THE PLAYERS: Groups, people helping downtown rebound

Date: June 21, 2007
By: John Gallagher
Source: Detroit Free Press

Dozens of groups and thousands of people are playing roles in revitalizing Detroit. Here are some major players:

City of Detroit: Through its departments and its quasi-public arm, the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., the city plays a major role in planning and supporting almost all new development within its borders. Besides Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, key players include George Jackson, president of the DEGC and Kilpatrick's chief development officer, and Derrick Miller, a Kilpatrick aide who serves as co-chair of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy.

General Motors: Since it bought the Renaissance Center for its new world headquarters, GM has played a major role in spurring redevelopment of the city's riverfront. Matt Cullen, GM's head of economic development, cochairs the Riverfront Conservancy, which oversees the new RiverWalk. Other private corporations playing big roles include Compuware and Ilitch Holdings.

Detroit Riverfront Conservancy: Created in 2002, the conservancy runs the $250-million effort to build, operate and maintain the RiverWalk. Now about half complete, the RiverWalk one day should encompass the entire 5.5-mile length of the riverfront from the Ambassador Bridge to Gabriel Richard Park near the MacArthur Bridge to Belle Isle. Faye Alexander Nelson, a former Wayne State University official, serves as the conservancy's president and CEO.

Downtown Detroit Partnership: Chaired by former Super Bowl Host chairman Roger Penske and run day-to-day by President and CEO Ann Lang, this group runs the Clean Downtown program. It also heads up the lobbying to create a business improvement district to market downtown attractions and maintain landscaping and visitor services.

Detroit 300 Conservancy: Working on contract with the City of Detroit, this nonprofit group designed, built and operates Campus Martius Park. Civil leader Edsel B. Ford II chairs the conservancy, while day-to-day operations are under President Robert Gregory.

Wayne State University: Besides increasing the size of its own campus, WSU promotes economic growth through its sponsorship of Tech Town, an incubator of high-tech start-up firms.

Ilitch Holdings: Now headed by President and CEO Christopher Ilitch, son of founders Mike and Marian Ilitch, this pizza and entertainment conglomerate owns the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Red Wings, the Fox Theatre, Hockeytown Café, Motor City Casino and lots of vacant real estate on the northern edge of downtown that may or may not one day become home to a new hockey arena.

Kresge Foundation: Headed by President and CEO Richard (Rip) Rapson, this Troy-based foundation launched the new Detroit RiverWalk in 2002 with matching grants of $50 million. That typified the way private foundations are playing a bigger, more direct role in redeveloping the city. Other foundations playing roles include the Skillman Foundation, Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan and Hudson-Webber Foundation.

Detroit Renaissance: This corporate leadership group, including leading CEOs and headed day-to-day by President Doug Rothwell, promotes economic growth in the city. Among other things, it has created the Detroit Investment Fund and other entities to help bankroll projects such as the Book-Cadillac Hotel renovation. It also contributed to the RiverWalk.

Eastern Market Corp.: Headed by President Katherine Beebe, this nonprofit umbrella group is working with the City of Detroit, other civic groups and Eastern Market businesses to upgrade and revitalize the market as a food-based regional attraction.

Preservation Wayne: This nonprofit group based in Detroit promotes the preservation and reuse of historic architecture. Although it does not undertake renovation projects itself, its promotion of historic architecture has helped shift development planning in Detroit from demolition to preservation.

Local Initiatives Support Coalition: Known as LISC, this nonprofit entity offers training and financial support to dozens of neighborhood redevelopment groups.

State of Michigan: The state plays a big part in promoting Detroit redevelopment through a wide variety of grants, loans and tax incentives.

Wayne County: With a big presence thanks to Wayne County courts, jails and government offices, the county promises to play and even bigger role downtown if county Executive Robert Ficano can pull off his plan for a major new criminal justice campus.

U.S. government: With a big presence downtown thanks to the McNamara Federal Building, the U.S. District Courthouse and other structures, the federal government is planning to build a major new regional FBI headquarters on the west edge of downtown.

