In those years after I returned to my job as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press from the lengthy newspaper strike in 1997, Detroit was touching bottom. The population was sliding, employers were still leaving, and crime seemed rampant, at least in some parts of the city.
The following is an excerpt from Rust Belt Reporter: A Memoir by John Gallagher and released by Wayne State University Press.
By John Gallagher
To many a viewer, the state of cities in the late ’90s and early 2000s may have seemed as dismal as the fate of the newspaper industry. But new ideas, new ways of doing things, were beginning to pop up. These would create, if not a full-blown renaissance, at least the opening pages of a new chapter, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the city of Detroit.
In those years after I returned to my job as a reporter at the Detroit Free Press from the lengthy newspaper strike in 1997, Detroit was touching bottom. The population was sliding, employers were still leaving, and crime seemed rampant, at least in some parts of the city. The percentage of Detroiters in the workforce—holding jobs or actively looking for one—was under 50 percent, the lowest percentage of workforce participation of any major city. As I wrote earlier, whatever the metric—crime, school test scores, poverty rates, infant mortality, the number of vacant properties—Detroit seemed to sit alone at the extreme end. Even if its woes were part of a more general, national urban crisis, with wealthier suburbs ringing poorer and Blacker inner cities, Detroit stood out for its distress. Detroit, once the mighty industrial heart of the nation, had become the world’s poster child of Rust Best abandonment.
But things started to happen in the first decade of the 2000s that set Detroit on the path to recovery. Many of these trends happened off stage, out of the main headlines, and often nobody noticed amid the city’s ongoing problems. But in my daily work covering the city I saw more and more encouraging signs. And these disparate elements would set the stage for what the world finally noticed was a remarkable urban turnaround.
Not far from where I lived on Detroit’s east side, an installation known as arthworks Urban Farm had grown on some former vacant lots. It had been established by a Catholic order of priests known as the Capuchins, who operated a community kitchen nearby, and the food from the farm made up much of the fare served to the homeless. The farm manager at that time, Patrick Crouch, showed me his spreadsheets keeping track of dozens of crops planted on a rotation basis, from tomatoes and strawberries to eggplant and squash. Beekeeping to produce honey was a sideline, there and elsewhere in Detroit. Meanwhile, on the city’s far west side, the activist Malik Yakini had created D-Town Farm as part of an effort not only to feed people but to create a measure of restorative social justice for Black Detroiters. Elsewhere small community gardening plots were sprouting on vacant lots throughout the city, hundreds of them. One I wrote about was tended by prison inmates awaiting their release at a halfway house. I found it driving by one day; seeing a man working the beds I stopped to chat with him.
And the world began to notice. Many of us who fielded calls from out-of-towners coming to visit the city—artists, architects, urban planners, economists, academics of various stripes—used to be asked for a tour of the burned-out factories and homes, what Detroiters took to calling “ruin porn.” But at some point, the visitors were asking to see the urban farms and other uses Detroiters were making of vacant and abandoned urban land. Late in that decade, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, with backing from the Kresge Foundation and other funders, created a program called Cities in Transition to take urban influencers from Detroit, Cleveland, Flint, and other U.S. cities to see what creative people were doing in the shrinking European cities. I went on two of these exploratory visits, to Leipzig, Germany, and Manchester, England, on the first one, and to Hamburg, Germany, on the second. And there I learned that reinventing vacant urban spaces was a matter of urgency everywhere, and that creative people in cities far and wide were looking to Detroit to lead by example. The repurposing of vacancy through urban farming and other strategies seemed to be what first gave Detroit the flavor of reinvention that would help create its emerging reputation as the Comeback City.
