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| Detroit Future City: Toni L. Griffin, project director for technical planning, makes a presentation about Detroit Works long term plans. MANDI WRIGHT/DFP |
Some of Detroit’s most vibrant areas would get an infusion of cash and other new services, such as transit and work force training, and other districts now mostly vacant and abandoned would be turned into farms, forests and other landscape uses under the long-awaited Detroit Future City strategy document that is to be released Wednesday.
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Following two years of study and 30,000 conversations with the public, the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning team gave the news media a sneak peek Tuesday of its final report that holds out the promise of a better, if radically different, Detroit.
Under the plan, specific employment and population centers of Detroit would be tagged as areas for future investment — some obvious ones are Midtown and downtown, but another would be the West McNichols hospital corridor, among others.
Other sparsely populated areas would be gradually transformed to other purposes, such as farms, apple orchards, retention ponds for rainwater and other environmental uses. Some of these areas include the lower east side and the blocks west of the Coleman A. Young International Airport.
| A cyclist makes his way up Rosa Parks Blvd. on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2013 in Detroit past an abandoned burned-out building. The Detroit Works Long Term Planning team is unveiling a book-length final report that is full of bold ideas and initiatives to deal with Detroit's vast vacant land. / Mandi Wright/Detroit Free Press |
The plan also includes a strategy for encouraging residents in these areas to move to more populated parts of the city. The point is to create more densely packed districts that are already doing relatively well that could be more efficiently served by the city with its limited resources.
When this idea was first discussed in 2010, various residents and elected officials screamed that the Bing administration was playing God and looking to forcibly move residents from their homes as he and his Detroit Works team picked winners and losers.
The proposal has been softened so that no one would be forced to move. Under the plan, all areas of Detroit are viewed as having value, and all will receive some support, depending on their pegged future use.
A key to success is connecting the stronger districts with improved transit options. The report envisions a new ring road to connect the major employment districts.
The road would include a new bus rapid transit route running roughly up Livernois from southwest Detroit, through the Lyndon industrial district adjacent to the Davison Freeway through Highland Park, and extend through the Mt. Elliott employment district, past the city’s airport, and down the Lower Conner Creek industrial corridor and ending at Jefferson.
The big question now is what happens to the book length compilation of text, data, maps and recommendations. The Detroit Economic Growth Corp., headed by President and CEO George Jackson Jr., takes over the general oversight of the report, and the Detroit Works team is recommending that a consortium of civic leaders be formed to help popularize Detroit Future City’s ideas.
Mayor Dave Bing told the Free Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday afternoon that he stands behind the report and will work to see it implemented.
“You’ve got to start talking about different ideas,” he said. “We can’t get stuck in our past.”
Bing said that the Detroit Future City plan must be viewed as a nonpolitical agenda for future improvement, one that will outlast his own administration. “This has to be a living document.”
Several council members and mayoral candidates contacted Tuesday gave varying degrees of qualified support for the plan, all acknowledging that Detroit needs some sort of strategy moving forward to deal with vacant land and stretched city services.
Robin Boyle, chairman of the department of urban planning at Wayne State University, said the hard work really starts now that the report itself is finished.
“If there is a widespread commitment, cultural, political, organizational, to move the recommendations, policies, forward, then these large-scale plans can be effective,” he said.
Heaster Wheeler, assistant CEO of Wayne County, served as a steering committee member for the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning team. He said this week that he and others who participated would try to provide that leadership going forward.
“Several of us have basically decided we’re not going away,” he said. “We’ve got a huge stake in the outcome. We’ve given over two years of voluntary participation and discussion after discussion. We’re in until we win.”
The final report is an offshoot of the Detroit Works effort launched by Bing in fall 2010. Bing promised at the time that his advisers would come up with a way to reshape Detroit’s neighborhoods in short order. But chaotic public meetings and opposition to the suggestion of relocating residents from distressed districts led to a rebooting of the effort several months later.
Eventually, the effort split into a short-term, smaller project focusing on a handful of neighborhoods and a long-term strategic endeavor that produced the Detroit Future City report being released today.
The Kresge Foundation, which contributed $3.9 million over three years, and other philanthropists paid for the staff work and the report itself.
For more than a year, a team of experts conducted dozens of community meetings and held more than 30,000 conversations with Detroiters for the report. Advisory teams included dozens of prominent Detroiters, as well as outside technical experts.
Sandra Turner-Handy, an east side resident and community outreach director for the Michigan Environmental Council, served as a process leader for the Detroit Works Long-Term Planning team. She said residents overcame initial suspicion of the project once they realized that Detroit Future City would recommend that every neighborhood be improved, somehow, depending on conditions.
“Once they got past the mistrust, they were in,” she said this week. “The residents were excited and ready. Our goal is to make sure we give the residents what they need to help them re-create their communities.”
Among the most innovative ideas: that nearly one-third of Detroit’s 139 square miles of land — the areas mostly vacant today — should be given over to new forms of landscape uses, including farms, forests and “blue infrastructure,” such as new ponds, lakes, and swales to keep rainwater out of the city’s overburdened sewage system.
New house-swap programs and other incentives might be offered to encourage people to move from those areas, and future resources for residential development would be directed elsewhere. The plan calls for limited resources to be allocated with a goal of creating denser concentrations of residential and commercial activity.
All areas would still receive some level of service. But transportation spending, work force training, residential development and other activity would be directed at areas most likely to produce denser concentrations of activity.
So far, the report is merely a collection of recommendations. It will go nowhere without widespread buy-in, not only from current city officials, but also from a wide range of public, philanthropic and corporate decision-makers, as well as the public at large.
Like many past reports and plans, this new Detroit Future City report faces numerous obstacles to avoid gathering dust on a shelf. Among the potential roadblocks: The city’s near-bankrupt fiscal condition and the longtime inability of public and private agencies and organizations to work together to achieve ambitious goals.
WSU’s Boyle noted that some strategic visionary exercises have produced great results, like the famous Burnham Plan for Chicago’s lakefront. But, he added, “If we look at many other examples, the impact of plans has been less than remarkable. That’s because people don’t get behind them. They don’t get the commitment necessary to do the heavy-lifting.”
But the tone of the report is unabashedly upbeat.
“The world needs Detroit’s example,” the report says. “We must proceed with open eyes and be willing to flex muscles and minds — not simply to ‘Get to Yes,’ but ‘Get to Next.’”
source: freep.com
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