Private developers: Private businessmen have spurred the renovation of dozens of sites in recent years. The best-known developers, such as the Ilitch family, are household names. Others include John Ferchill of Cleveland-based Ferchill Group, who is renovating the Book-Cadillac, and Bernie Glieberman of Novi-based Crosswinds Communities, who has built more than 200 new residential units in the Brush Park district.

Casinos: Detroit's three casinos -- MGM Grand Detroit, Motor City and Greektown -- are building permanent facilities. MGM and Motor City should open their completed projects by November; Greektown will follow about a year later.

Neighborhood groups: What started out as small, volunteer efforts 30 years ago have morphed into sophisticated, well-funded, professionally staffed development groups. Among the best known and most successful are the Warren-Conner Development Coalition and Bagley Housing Association.

Detroit seizes the moment to rebuild

Date: June 21, 2007
By: JOHN GALLAGHER, FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
Source: Detroit Free Press

As varied interests cooperate, results rise in concrete, steel

Detroit's new RiverWalk, which officially opens Friday in a splash of celebrations and special events, offers more than fountains, a carousel and waterfront promenade.

It also offers a new model of redeveloping Detroit.

Born of widespread regional cooperation, the project saw the City of Detroit, General Motors Corp., the Kresge Foundation and dozens of other public and private players team up to create the RiverWalk and its nonprofit governing body, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy.

In a region riven by city-suburban feuds over such issues as Cobo Center, bus routes and water rates, the RiverWalk shows that competing interests can and do cooperate to achieve major goals.

"We really created a sense of urgency by convincing ourselves that this was a moment in time," Matt Cullen, a GM executive who serves as co-chair of the nonprofit riverfront conservancy, said this week.

"Three hundred years of history on the riverfront, and there was never a time in our history when somebody had the opportunity to say, 'We're going to reclaim the whole thing.' It was the coming together of a powerful vision and a real sense of urgency."

Nor is the RiverWalk a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Similar models of public, private and nonprofit cooperation led to the creation of Campus Martius Park in 2004 and to the city's effort in hosting Super Bowl XL in 2006.

The same blend of city, corporate and nonprofit effort will see the Eastern Market reconstruction begin soon. The Riverfront Conservancy will take over operation and maintenance of an old railroad right-of-way known as the Dequindre Cut that the city is turning into a landscaped pedestrian and bike greenway.

This broader cast of characters marks a substantial change from development practices in the 1970s through the mid- to late 1990s, when then-Mayor Coleman Young often negotiated deals one-on-one with powerful executives such as Henry Ford II, Peter Stroh and Max Fisher.

"The old way is Hank the Deuce and Al Taubman and Mike Ilitch and Coleman Young would sit down, and they would get a project done," Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said this week. "But this is a new model, and because it's a new model, bringing everybody to the table, it's spurring so much development in other ways, people saying, 'Let's make it all happen.' "

Richard (Rip) Rapson, president and chief executive of the Kresge Foundation, which contributed $50 million in matching grants to create the RiverWalk, said the foundation tied its gifts to specific contributions and actions by others.

"It was an attempt to try to create the broadest possible spectrum of civic engagement in the project," he said.

Frustrations exist

This new model doesn't mean that development in Detroit has gotten easy, even for the RiverWalk.

"It's frustratingly slow at times," Cullen said. "There's a lot of times when it took a lot of cajoling and handholding to convince everybody to keep all the puppies in the box."

George Jackson, president of the city's Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and Kilpatrick's chief development officer, agreed.

"We haven't always been bosom buddies through the process," he said of the RiverWalk. "Not everyone agrees on everything. But I think the critical piece here, even with our differences, we all had the same objective, and we didn't let anyone get off the objective of making this a reality."

Robin Boyle, a Wayne State University urban planning professor, said the greater cooperation is real, not just a slogan.

"You do see a more diverse range of players who are making an impact. Is it a big enough impact? That's the $64,000 question. But at least it's different from 20 years ago, when the silver bullet was still being sought."