This effort was aided immeasurably by a change in approach at the region’s many philanthropic foundations. Detroit, despite being one of the poorest cities in America, could boast a vast legacy wealth from the early success of the automotive industry. A lot of that wealth now resided in the upscale suburbs, but a lot also resided in the many foundations created during the city’s glory years—the Ford Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, and many others. One in particular, the Kresge Foundation, founded on the wealth of the Kresge family’s five-and-dime stores that grew into Kmart, led the way. Under its new leader Rip Rapson, who arrived in 2006, it began to reimagine how a foundation could impact a city. Instead of sitting back and passively writing checks for good causes, Rapson led Kresge to put not just dollars but staff time and expertise into leading recovery efforts across many fields, from urban farming
to the arts to human services. And it poured money into high-profile activities. (Even before Rapson arrived, Kresge had gifted $50 million toward re-creating the city’s derelict waterfront as the splendid new RiverWalk promenade.) The involvement of the many different foundations taking a more activist leadership role in Detroit provided both money and talent when the city’s strapped municipal leadership could provide neither.
Another new tactic: So beset with problems had Detroit’s city hall become that in the early 2000s the city began to spin off functions into a whole series of nonprofit conservancies, public authorities, and nonprofit corporations. Unlike the often disreputable practice of out-sourcing public functions to profit-making companies, this spinning off of city operations in Detroit proved hugely successful. Two of Detroit’s great public places, the RiverWalk and the central downtown Campus Martius Park, were built not by the city’s underfunded parks and recreation department but by nonprofit conservancies. The city’s beleaguered Eastern Market, the remnant of a farmer’s market
dating back decades, was restructured as the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation in 2006 and, with cash from the Kresge Foundation, rebounded to become one of America’s best public markets, visited by thousands of shoppers each market day. The city’s convention center, Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place) was handed off in 2009 to a regional public authority that immediately reversed years of decline and deferred maintenance. There were many other spinoffs—the city’s historical museum, public lighting, workforce development agency, and others all slipped away from direct city control—not without controversy, of course, but ultimately ceded—and all flourished under their new nonprofit management structures.
Neighborhood nonprofits, the old block clubs that in many cases had grown into professionally staffed and funded community development organizations, did amazing work in neighborhoods where they were present. Most famously in Detroit, the nonprofit Midtown Detroit, Inc., led by the indefatigable Sue Mosey, led the turnaround in the city’s Midtown area—the museum, university, and hospital district north of downtown—making it the most notable of Detroit’s many revitalized districts. But there were many other successes attributable as well to the neighborhood activists.
And a new entrepreneurial spirit was sprouting. It was offering hope in a city whose signature auto industry with its vast workforces was a fading memory. Detroit’s new startups took many forms, from new smart phone apps created by technology geeks to food production to bridal salons and bookstores and coffee shops and much more. I would write extensively about these startups in the Free Press and, later, in a book called The Englishman and Detroit. It chronicled the role of British entrepreneur Randal Charlton, who came to Detroit in 2000 and went on to lead the creation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem as director of the new TechTown startup incubator in Midtown. In early 2000, there was no such ecosystem, virtually no venture capital available to bankroll startups, no training programs for entrepreneurs, no incubators, no culture of risk-taking in what had been the ultimate corporate town. Beginning thereafter, Detroit began to see all of that necessary ecosystem growing and flourishing, and numerous refugees from the auto industry and other parts of corporate America began to try their hand at startups.
As a business writer focusing on urban redevelopment, all these trends became the stuff of my daily coverage. But by 2010 or so, most of the main elements of Detroit’s recovery were in place. These would all hold lessons for other cities, and indeed were getting noticed from afar, even if in Detroit itself they were often overlooked as other crises loomed.
Perhaps not every other city could take advantage of these same tactics. Detroit, after all, had advantages, hard as it may be to think so. There was the legacy wealth held by the newly active foundations, and not all cities have that. Detroit had done exceptionally well with its series of municipal spinoffs, but there’s no guarantee other cities would be so fortunate. Then, too, Detroit’s rock-bottom reputation generated enough sympathy that eventually many people, in the Obama White House and elsewhere, wanted to help save the city once Detroit filed for municipal bankruptcy in 2013. And not every city that files for municipal bankruptcy can count on being as fortunate as Detroit was in its bankruptcy settlement in 2014. But at bottom, what other cities need comes down to a more elusive quality, which made all the difference in Detroit—a willingness to think anew and act anew.
