An Urban Revival in the Rust Belt

[Leo the Dog]

Originally Posted by Austinlee

Detroit population
city / metro
951,270; 4,441,551 - 2000 census
713,777; 4,296,250 - 2010 census


city and metro dropping by the hundreds of thousands. Supposedly , Allegedly. There is simply no proof.... except for the massive open urban prairies with with prancing antelope where a city used to stand.

2013 Detroit Population

The current population of the city of Detroit, Michigan is estimated to be about 701,475, which is a decrease of about 0.72% from the last record of the population.

It may have already dropped into the 600,000's now.

Source: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics...pulation-2013/

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Leo the Dog

It may have already dropped into the 600,000's now.

it almost certainly already has. both the US census bureau and SEMCOG have the city of detroit estimated below the 700,000 mark in 2013 (most recent available).

Agency      2010 Base     2013 est.     Num. decline

US Census    713,862       688,701       -25,161

SEMCOG       713,862       661,267       -52,595

i believe SEMCOG is forecasting that the city will be at ~625,000 in 2020 and then finally bottom out at ~610,000 people in 2030.

[mrnyc]

well, its hard to argue with those severe population trends, but if you look at what is going on with gilbert & some others in the heart of downtown detroit you wouldn't think so (although i just wish gilbert wasnt sucking $$$ out of cleveland to do it). it may be a donut hole, but at least downtown detroit is springing back. the national back-to-the-city trend is going as strong there as anywhere else in the midwest. and why shouldnt it? of course detroit has fantastic old bones downtown. who knows what will happen? maybe not much population-wise, but otoh maybe it will be transformative and suck in younger, more urban-minded suburbanites. anyway, i am going to bet the pop drop stabilizes well before 2030.

[memph]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

well, its hard to argue with those severe population trends, but if you look at what is going on with gilbert & some others in the heart of downtown detroit you wouldn't think so (although i just wish gilbert wasnt sucking $$$ out of cleveland to do it). it may be a donut hole, but at least downtown detroit is springing back. the national back-to-the-city trend is going as strong there as anywhere else in the midwest. and why shouldnt it? of course detroit has fantastic old bones downtown. who knows what will happen? maybe not much population-wise, but otoh maybe it will be transformative and suck in younger, more urban-minded suburbanites. anyway, i am going to bet the pop drop stabilizes well before 2030.

Neighbourhoods naturally lose residents, whether because they die, or move to another city, or move to different neighbourhood if their income level changes. I think many black Detroiters, as soon as they can get a slightly above minimum wage job, are moving out of Detroit to the suburbs, for better safety, schools and other services. So for a neighbourhood to be stable, you need residents moving in to replace those you lose. Who will want to move into neighbourhoods like Osborn, Warrendale or Fitzgerald? Or will their current residents really stop aspiring to move to the suburbs? These neighbourhoods are pretty far removed from the core of the city, and they're are the types of neighbourhoods that most Detroit residents live in right now, but I have a hard time seeing how they'll stop losing population. And because they make up so much of the city, it seems unlikely that the more core areas will be able to offset their population losses.

What sets Detroit apart from other cities is how much of the city consists of neighbourhoods far removed from the core, that are basically ghettos, and in decline, and how little of the population lives in the core, or near-core neighbourhoods that have more potential to revitalize. Also because property values are so low, neighbourhoods in decline are imo more at risk of being abandoned for better but still low cost neighbourhoods.

[hudkina]

The neighborhoods aren't the story. The revitalization of just about every urban area is occurring in the core. Detroit has a 10 sq. mi. central core that is a completely different world from the rest of the city. It is growing. It is diversifying. It is seeing rising education levels and incomes. It is seeing a major decrease in crime. It is seeing tons of new and refurbished housing. It is seeing a 2% rental vacancy rate. It is seeing a new streetcar. It is seeing new local and national retail shops. It is seeing new and expanded corporate businesses.

It is just like every other major urban center that is currently seeing a revitalizing core. As long as the core becomes stronger, the outer neighborhoods will almost certainly see improvements. As jobs return to the core from the suburbs, people will have an incentive to stay (or move in). I honestly don't care if Detroit's population falls below 500,000, as long as the core continues to rebuild. Eventually, the development in the core (e.g. riverfront highrises, increased densities in Midtown, new housing on vacant land in the adjacent neighborhoods, etc.) will begin to match and hopefully surpass the decline that will obviously continue in many outer neighborhoods. I'm perfectly fine with that.

