Metro Detroit’s longstanding city-suburb dynamic is being turned on its head

In metropolitan Detroit right now, the shoe fits squarely on the other foot: The central city is booming, attracting jobs, people, new businesses and investment in droves. Suburban leaders, meanwhile look on in rising panic as employers including Google, Microsoft and Tata Technologies ditch their far-flung office parks for urban digs closer to the action — and workforce talent.

It’s the ultimate irony, considering that most of Detroit’s suburbs grew at the direct expense of the city itself. Starting not with the 1967 revolt, as conventional wisdom has it, but during the 1950s (thanks to freeway expansion, urban renewal, federal housing policies and straight-up racism) the suburbs began sucking up jobs and residents who fled the ailing city and crippled its tax base, exacerbating a cycle of decline.

For as long as I can remember, Detroit’s pain was literally the suburbs’ gain.

Today, people are once again embracing all things urban. People young and old want to be part of walkable, vibrant neighborhoods, seeking out places that offer a sense of, well, place.

And that’s frankly freaking out leaders like Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and his Macomb County counterpart, Mark Hackel. Maybe for good reason.

It’s been interesting to me lately to keep these forces in mind as I drive around our sprawling megalopolis and take stock of this place we call metro Detroit. More often than not, it’s not a pretty picture.

The abandoned Summit Place Mall in Waterford. | Wikimedia Commons

We’re a region in which charm and authenticity are in short supply. You get the sense that many suburbs essentially started when GM found land for a huge assembly plant, and planners chose to surround it with wide, divided boulevards on which detached businesses, surface lots and broad grassy medians could flourish — the urban planning vision of a Robert Moses. Entire inner-ring suburbs suffer from badly outdated mid-century housing stock of limited redevelopment potential. Blue-collar Macomb County looks especially tattered.

As urban planner Pete Saunders wrote recently on New Geography, “Unlike most other metro areas, Detroit’s suburbs doubled down on suburbia in a major way, and never envisioned a future where the city would even begin to make a credible comeback.”

One of the key points Saunders makes is that from 1970 to 2016, the Detroit region has managed only to shrink in population.

For more than half a century, the city of Detroit has been losing population and tax base to the suburbs — first as whites moved out, and more recently as the black middle class has fled. But more people left the region than came in. Now, the city’s population losses are at the lowest level in years, and experts say it’s not inconceivable that Detroit might start growing population in the next few years. Spend time in the central city, and it’s not hard to overhear or meet people who’ve moved here from New York City, the Bay Area or other cosmopolitan but overpriced urban areas.

It’s clear that in order to get our region growing, we need to get the city of Detroit growing. That remains a herculean task, with a yawning poverty rate and major educational shortcomings, but in many ways, the city is becoming a more and more attractive place than it’s been in decades.

A typical suburban Detroit vista. | Creative Commons photo via Mike Kalasnik

As my partner Jeremiah writes today in an excellent op-ed at Daily Detroit, one of the biggest reasons our region has stagnated over time is the city-suburbs bunker mentality that has tainted our discourse for too long, a sense that we’re not a unified region and that the suburbs can somehow exist — and even thrive — without a functional, productive urban core.

Supporting more robust regional transit would be another way. Incidentally, a lot of people believe that fear of an ascendent Detroit is a big reason that Patterson and Hackel and other suburban elected officials have stonewalled the regional transit proposal (which is now officially dead for 2018, by the way). That they oppose the plan in part because they see it as making it easier for people to get from the ‘burbs to downtown Detroit, where all the jobs are going. (Although let’s be clear — there are many other forces at play in this calculus.)

And yes, fixing our third-world roads will also be necessary.

Other far more creative solutions will be needed to help nudge our sprawling region into the 21st century with the rest of the world. It will be difficult, and some suburbs face a much steeper hill to climb than others. (For example, it’s instructive to take a drive west down Nine Mile Road from Warren, through Hazel Park and into Ferndale. The contrasts in just a few short miles are stark.) And frankly, much of the entrenched political leadership doesn’t see any need to disrupt the status quo.

I constantly come back to this thought: for Detroit and the entire region, the latter half of the 20th century amounted to a giant failure on so many fronts. Why wouldn’t we look to try some new things?