A turning point

Why the change? By the late '90s, planners began to realize the old single-player, single-project mode of development wasn't helping the city much.

Throughout the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, highly touted projects like the Renaissance Center, Riverfront Apartments, Harbortown and Stroh River Place tended to be individual projects that had little spin-off effect.

Similarly, Young's efforts to encourage new downtown skyscrapers saw two built -- One Detroit Center in 1992 and 150 W. Jefferson in 1989 -- but both did little more than take tenants from older downtown buildings.

"Back then, the focus was on building projects instead of building the city," said Larry Marantette, principal of the Detroit consulting firm Taktix Solutions who in the '80s helped develop the Harbortown project and later served as president of the Greater Downtown Partnership, which helped plan the Campus Martius area.

Beginning in the mid- to late '90s during the administration of Mayor Dennis Archer and continuing under Kilpatrick, planners have emphasized broader plans to revive entire districts, like the RiverWalk and Eastern Market.

"They're not one-off projects as much as a city rebuilding plan. There's a big difference," Marantette said this week.

New financial angles

Today's redevelopment efforts also benefit from a raft of new tax credits, investment pools and other aids that weren't available until the late '90s or later.

The Book-Cadillac Hotel renovation and several other recent downtown projects got part of their financing from the Detroit Investment Fund, a $52-million private capital fund set up by the corporate leadership group Detroit Renaissance to help revitalize the city.

"I think it's becoming a little more mainstream," said Colin Hubbell, a residential developer who has built several projects in the city's Midtown district. "There's more people that have gotten their arms around what we're doing in urban development."

Contact JOHN GALLAGHER at 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com.

Region must become 'mobility' capital

Date: June 20, 2007
By: Rod Gillum/Opinion
Source: The Detroit News

We are reminded each day by the global automotive business how essential it is for each region and each country to seize every opportunity this new century offers. For Metro Detroit, this must include taking full advantage of our existing infrastructure, the natural resources of the Great Lakes, our technically trained work force and the entrepreneurial spirit that has produced Motown, Compuware and Quicken Loans, among many other business successes.

Detroit Renaissance has addressed our region's need for new economic development with its "Road to Renaissance" plan. One of the plan's key strategies calls for Southeastern Michigan to become the world's dominant mobility center -- that is, the leader in next-generation transportation systems for moving people and goods.

For that to happen, we must accelerate our leadership in key automotive-related technologies, such as tooling and advanced energy systems. We also must look for ways to apply these technologies beyond the automotive sector.

A great example of the determination and flexibility needed to adjust to a changing economy can be found just 80 miles west of us -- in Lansing. Many pundits predicted Lansing would be economically devastated by the discontinuation of the Oldsmobile brand earlier in this decade.

But the region pulled together government, business, labor and civic leaders, and developed a proactive strategy for making Lansing one of the best communities for transportation/mobility investment. They fast-tracked permitting, retooled their education system, tailored business incentives and otherwise created a positive community environment for the auto industry.

As a result, GM committed to building two state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in the area. The Lansing Grand River plant has been instrumental in the revival of the Cadillac brand. The Lansing Delta Township plant is making GM's hot new crossovers, the GMC Acadia, Saturn Outlook and Buick Enclave.

Lansing's civic leaders remained focused in the face of adversity and made changes that improved the city's ability to attract investment. Today, we're pleased to be part of Lansing's history and its revival.

General Motors also is proud to be fully engaged in efforts to help Detroit achieve its full potential as the anchor of a region vitally important to our state -- and our nation. GM's commitment to Detroit and Southeastern Michigan is reflected in our investment in manufacturing, engineering and design facilities throughout the region, and the renovation of our Renaissance Center global headquarters complex -- including a portion of the new Detroit RiverWalk.

The Road to Renaissance plan for global mobility leadership calls for the creation of several nonprofit institutes that will facilitate the sharing of technology and other resources among companies engaged in mobility research and development. This plan can be the catalyst for innovative, creative strategies that make it easier to bring to market high-tech, environmentally friendly cars, trucks, crossover vehicles and other mobility products.