Granted, having said that, there are still plenty of outer neighborhoods that are relatively stable, for an older industrial city. The northern portion of Northwest Detroit is basically middle-class. Much of the area bounded by 8 Mile, Woodward, McNichols, and Telegraph is pretty solid. That's a good 16+ sq. mi. of the city with only a few pockets here and there of sub-par neighborhoods.

[Docta_Love]

Yeah and really you can make that area more like 20 + sq mi by including Rodedale Park and the Grandmont - Rosedale area. You have a large collection of solid neighborhoods in Southwest Detroit and the Warrendale area has remained pretty strong. You add in the new neighborhood slowly taking shape where Herman Gardens was and the arab immigrant spillover on the other side of Warren ave of that part of Dearborn that juts into the city and you have a special solid area a blue collar area that has maintained itself. Detroit has still got large areas of the outer city that are maintaining to keep themselves strong and are even starting to see reinvestment like on Livernois in the University District area.

I'll also make the argument that if you look at population loss for the Detroit CSA, 99% happened during the Great Recession and in terms of numbers Pittsburgh and Cleveland CSA's lost a proportional amount compared to Detroit during the same time.

Cleveland CSA -63,894 , Pittsburgh CSA -78,337 and Detroit CSA -138,686, Metro Cleveland has just slightly more than half of Metro Detroit's 5.2 million and Metro Pittsburgh slightly less than half. Btw i like to use CSA when dealing with Detroit because it is the quintessential urban doughnut.

You can do the math all these cities suffered Detroit is just bigger and was hit harder by the recession because the auto industry was already hurting before 08' so its problems are on a larger scale and therefore they get more attention but were all in the same boat. But looking at how far the city of Detroit has come with the resurgence of the central core and the fact that there is now regional cooperation with a metro area that has the 8th highest percent of millionaire's per population of major metro areas in the country. This is the best way i could think to represent the wealth of Southeast Mi and not to mention this region has world class research and development schools and institutions along the resurgence of Automation Alley which is now part of building the new Google driver-less car among other things its easy to argue that Detroit's "come back' is just as big if not bigger than its fellow Great Lakes cities.

[fflint]

According to the PBS NewsHour, Detroit is each week demolishing 250 of its current stock of 80,000 dilapidated buildings. The city intends to spend nearly $1,000,000,000 tearing down the rest, on which the Guardian reports, "No other American city has ever attempted such a large-scale operation." Another 53,000 currently occupied homes in the city of Detroit are eligible for tax foreclosure, with a third of those being put up for auction by Wayne County this month.

National Geographic, in last month's report on Detroit city's 5,900 illegal dump sites (one of which is two stories tall over an area of two football fields), reported the city earlier this year tallied up a total of 70,933 total vacant lots:



Meanwhile, one of the city's bankruptcy judges (yes, Detroit is still in bankruptcy court) gave the city the green light to cut off the water supply to thousands of Detroit's poorest residents, and whether or not the courts will force the city to sell off its public museum's art collection is still up in the air.

Despite some new construction in the core, unremarkable by national standards, Detroit--not just the small, non-blighted portions its blinkered boosters want us to focus on, but the entirety of the city--is not a suitable poster-boy for urban revival in the Rust Belt, or anywhere else, which is why the article rightly refuses to characterize it as such.

[Docta_Love]

80,000 vacant building really i hadn't heard it must my narrow provincial mind trying to block out what i don't want to hear. But seriously i grew up in Southeast Michigan i know exactly how bad things have gotten in the city better than say someone who say lives hundreds of miles away and has gathered their viewpoint by what they read online.

The city can fit San Fran (which is one of my favorite parts of cali although i do prefer the Truckee - Tahoe area) Boston and Manhattan in it. Even with a 3rd of it vacant you still got a city the area of two of those cities. When most of the city was built Detroit was the wealthiest city in the country, call it bones or whatever you want the point is Detroit was built as a world class city and not to mention with more art deco than any other city other than NY or Chi-town. Yeah the old working class areas have hollowed out but its not the case that there are only small parts of the city that area non-blighted most of the city has a mixture of good and bad in a only in Detroit kind of way.

