The city of Detroit faces a catch-22: It must modernize to attract residents, but in order to modernize, it needs residents as a tax and community base.
That is the premise of Bill Adler’s article for Grist, which takes Detroit’s conundrum a step further in recognizing an important trend for growth: Going green.
Adler compares Detroit to other cities across the country, including Portland, Oregon, in analyzing how Detroit can grow and attract more residents, in particular Millennials — the new young urban professional.
Detroit’s weather, crime rate, lack of adequate emergency services, high tax rates, and lack of transportation — among other things —conspire to keep the city unattractive. So how to change that?
Greening is important, Adler writes. Part of that is urban density, now recognized as an environmental good for reducing carbon emissions. Detroit has a density of about 5,100 people per square mile, closer to suburban-style cities like San Jose than it is to other industrial-era cities, like Chicago (12,000) or Washington, D.C. (10,000). Its current density is slightly higher than Portland, Oregon, which has been recognized for its urban planning and its attractiveness to Millennials and entrepreneurs.
Detroit has existing infrastructure to support greater density, and can do more — expanding public transportation, investing in urban neighborhoods like Midtown and Corktown, expanding renewal efforts to other potentially up-and-coming areas, and turning itself into an incubator or business hub for certain business segments, such as biotechnology — could help the city become attractive to new residents.
Residents also need jobs, and Detroit does have them, with 232,000 existing jobs and just 169,000 employed Detroit residents. The problem there is that many of Detroit’s high income workers commute into the city from suburbs, while Detroit’s urban poor commute out for minimum-wage positions. Further, the city’s transportation structure is car-centric due to its early years, and it is behind the times in implementing public transit.
Detroit does have one thing in stock that could be very attractive to home buyers: Architecture. The city has Tudors and Italianate and Romanesque Revival mansions in stock and for sale. However, the surplus of beautiful homes is actually another detriment, right now, as homes are bulldozed lest they become a magnet for crime or fire hazards.
All hope is not lost, Adler writes, noting that other cities (he calls them Legacy cities) facing similar problems have managed to bounce back, or are in the process of doing so, among them Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Brooklyn.
But first, Detroit needs to figure out how to bring in people who want to live in the urban core, and provide them with the services necessary to stay.