtful way So I think that in years to come it will be at least as significant as the Youngstown 2010 Plan is and I'd like to see someone Running for mayor really take that on and say this is my this is my campaign document right here So those are my three observations and now I guess June and Marty and I are going to sit up here Do some questions. Thank you for the water It was touched upon but skirted around and that is that these cities all exist in regions and these cities have Limitations in the sense that the political structures are bounded by physical boundaries and yet as was pointed out You know 80 a 90% of the tax base is in the region, but not in the city Solutions that don't deal with the regional aspect of any of these cities is critical The second is that a lot of what I'm hearing is market reliance It's talking about market failures or or programs to work through markets and those have I mean There's a whole body of literature that speaks to the problems of that Not the least of which is they like Detroit, which you know, it's 138 square miles And it's you got a third of the population that had a long time ago so that you know getting market generator solutions And then the third dimension that seemed to be missing is that the degree to which or role of citizen input In terms of some of these plans and programs those people who are around Detroit know that there is nothing else that that whole More than kerfuffle around relocating people to form concentration people felt isolated or left out of the discussion and there is sort of a Wisdom that you don't ask the homeless where to build low-income housing and they're the ones most affected So I think those three things Are missing at least from the presentation. They may well be in the other articles But I think that they're critical constraints as we start envisioning or visioning a city even as it embraces its smallness if you will so those are Questions I think the book does address them more than we did but Apparently it's So I'll try to speak loudly enough for you to hear me and just wave if you can't So indeed as John said the regional solutions are vital I we agree they Issues that and we can we've been able to see that we didn't articulate We did not go into this in detail in the book, but the the real struggle that goes on as As efforts to bring some of that money back to the city happened they mean Changing who's in control and that's not easy and indeed I would say The the residents of the city shouldn't lose all say and what's going on in in the this Transfers of money essentially where the state takes over something and does a good job of say demolishing Structures of near schools, but People still have lot that's not their elected officials now doing that and On market failures, I think we did deal with that in the book indeed tales chapter is really about how do you intervene to? Take advantage of market failures to strengthen places And the third one was citizen input Yeah, so I don't think really that we did we don't have a chapter that talks about citizen input But I think that's kind of assume The way it it comes through indirectly is at one point it could be we thought that community development corporations would Be a reflection of that input because those are Community-based organizations, so we were talking about CDCs We were really talking about these groups that at one point were supposed to be The representation of citizen input of course what has happened is that quite often they're not So that is still an issue But no, but certainly I think that this is something I think that was the lesson of the last chapter in terms of what Of what do we need to know in terms of Youngstown and Cleveland? About how we move forward the whole idea of involving citizens in that discussion I think was was handled very well there, so Yeah, just a comment. You're absolutely correct that the lack of regional reach is the big problem here Southwestern cities handled this through annexation. They were allowed to grow after World War two in 1950 Detroit was 139 square miles today It's 139 square miles Phoenix was 17 square miles now It's 500 so and that's Dallas Houston Albuquerque. They all they all grew that way So so that is a problem that the older cities were not allowed to expand in that way European cities of course a much more regionally focused as is one German planner said one time to me We try to make people feel really stupid if they move out of town, you know, we want people to live in the city So it's still sort of a lack of regional reach and all these sort of northeast rust belt mid Midwest cities that ultimately creates the problem that we're dealing with and all the solutions that we try to reach which Tend to be reach for it tend to be fragmentary because we're not dealing We're not reaching for regional solutions except in a very minor way like a regional board for covo. We're a regional transit authority so I have a question as John, maybe you're the first time the response. I thank you for the panel. It's great to see Entirely people like I mean we really care Detroit. I was there. I was always been crying You say the garden is trash the community really want to wake up, but somehow didn't work I didn't talk you mentioned about the The history will repeat No one mentioned about how San Francisco recovered Because of one man play very important known his name is a tea Xiaomi That's why Bank of America created He initiated microloan that time right after earthquake and the Great Depression That is city and there is Detroit Right now. We have three important people you talk about the Dan Gilbert. You talk about many You talk of another person penskey Those are