Detroit's rebound driven by believers investing in the city's future

By Neal E. Boudette

On a sunny Friday morning last month, Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, got behind the wheel of his black Jeep Grand Cherokee to give a tour of the city he has led for 10 years. Not far from Michigan Central Station, the former hulking ruin that was recently transformed into a gleaming office complex, he slowed to point to a construction site of vertical steel girders and yellow earth-moving machines. It will become a 600-room JW Marriott hotel, linked to the city’s convention centre and scheduled to open by 2027, when college basketball’s Final Four will be played in Detroit.
 

 

Farther west, more earth movers were crawling along a mile-long stretch of riverfront land, adding contours that will soon be a spacious, green recreation area, with elaborate play structures, a water park, basketball courts and outdoor workout equipment. It will be one of the final links in a 3.5-mile chain of parks, open spaces and bike paths that have replaced the warehouses and industrial yards that previously lined the Detroit River.
 

Just beyond the park stood a vestige of Detroit’s troubled past — a crumbling, boarded-up building that was once the Southwest Detroit Hospital, which closed 18 years ago. Detroit City FC, a professional soccer club, hopes to raze it and build a new stadium.
 

A mile or so away, Duggan, 66, pulled up at another construction site that will be the home of a University of Michigan research and innovation centre focusing on software, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. “This is where we are going to create the jobs of the future,” he said.
 

Twenty minutes later, Duggan stepped out of the Jeep at a small park off Rosa Parks Boulevard, north of downtown. In 1967, it was the site of an unlicensed after-hours club that was raided by the police. The action provoked a violent uprising that raged for five days, left 34 people dead, 1,200 injured, and more than 14,000 homes, buildings and stores burned or destroyed. The episode spurred the flight of thousands of residents from the city and marked the start of Detroit’s long, painful decline.
 

“We had tanks in the streets,” Duggan said softly. “This is where the violence began in 1967. So standing here now is very powerful.”
 

On this day, though, Detroit’s mayor strode into a bustling coffee shop nearby — called The Congregation — housed in a former small church. He was quickly recognised.
 

“Mayor!” a blonde woman with a nose piercing said, standing from a pew to shake his hand. Adelaide Welden, 34, is an example of the optimism building in Detroit, and the kind of young, urban pioneers the city is starting to attract. A Texas native, she moved to the city and bought a duplex that she and her fiancé are renovating. “I’m getting married next week!” she told Duggan with a smile. “I love Detroit.”
 

For more than half a century, Detroit has been widely viewed as the most troubled and seemingly unfixable example of urban decay in America; to many, it was the murder capital of the country. (And as recently as Thursday, former President Donald J  Trump, addressing the Detroit Economic Club, called the city a “mess.”)
 

At one point about 40 percent of its streetlights didn’t work. The city lost about two-thirds of its population, from more than two million people in the late 1950s to just over 600,000 in more recent years. The downtown was dotted with boarded-up office towers and apartment buildings left to rot. When the Super Bowl came to Detroit in 2006, organisers painted over storefronts to make them look occupied.
 

In 2013, the city hit its nadir: Burdened by $19 billion in debt, Detroit became the largest city in the United States to file for bankruptcy protection.
 

Since then, however, under Mayor Duggan, and with the help of some billionaire investors, Detroit has made progress reviving the downtown area as well as a nearby district known as Midtown, home to Wayne State Univer­sity, and the Corktown neighbourhood, once a stronghold of Irish immigrants.

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