The Road to Renaissance can also help make Detroit a hub for development of the most sustainable forms of shipping, public transportation and other modes of mobility. It can give our region greater control of our own economic destiny.

Rod Gillum is vice president of corporate responsibility and diversity at General Motors Corp. and a board member of Detroit Renaissance. E-mail comments to letters@detnews.com.

Suburbs graying faster than cities

Date: June 20, 2007
By: Sam Roberts / New York Times
Source: The Detroit News

Senior baby boomers will put new demands on housing, health care, transit, social services.

America's suburbs, historically a haven for young families with children, are aging more rapidly than the nation's central cities as the first suburban generation grows older.

At the same time, there are early signs of a possible trend of wealthier and more educated older suburbanites moving to the cities.

Those findings, in a report released recently by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group, suggest that in most places, the fastest growth in elderly populations will result from the aging of baby boomers already living there, rather than from an infusion of retirees.

The over-65 population in Georgia is projected to rise more than 40 percent in the decade beginning in 2010 as residents grow older, but only 3 percent as a result of migration.

Florida attracts the most elderly migrants. But the fastest overall growth of elderly people over the next two decades is projected for Georgia and Arizona, the slowest in Pennsylvania and New York.

The study forecast widening age disparities between cities and increasingly older suburbs by 2040 in, among other places, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

"Suburbs, which previously were considered youthful and family-friendly parts of America, will, as more seniors age in place, become a fast-graying part of our national landscape," said William H. Frey, a Brookings demographer.

Frey said the extraordinary growth in the number of Americans from 55 to 64 would fuel a "senior tsunami" beginning in less than four years when the first baby boomers turn 65.

The greatest growth in the 55-to-64-year-old group has been in the West and in Sun Belt metropolitan areas (including Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; Raleigh, N.C.; Atlanta; and Phoenix) -- areas that, like the suburbs, were previously known for younger populations -- and in New Hampshire and Vermont, which have lured mobile workers attracted by the scenic beauty and small-town amenities.

From 2000-2010, the population in that age group is projected to rise across the board, ranging from an increase of 80 percent in Arizona to a still-robust 33 percent increase in New York.

Since 2000, the fastest growth in that population was registered in states that also recorded the most job growth. The slowest was in Rust Belt areas that had hemorrhaged jobs.

The new demographics of aging present unique opportunities and challenges, both for the elderly and for their neighbors. While New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, among others, may appeal to aging suburbanites, smaller cities and metropolitan areas are also marketing themselves as magnets for "suppies" -- urban professionals ages 65 to 74, who tend to be healthier and wealthier than older people.

Frey said the increasing share of the elderly in the suburbs would place new demands on housing, health care, transportation and social services.

Tell Us About It: Race Relations in Metro Detroit

While Metro Detroit has been identified as one of the most racially segregated regions in the nation, our growing diversity is one of our greatest strengths. United Way, metromode and New Detroit are interested in your thoughts on race relations in this community. Click here to take a quick survey about the subject.

Community Voice - ONE D and Marketing

I received an email the other day on ONE D: Transforming Regional Detroit from Erich Friebel, special projects intern at Habitat for Humanity Detroit. Special thanks to Erich for sharing his voice:

______________________
In order for One D to be truly effective in its regional approach there needs to be an implementation of a strong and wide ranging marketing campaign. All ages, races, ethnic groups, socio-economic levels must be approached. It is these divisions that have been perpetuated in metropolitan Detroit. One D must capitalize and bridge these gaps to show why we all have a serious stake in the empowerment of a cohesive region. The people will have the last say especially if attempting to change policy in order to establish a regional government. This should be the end result---regional government.

Erich Friebel
Special Projects Intern
Habitat for Humanity Detroit

_____________________

His email got me thinking about the Detroit's Visitor's Bureau new Branding Effort





What do you think? Feel free to post a comment or email us at impact.strategy@uwsem.org.