the important figures Then we can see the seeds I See trash not garlic we But me time I see this and risk takers my question as a panel is that who are really? important movers and shakers we rely on Before we talk too much detail There's a golden bridge golden gate bridge There's another bridge was Dominate by one man, but was defeated by the people we're going to be a new bridge, but it's still fighting going on How we can solve the problem say you say what what what but who are the Shaker all we have classed over creativities. Well, I I think if Maddie Maroon is the one of the three. We're in trouble I And I'm sorry to speak in that way, but I think you know basically his concern is the ambassador bridge and his own company and I don't see that that really is a but Dan Gilbert is another Another person. I think what he's doing in terms of buying up. I think it's not 13 buildings down 15 is very interesting and and we'll see you know, we're still watching the story is still evolving So we'll see what happens I think the movers and shakers in terms of Detroit are different The way those of you in political science or policy would think of this in terms of regime theory We've had a very weak regime in Detroit So you would think that a city such as Detroit that had the auto industry You would have seen a very strong growth coalition that that was consistent over 50 a hundred years Whereas in Detroit the auto headquarters were either not in the center of the city or leaving as fast as they could so Henry Ford Developed Dearborn instead of Detroit. So there's been a long long history of disinvestment So I think we can't depend we have not been able to depend in Detroit on this What you think of in other places is the movers and shakers a Aka a growth coalition or regime. They just have not been consistent, but of course we've had people their people Illich is one that I would name Who are doing interesting things and we wait and see some people think that? Dan Gilbert is crazy like a fox. I mean, he's buying very cheap buildings. And so he's going to make a profit I think the real Anchors have been the institutions that you know, basically it's a medical center It's Wayne State University And of course the nice thing about this Detroit City future plan is we see there's some other anchors at other places But we're still watching to see how this evolves And I would add that The remarkable there are so many remarkable people in the city doing so many Interesting things who aren't the people whose names we would necessarily hear they are the leaders of community-based organizations who've been often working 30 years on these issues and they are Working against considerable odds, but And and making a considerable difference and I really believe that in Detroit There is not one answer one big answer to the big problem It's going to be many many answers from many many people that that relieve the problems of the city So my question is if you could maybe elaborate a little bit more about how That plays a role in developing a city and it may be also if there was anything that you learned specifically towards like Alternative energy and how that might play a role in developing a city Well, we're talking about doing a lot of these things right now mostly talking most of them haven't happened yet Things like the blue infrastructure that the Detroit Future City plan talks about that we would create these artificial ponds and lakes and swales and so on To give rainwater someplace to go besides the sewer system So we don't have to spend millions of dollars a year, you know running rainwater through our sewer system and you know green far carbon forests planting trees along highways and around factories to soak up air pollution to lower the rates of asthma and respiratory disease and You know as well as urban farming so we can feed ourselves more and I guess the question I have is is what's going to work? I mean not the one question is to what extent are we going to commit to that to what extent are we going to see that? That's important and getting all these disparate groups like Detroit public schools and water and sewer and all the others To buy into it and then once you do it will we do it to the point that it makes a difference Well, we just plant a few trees here and there or will we really you know go into The whole concept of carbon fires and then will it actually lower rates of asthma and respiratory diseases How much good will all this do and we're you know the exciting thing for me is that right now or at the front end of that in Deciding yeah, we think this is a good idea. Okay. How do we design it? How do we implement it? Who's in charge? How do we pay for it? How long does it take it then? How much good does it do? So that's where we are right now Thanks I think John mentioned that you saw the university is one of these sort of triad in the leadership And I wonder if you could elaborate on this a little bit Lessons learned Key directions what makes me how do you see the university? Well, it really is a thought leader You know a lot of the great interviews I've done have been with university researchers who you have the luxury unlike newspaper reporters of really taking a topic and digging into it in really depth and so You know yeah, for example, I'm not gonna toss it over here and I had conversations about targeting which have been very very Helpful, so I think as thought leaders the university people are very important And then they're in there in the fight when I said, you know Kresge is open in office in Detroit Well, so has U of M and and I see Eric working here from the U of M office in Detroit And all the universities Lawrence Tech and UD