If in Detroit these improvements were happening off stage, mostly out of the headlines, one reason is that Detroit was distracted by the mounting troubles of its young mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. Back when Kwame Kilpatrick occupied the mayor’s mansion in Detroit (and not the federal prison cell he occupied later), his father,
Bernard Kilpatrick, used to live in my building on Detroit’s east side. Grandfather Bernard would babysit his son’s kids and I frequently met Mayor Kilpatrick in the lobby as he was picking them up. He was always friendly toward me, although he knew me as a journalist, and showed little or none of the reserve that you might expect between elected official and a reporter who wrote frequently about him. But then his strong suit as mayor was moving real estate development projects through the city’s bureaucracy, one of the few signs of hope in a dispirited city, and since I covered most of these stories, we usually met on friendly ground.
Like everyone in those first years of the Kilpatrick era in Detroit I found it impossible not to be impressed and heartened by the promise the young mayor exuded. Among much else, he had the knack of picking up on my line of questions in an interview and giving me the exact perfect quote for my stories. Maybe I should have been a little more skeptical of that ability, but at the time it was uncannily helpful, especially on deadline. And his public remarks before audiences could be eloquent, even moving. Once, with Tom Walsh, the
Free Press’s business columnist then, I attended a ceremony to mark the end of renovations of Detroit’s Renaissance Center that had become the world headquarters of General Motors. Kilpatrick’s remarks to the assembled GM workers were so spot on that Tom and I had to admit that one of the perks of our jobs was listening to Kwame Kilpatrick make a speech.
One of my colleagues, M. L. Elrick, warned me early on that Kilpatrick was a liar and a crook. I’m not sure how he saw through the performance so much earlier than the rest of us, but of course he was right. Elrick and Jim Schaefer would win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the text message scandal that cost the mayor his job and sent him to jail. The federal prison term that followed came after a corruption conviction that further demoralized the already beleaguered city. But by then we were all aware of how much we had been lied to. Once, as rumors surfaced of the married Kilpatrick’s dalliances with other women, I was part of a scrum of reporters who questioned him at a public event. Standing with his arm around his wife, Carlita, Kilpatrick told us he would never betray the mother of his children in that way. And of course he was lying. His philandering didn’t send him to prison; public corruption and perjury did that. But his many unseemly betrayals—of his wife, his city, and of the promise he brought to the public stage—make his tenure a bad memory.
Another reason why the nascent improvements in Detroit got little notice was the implosion of the subprime mortgage market and the Great Recession of 2007–9. This economic collapse hit Detroit with the utmost severity; tens of thousands of Detroit homeowners slipped into foreclosure, with a catastrophic loss of family wealth and the further abandonment of many structures. Detroit was hardly alone in this misery; the subprime debacle plunged the nation into the most severe recession since the 1930s. But Detroiters, awash in foreclosure problems, could be forgiven for not noticing that operations like Eastern Market and the RiverWalk and the convention center were all doing well under new management, or that nonprofit neighborhood groups like Midtown Detroit, Inc., were growing increasingly skilled at bringing needed development to their districts.
Why did I find this all so fascinating? Going back to my college days in Chicago, I had always found cities so full of life, offering something for every imaginable taste, that I grew ever more absorbed by the urban scene. The novelist John O’Hara once said somewhere that he preferred cities to the countryside because he liked bookstores and shops and culture and anything that didn’t make him feel ashamed to be a human being. The suburbs were safe but bland. Cities were challenging, to be sure, but alive with promise if only that promise could be realized.
And if some cities like Detroit still bled from a thousand wounds, if civic leaders still made far too many mistakes, if decades of turnaround efforts had yielded too little in results, none of that diminished my interest in the urban tableau. In Detroit and other cities I found a story commensurate with my interests and talent. I felt more than lucky to spend my days writing about a world I found endlessly fascinating.
John Gallagher worked as an urban affairs reporter and columnist with the Detroit Free Press for more than 30 years before his retirement in 2019. His just-published memoir is Rust Belt Reporter (Wayne State University Press). While much of the coverage of Detroit’s highly touted recovery has focused on recent events including businessman Dan Gilbert’s many investments and Mayor Mike Duggan’s reforms, in this excerpt from his book Gallagher write about the earlier signs of urban recovery that he first noticed as early as 25 years ago.