In Detroit you have a mixture of areas that were built for what was at the time one of the worlds greatest cities and abandonment that is on a greater scale than in anywhere in the country but you still have the bones of a world class city and reconnecting them isn't a pipe dream its already begun the Woodward corridor's only missing piece in the redevelopment picture at the moment is Highland Park, Jefferson also is coming along. But just because Detroit's comeback hasn't had any mega projects yet doesn't discredit it, there have been billions spent on renovations in the downtown area.There has been an unprecedented amount of public-private partnership involved with efforts to revive the city which have been looked nationally as a model for getting hard pressed development efforts going when neither side has the resources on its own. It actually seems like barring any economic downturn the core has reached the tipping point where the development has become sustainable not just based on tax credits. In ten to 20 years Detroit will be a completely different and better city even if it only has 600,000 or 500,000 the land bank is getting homes out of the hands of slum lords and using the future city plan as a template to re-purpose vacant land and especially those urban prairies the aspect that the city is most maligned for could be its greatest asset.

Speaking of the bankruptcy Detroit was bankrupt when NY was back in the 70s but was propped up by the state, whats changed is the state finally gets that it needs a healthy Detroit because people see pics of the ruins and think that 90% of the city is like that. The restructuring of the city government that is coming when the city exits bankruptcy which is progressing is needed sorely, the broken aspects of city government have always been one of the biggest complaints of residents up there with crime and the schools and the fixing of the gov is the first step to fixing the others. But that's really the key the city wont rise without good governance, Duggan has been doing a good job so far with his limited powers targeting dumping in residential areas and getting the most dangerous vacant structures in residential areas torn down.

[Steely Dan]

^ if the newest SEMCOG estimates for 2014 are on the mark (they now have the city estimated at 652,000), then that's a loss of roughly 9% of the city's population in just the 4 years since census 2010! other major cities in the rust belt are still struggling on the population front as well, but detroit is at an entirely different level right now, and the continuing population free fall is what drives the perception that detroit is still a massively struggling, decaying, dying city, despite some positive momentum in the core.

until the city of detroit (and i'm not talking about the metro or CSA or whatever, just the actual city) can get the population exodus under control, i'm afraid that the positive things happening in the core of the city will continue to be overshadowed to a large extant in popular and media perceptions.

i'm from chicago and i know all about how core rebound can be overshadowed by city-wide decline. from 2000 to 2010, chicago led the entire nation in adding people to its downtown core (defined by the census bureau as a 1 mile radius around city hall). we had a population increase of ~45,000 new downtown residents in just one decade! but the city overall lost around 200,000 people in that same decade as neighborhoods in struggling areas continued to bleed people to the burbs and other locales. the loss of the 200,000 people was the national media story, not the 45,000 people who had moved into a profoundly rejuvenated downtown chicago. great, amazing things were happening in downtown chicago as the city witnessed one of the greatest skyscraper building booms in its entire history, but the continued struggles and population loss of the city at large was what most media outlets were talking about.

[Docta_Love]

Yeah that's absolutely true i don't know enough about the methods to judge whether SEMCOG's numbers or US Cencus numbers are right but it doesnt matter either way the bleeding of population is going still at a rapid rate and the city will continue to lose population at least the through the next decade if not decades by all but the most optimistic forcast. The reason's why people still are leaving the city in those large numbers haven't been gotten under control yet the high crime rate poor, city schools and blight. Although on a bright note i recently heard supposedly homicides are down and could be down to 47 year lows if the recent trends continue according to Police Chief Craig, but at the same time resources were taken out of narcotics to accomplish this and on that end arrests are down significantly.

I'm not trying to deny that Detroit doesn't have more problem's than any other major city in the country right now and i didn't sign up here so i can be another voice sayin nice things about Detroit, i'm just a dude who was lucky enough to have been able to travel throughout my life (partially because of an uncle who was v.p. of Reno Airline's) to a lot of really cool cities and places so naturally perhaps i've wanted to become an Urban Planner and i happen to be about to transfer to the University of Michigan to study Urban Planning. Its just that i see all these huge things happening in a city that isn't as bad as its made out to be sometime online and was just trying to make that point and perhaps got a lil carried away.

[EuphoricOctopus]

Originally Posted by hudkina

Never mind that Detroit has probably seen more investment than any of the three cities highlighted and is probably the closest thing to a "Brooklyn of the Midwest" these days.

^ This and that's with the population loss and bankruptcy which makes it even more impressive.