Mercy UD Mercy was a big part of the Detroit future city planning effort So, you know, they're not out here sort of just to you know in the tower You know spinning theories, but they're in there sort of getting their hands dirty on the ground Looking at all these topics, you know, how do you plan for a city after abandonment? So I think you know I repeat there That's one of the triad of leadership that we're getting in the city sitting there. Hi, I think so much for this Um, I wanted to speak to this idea that you put out of change without growth or the idea that you know This acceptance that growth isn't going to happen Which is something that I think a lot of us can get behind as an idea but I think that one of the one of the challenges of that and something that people might push back against just to say Yes, but this is a city where we have a very large poor population Really high unemployment. And so I was wondering if you could speak to the issue of how we can provide for people If we accept an idea that there won't be economic growth We didn't I don't think we meant to accept that there won't be economic growth there really has to be some growth in jobs or and access to jobs and improvements in education to enable people to Find better jobs and so forth and that's really really important because the city has lost so much It really has lost well over 90 percent of its manufacturing jobs and its retail jobs There's very few jobs left in the city in relation to the population It does not have it share of regional jobs at all and so and Detroit future. I think said 40 percent 30 percent of People who live in Detroit actually work in Detroit. So That's really that's really important. It also But it doesn't mean you you go after a big subsidy for a plant. It doesn't mean you Put a huge amount of your community development block grant dollars into a New company or something it really means that You think about how can People be connected with jobs that exist and how can more jobs be created in many small ways I do a lot of work in the spatial epidemiology of violence and such Have a kind of spatial sensibility that I bring to these things but you know, I'm thinking When I wanted to also ask you guys about Because I see we work closely in Flynn. We have a city Center for Disease Control youth violence prevention grant And that place is it's as if a meteor strike hit Right. I mean, you know the GM plan was lifted out and economically that place was essentially shot in the head So That's that's what happened to Europe after World War two and there was a Marshall plan. It was a very large scale thing There's flint is emblematic as is Detroit maybe others But my questions like there's local there's regional then there's national level efforts and need to be brought to bear here, right and If we're not speaking at the national level for the rust belt cities for these essentially these abandoned places I'm from the I'm from California. We have lots of ghost towns. They're smaller, but are these effectively going to become? Ghost towns. I mean, you know, like we tried it here didn't work. Everyone needs to leave now Similarly in I'm doing multi-city comparisons of crime and such New Orleans As soon as people could they left one of the dirty secrets about that is there's a lot of really poor people there Who needed to leave and they couldn't until the FEMA funds came through as badly distributed and all the other issues That occurred there. Is that something that we have to start thinking a little more proactively about? I'm just brainstorming. I don't have an answer, but there's a truly epic large-scale systemic Issue and I wanted to bring that it's almost like climate change Seriously, anyway, thank you Well, I I think it's important to speak to the national level. I think For this particular book we tended to focus more on the local level and the state level I think if I personally had more faith that our voice could be heard the national level I would address that but it seems as if these cities have been abandoned by national government But I I do think that what we should look at is maybe And I can perfectly relate to what you're saying about Flint and we have the same feeling about much of Detroit but what's interesting is that as we start studying these neighborhoods and smaller chunks of the city we're seeing forms of life and Resilience that Are not commonly known and I'm thinking for example this neighborhood bright more which we've sent several students to we've studied In some depth. I mapped it in one of the maps Is pretty much bombed out in some ways the center of it is bombed out and yet it has a fairly high number of home-based Businesses they are not big. They're not a replacement for GM But they're there people seem to have taken over some of the economic development for themselves There Margie some of Margie's research has shown that what people are doing sometimes with this vacant land is creative stuff I mean essentially reusing it to create homesteads Instead of their formerly narrow lots This bright more area as far as we can tell is the one in Detroit with the densest level of community Organizations mean it has like 38 or 40 in the bright more alliance So I think one of the things that that the research has shown me is that we Can't necessarily generalize about what we see is decay and decline from the Mega perspective when you look on the ground Sometimes people are making amazing adjustments now That's not to say that they should be doing that we should let that stand that that we should depend on that There are still things that we should do as a society We shouldn't make people depend on those kinds of things like hairdressing