Detroit.html

Detroit Free Press, April 10, 1999

In 1916, stores lined downtown Woodward and the city was alive with industry. (Photo courtesy of Manning Bros.)

Government choices sped Detroit's blight
BY JOHN GALLAGHER Free Press Business Writer

The downtown Detroit that Compuware is moving to is one of the most blighted urban landscapes in America. It has remained that way despite plan after ambitious plan to revive it over the last quarter-century.

Before asking whether Compuware can change that, it helps to know how downtown got that way.

It was no accident.

The decline of downtown since World War II reflects a set of public and private policies and decisions to build the suburbs and neglect central cities.

Beginning in the boom years after the war, the federal government spent billions of dollars extending freeways, and sewer and water systems, to the suburbs. The idea was to give cities some breathing room, but planners were shocked when people and jobs fled cities for new suburbs.

At the same time, through such agencies as the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration, the government was offering cheap mortgages. Across the nation, contractors built millions of suburban homes certain that there would be buyers for them.

These policies continue, with the federal government spending about five times as much on highways in the 1990s as on public transit systems.

"All of these were pushes that allowed people to create the fringe cities and the kind of development that people wanted," says Harriet Saperstein, president of HP Devco, a Highland Park redevelopment agency.

Racism and the 1967 riot also drove people from Detroit. After the riot, says Rainy Hamilton Jr., a downtown architect, "it was uphill all the way."

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By 1989, the businesses had gone to the South or to the suburbs, drawn by lower wages and aided by transport and communication advances. (Free Press photo by Keith Piaseczny)
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Already leaving

But suburban sprawl was well under way -- and probably irreversible -- by 1967. The city's population had peaked at about two million people in the early '50s, about 15 years before the unrest.

The car provided Americans with unprecedented mobility and allowed them to adopt a new way of living. Millions opted for a suburban lifestyle of big backyards, shopping at the mall and driving to work -- over the city lifestyle of smaller lots, shopping at the corner grocery and taking the bus.

"There is no question that the development of the malls, and the perception that malls were easier to get around and safer, and that you didn't pay out-of-pocket for parking, was a factor," Saperstein says.

The popularity of suburban malls meant fewer people came downtown to shop. The result was the closing of all the old department stores, including the landmark Hudson's in early 1983. Each closure, in turn, gave people even fewer reasons to come downtown.

All big, older cities suffered an exodus to some degree -- Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Washington, Boston, New York -- but Detroit suffered more than any, for reasons only partially clear.

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A mud-filled hole remains Friday on what had been the site of the landmark Hudson's building. The building stood vacant for 15 years before being torn down last year. (Free Press photo by Patricia Beck)
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Good-bye, jobs

The loss of factories was especially wounding as well.

Throughout the 19th Century, writes historian Thomas Sugrue in his 1997 book, "Origins of the Urban Crisis," industry tended to concentrate in central locations -- like Detroit in the 1920s.

By the 1950s, however, advances in communication and transportation and the lure of low-wage, nonunion areas like the South drew industry -- starting with the auto companies -- away.

Between 1947 and 1963, Sugrue writes, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs.

"Laid-off workers were also consumers whose loss of buying power rippled throughout the city's economy," Sugrue writes, "affecting local businesses from department stores and groceries to restaurants and bowing alleys. The growing gap between job seekers and job opportunities would have profound ramifications in subsequent decades."

Between 1947 and 1958, Sugrue writes, the Big Three built 25 plants in the metropolitan Detroit area. All were in the suburbs, most more than 15 miles from the center city.

Other factors played a part in downtown's decline.

One can be found in Detroit's early-20th-Century history. At the birth of the auto industry, none of the automakers that became the Big Three chose downtown as its home. Ford Motor Co. went to Dearborn, Chrysler Corp. to Highland Park and General Motors Corp. to a patch of land that became known as New Center.

This decentralization of power deprived downtown of a nucleus that might have held the center in later decades.

Michigan's system of strong local government also hurt Detroit. Outlying townships wield enormous home-rule powers to plan for growth without any outside oversight.

As the same time, says Gerald Crane, professor emeritus of architecture and planning at the University of Michigan, the older central city was restrained by laws that made annexing land north of 8 Mile impossible. That meant Detroit could not capture any of the growth benefits.

Many earlier plans to revive downtown foundered on the rocks of low real estate values, fear of crime, the high cost of parking and miscalculations.

A coalition led by industrialist Henry Ford II built the Renaissance Center in the mid-1970s to save downtown. But the gargantuan development did little more than create a well-to-do fortress on the riverfront that left the rest of downtown emptier and more blighted than ever.

The late Coleman Young, during his 20 years as mayor, strove mightily to find ways to rebuild. He built the People Mover, but found it did little, if anything, to stem the outward tide of jobs and people. Meanwhile, his adversarial demeanor and tactics alienated business leaders he needed to revive downtown.

All the while, a poorly equipped city government found itself unable to cope with downtown's mounting number of blighted and abandoned buildings.

Saperstein says the Lafayette Park residential development could have served as a model for new urban living. But it should have extended south to the riverfront and west into downtown, instead of being confined to an area just east of downtown.

And, then, the huge Hudson's building stood empty for 15 years as a rebuke to the city's hopes for revitalization. It was demolished last year.

Other empty landmarks, like the Book Cadillac Hotel, still stand. The city has been unable to either tear them down or find new uses for them. These examples of blight tarnished the city's reputation and hindered redevelopment.

Now, with the promise of Compuware, downtown's long decades of decline may finally be checked.