[hudkina]

Despite some new construction in the core, unremarkable by national standards, Detroit--not just the small, non-blighted portions its blinkered boosters want us to focus on, but the entirety of the city--is not a suitable poster-boy for urban revival in the Rust Belt, or anywhere else, which is why the article rightly refuses to characterize it as such.

Do you realize how much of a douchebag you sound like right now?


How unremarkable!!!!

[fflint]

Originally Posted by hudkina

Do you realize how much of a douchebag you sound like right now?

I provided links to mainstream media sources reporting on several critical aspects of Detroit's dour predicament, and I did so to support my conclusion that the article in the original post of this thread correctly excluded Detroit from being a notable example of the urban revival in the Rust Belt. You can disagree with me and disagree with the article, but there's no reason to resort to personal insults like "douchebag." You're not going to change minds or win arguments with childish behavior.

[MayDay]

Originally Posted by fflint

You can disagree with me and disagree with the article, but there's no reason to resort to personal insults like "douchebag." You're not going to change minds or win arguments with childish behavior.

Especially on this forum, where it takes more than carefully selected before/after photos of high-profile projects as if those cancel out other issues - and yes, that includes Cleveland.

[hudkina]

The point of the article is to highlight revival stories in the Rust Belt cities. I think the Detroit Riverwalk and Dequindre Cut would be two such examples. As would the new mixed-use entertainment district, the streetcar line under construction, Campus Martius park, the thousands of jobs that have returned to the CBD, the thousands of new housing units built and renovated in the central city, etc.

The point of the article isn't to highlight the problems that these cities still face. And yes every one of the cities has major problems that still need to be addressed.

The continued decline of certain neighborhoods in the outer city doesn't negate the massive amount of progress that all of the Rust Belt cities have seen in the central city. Detroit doesn't need a prosperous Brightmoor to ensure future success. Brightmoor and the other older, working-class neighborhoods can return to nature. As long as the core continues to see revitalization, that's all that matters.

[Jelly Roll]

Originally Posted by hudkina

The point of the article is to highlight revival stories in the Rust Belt cities. I think the Detroit Riverwalk and Dequindre Cut would be two such examples. As would the new mixed-use entertainment district, the streetcar line under construction, Campus Martius park, the thousands of jobs that have returned to the CBD, the thousands of new housing units built and renovated in the central city, etc.

The continued decline of certain neighborhoods in the outer city doesn't negate the massive amount of progress that all of the Rust Belt cities have seen in the central city. Detroit doesn't need a prosperous Brightmoor to ensure future success. Brightmoor and the other older, working-class neighborhoods can return to nature. As long as the core continues to see revitalization, that's all that matters.

Do you have any numbers to show Detriot has had more investment versus the other three cities cited? I would think the new PNC building would give Pittsburgh the edge but I am interested to see how much investment these cities have and maybe compare it to Baltimore and Philadelphia?

[ShooFlyPie]

so for those that look at the glass half full; Detroit has a growing and vibrant core while just converting some of its few older outside neighborhoods into wonderful urban gardens with lollipop trees, giant beanstalks, and packs of wild dogs.

[mind field]

Detroit is possibly not seeing the investment levels it's Midwest peers are seeing, but it's not far behind. The city's bankruptcy was a needed and good thing, even if its image suffered even more.

Home sales in desirable neighborhoods, some of which are many miles from the core, are seeing multiple offers and selling for above asking price at times.

There are large scale efforts to remove blight and bring stability to struggling areas of the city such as a recent initiative by GM, quicken loans, and foundations to revitalize the neighborhood around Cody high school.

In the core, I have been tracking development since the late 90s. Downtown has never seemed better off than it is today. Yes this city still struggles mightily, but at the same time it's seeing a ton of investment.

[dc_denizen]

How hard could it be to fill in this pic with 5000 homes on the interspersed vacant lots? Cmon, billionaire hipster philathropists..

[montréaliste]

I think that in terms of urbanity in its core, Detroit still has to address the issue of rehabbing some of the older highrises and skyscrapers before giving rise to new stuff. Detroiters need to support what is left of an important architectural heritage.

The time is ripe for rehabbing buildings like the Wurlitzer especially now that there is substantial investment downtown. Wherever possible, older buildings should be integrated in larger schemes to frame them by modernity, and thus avoid the wholesale erasure of a collective memory.