in their kitchen or something like that But let's at least acknowledge that some of that exists In terms of the city's going to disappear that all these cities occupy really strategic points Obviously New Orleans Pittsburgh Detroit and those those will still be there that their reason for being will still be there You know it's past the current thing and so I you know even before the auto industry Detroit had 300,000 people So so they'll these cities will still be here what they become of course is a question in terms of Spatial aspects of violence. There's a paper came out a year or two ago in Philadelphia about the Philadelphia green vacant lot Gun violence, you know that one I guess okay good. I think it is striking that the in the Presidential election there was no mention of an urban policy really and it's so indeed it's getting no This these cities are getting Little to no attention Also what people from who go to these meetings say the meetings and HUD and for instance say is that They're the HUD officials are really still talking to grow growing cities and the areas of Growing cities that need some support and not thinking about what about the cities where there isn't going to be Prospects for there aren't prospects for new development Stories that people often tell about Detroit that map on the sort of a longer trajectory in thinking about Industrial cities and one is Detroit as a warning of sorts So the Detroit that's been effectively eviscerated shot in the head I mean we're put it and then on the other hand is sort of inspiring hopeful This sort of urban gardening and community redevelopment kind of story and I guess the question in In one way this is just an invitation to sort of have you guys reflect on that but then also to ask How long has it sort of been torn between those two poles in Detroit right like how long of those two stories been active and then It seems to me and maybe this just demonstrates my own sort of familiarity with Detroit more than anything else But that the inspiring story has become more and more sort of active in popular media accounts And how people think about Detroit and I just sort of wanted to ask like why now if that's true Well, I think in the last few years these these two story I mean the the the depressing story about Detroit's over it's done. It's dead. That's been around for a long time the more hopeful story is Been emerging for maybe about 10 years or less And I think it tracks some of the efforts that have been emerging Most of the community gardens in Detroit are less than 10 years old most are less than five years old Earthworks for example probably the the best one is only about 10 or 12 years old So so one reason is that the media is looking at what's been happening You know the big Celebration of downtown Detroit's is Dan Gilbert moved down Dan Gilbert moved down two years ago so so a lot of interesting stuff is happening and Recovering that I think there's also even though people say the media is always looking for bad news The media is desperate to report good news People would much rather buy a paper with good news than bad news in it. So So I think the interplay of these two things is really interesting. It's hard to get someone to give you both in a measured way You need to get you know stuff like the Rune porn Detroit disassembled that photo book by Andrew Moore or you get something completely optimistic and almost polyamid it's tough to get sort of a Good measured. Where are we? Sort of thing Detroit Future City actually does that pretty well I think it's it's honest about the problems, but also looks ahead to our possible solutions So I live in Detroit off of Grand River and maybe six and I own a house there and when I I see that the big plan of The Detroit Orcs project come out and I look at my surroundings and I look at where they're mapping out certain things I'm going whoa that that'd be really different if that was actually put in place And now I've looked at the plan as in depth as I need to But I'm just wondering as a as a citizen living in an area where According to the plan my house, maybe shouldn't be there or As an urban planner that is out that is truly truly What wants the best for the public? How do I engage with the with the larger plan? How do I engage with the city? How do I be a citizen there? And do that responsibly and work with the government not against but also do my part So The planners for Detroit Future City say I've heard them say this several times We were looking at this from 30,000 to 50,000 feet up and a lot of the areas where they've said here's the future for this area are actually very Diverse they shouldn't be all the same in the future and so there's a lot of work to do to Get down to the ground on what should happen and in the do you know about the leap plan the lower east side action plan? They have actually done a lot to look in a very fine-grained way about what could the future of their area be and their plan differs from Detroit Future City in that Detroit Future City is looking at kind of very big pieces of prop big pieces of the city and Leap is looking at a few blocks here and a few blocks there and and the city officials have said they Are supportive of leap now all that you know has to be followed and monitored and you'll need to keep track of what's Happening in your neighborhood, but I think people are open to listening To different scenarios and also of course Detroit Future City is not a formally adopted plan anyway I mean it's a framework. It's a strategic framework and The history of planning in Detroit is that some stuff gets put out there that's adopted and some stuff never does So I don't think you should sell your house