Michigan and Louisiana Lose Population

While Arizona Edges Nevada as Fastest-Growing State

Michigan experienced its first population loss between 2005 and 2006, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, since the early 1980s, when the economic recession led to population declines between 1980 and 1983 (see Figure 1). The primary reason for this loss was the large outmigration (over 65,000) of residents looking for jobs, in addition to the usual retirement movers and recent college graduates (detailed historical tables appear later). In spite of the loss, Michigan held its 8th place ranking though Georgia closed its 9th place gap by over 230,000 persons.

Read More

ONE D -- You Have A Voice

Two articles should grab your attention today on the coalition One D: Transforming Regional Detroit.

The first expresses concern that success is unlikely without the support from the broader community. Expert: Average Joe key to One D

For nearly a year now, United Way has been gleaning the community voice on the issues southeast Michigan cares most about. Well over 7,000 people have provided vital input to our effort.

Indeed, one voice was overwhelmingly outspoken: Residents, leaders and issue experts, by an 85% margin, expect the region to work better together.

ONE D illustrates the following: We're listening.

No doubt there is much work to be done and the community voice will continue to be vital. Through online surveys to community forums, United Way will ensure that the community voice is heard.

Another view for all of us to consider is from Daniel Howes of the Detroit News:
Shed the cynicism; One D could spell different Detroit

What are your thoughts? Does this answer the call to regional cooperation? What will these groups need to do to demonstrate success?

Email us your thoughts to impact.strategy@uwsem.org

Detroit's Growth -- Model D Readers Speak Out

Last week, United Way and Model D teamed up to ask readers to share their views on city living and how Detroit can become a better and more inviting place to live, work and play.

Over 800 people responded in just one week!

Very impressive -- when given the chance, just as we learned during the Community Action Survey, metro-detroiters rise to the challenge. Here's a sample of some of the comments we received to the question, "What should Detroit Do to Continue to Improve?"

“Build community, collaborate, be positive about the city and its future.”

“Continuously work to clean the city and ensure safety is a priority by any means necessary, otherwise the city’s negative perception nationally will be an ongoing struggle.”

“Don’t treat everything like it’s a race issue.”

“Focus on safety, transit, and public services.”

“I believe the leadership, both in the suburbs and in Detroit need to start working together to redo the basic infrastructure of educational, welfare, and educational system.”

“Its image and safety – everything else is in place.”

“Keep offering an authentic and compelling experience for visitors – illustrate the unique qualities of the city and draw people in with rich cultural and social events.”

“Mass Transit!”

“Think different, take risks and lead!”

Such thoughtful comments. You may agree or disagree and we welcome your continued feedback. To learn more, look for a brief report in the next issue of Model D this Tuesday or feel free to sign up for them by sending an email with your thoughts to impact.strategy@uwsem.org with the subject line "Model D Survey"

Partnerships: Model D & United Way Team Up

Interested in Detroit? Do you know what Model D is?

Click here to share your voice about Detroit?

ModelD and United Way have partnered to learn about the ideas, values and trends of the people who follow Detroit's continued revitalization. The main author covering that story is this stunning weekly online magazine bringing fresh perspective on how to learn and explore an authentic Detroit experience.

This first survey is about where you live, why and what it all means to you with respect to Detroit. Want to take it and tell us what you think?

Please, click here.

Telling the Regional Story

Our goal with the "What Matters Most to You" blog is to serve as a forum for the key results from our spring 2006 regional outreach and visioning process. Also we hope to share some of the meaningful stories we continue to receive from thousands across the region. Most importantly, we want a candid community conversation. As United Way continues its transformation process, this is one tool to help achieve that objective and tell the story along the way.

Over the next two weeks, we will be sharing some final results of the community outreach effort, including the regional aspiration and the broad categories universally identified as necessary for success.

So, please, come back and read more about what you and so many others shared when we asked that simple and powerful question: What matters most to you?

To share your voice further, email us at impact.strategy@uwsem.org