Detroit’s Core Is Working on a Comeback

Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick beams as he shares the good news: His city will soon get its first Home Depot. And its first Borders books. Its first sushi bar is also on the way.

“All these things sound so small, but when you’re talking about Detroit, it’s a big deal,” Kilpatrick says. He corrects himself. It’s more than a big deal. “It’s incredible.”

Scarred by riots, crime and relentless white flight, Detroit lost half its population -- nearly 1 million residents -- between 1950 and 2000.

Now, after decades of decay, downtown Detroit seems poised for a comeback.

The impoverished neighborhoods outside downtown are still struggling. But there’s new energy in the heart of the city. People are increasingly eager to move downtown, even from the suburbs.

And new businesses are springing up to serve them. “For every customer we get, there are still two or three bums,” said Athena Byron, 25, who recently opened the first walk-up deli downtown. “But you can see the shift as more people are starting to move in.”

“The city is working again. That’s what it comes down to,” said John Ferchill, a Cleveland developer who is building a $27-million Hilton Garden Inn downtown.

Perhaps the signature symbol of Detroit’s rebound is the stunning new steel-and-glass headquarters for the software firm Compuware -- formerly based in an upscale suburb. Chief executive Peter Karmanos Jr. began moving his 4,200 employees downtown last month. The new building will feature a Hard Rock Cafe, and the park out front, modeled on New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza, will offer free concerts, an ice-skating rink and a giant fountain.

“When I was in my 20s, there was a lot to do downtown. Detroit was fun,” said Karmanos, 60. “That all changed after the riots in 1967. But the city’s starting to come back.”

He considered building a secluded campus headquarters in the suburbs. “But we have a lot of young employees, and they’ve been denied an urban experience for two or three generations. Downtown just seemed like the right place to go,” Karmanos said.

One statistic captures the new optimism in Detroit: In the last year and a half, there have been 4,400 housing starts. During the entire decade of the 1980s, there were fewer than 100.

The shuttered office buildings along once-grand Woodward Avenue are being converted into lofts. Crumbling houses on the east side have been bulldozed to make way for $300,000 brick Colonials with koi ponds out back.

The demand for city living has proved so unexpectedly strong that developers have been able to sell condos for $200,000 and up, even in ragged neighborhoods barely beginning to gentrify.

Down the street from buildings scrawled with graffiti, a block of condos still under construction sports red “SOLD” signs in nearly every window. On vacant lots where trash tangles in waist-high grass, signs announce: “Coming Soon, Right Here! Luxury Townhomes.” In some of these new developments, prices have risen 15% in just the last year.

Suburban families have for the most part stayed away, uneasy about crime and wary of Detroit’s troubled public schools. (Violent crime has dropped dramatically in the last year, but the city’s Police Department has been accused of false arrests and excessive force; a federal monitor has been appointed to supervise reforms.) Many who watched the city’s long decline are reluctant to drive downtown even for an evening at the opera: “To our age group, it’s scary,” explained 71-year-old Harriett Ephraim of Farmington Hills, a wealthy suburb.

But young professionals increasingly see downtown as exciting -- and are buying lofts as investments. “There’s a different atmosphere here now, and it’s pretty neat. You kind of want to be here when it all starts,” said Randy Smith, 41, who traded his brand-new house on a suburban golf course for a city loft across the street from a burned-out crack house.

The city’s move toward revival began in 1999 with three casinos, made possible when state voters lifted a ban on urban gaming. The slot machines did such sizzling business -- better than casinos in Las Vegas -- that developers who had dismissed Detroit as a poor market began to take a second look.

Local investment came first: new football and baseball stadiums, built side by side, and the renovation of three ornate playhouses downtown. Suddenly, Detroit had an entertainment district. And for the first time in years, traffic jams. To top it off, the city landed a coveted contract to host the 2006 Super Bowl.

Out-of-town investors took notice. They listened when city officials called pitching projects -- and dangling tax credits for downtown development.

After 15 years without a new hotel, Detroit now has five in the works. And then there’s that Home Depot, which will take over a shuttered Kmart in the city’s northwest corner.

“Five years ago, they wouldn’t even have talked to us,” said George Jackson, who runs the Detroit Economic Development Corp.

As in any urban comeback, the progress in Detroit has been uneven.

Ramshackle houses -- left to rot when their owners fled to the suburbs -- still scar block after block. By some estimates, there are 10,000 vacant buildings in the city. Detroit spends $12 million a year demolishing the most dangerous structures, but there’s nothing to replace them, and the weeds soon take over the vacant lots.

“They say they’re going to fix things up down here, but they’re not going to do a thing,” said Betty Howell, 64. “They don’t care about us down here on the east side. This here is all black folks. It’s all low-income people. What they’re fixing up is for those with money.”

City Council President Maryann Mahaffey worries that too many city residents have been left behind in slum housing in Detroit’s rush to draw wealthy suburbanites downtown.

“So many people measure a city as booming because you have cranes up in the sky. But in reality, it’s about what’s going on in the neighborhoods,” Mahaffey said. The Hard Rock Cafe might be a sign that downtown Detroit has turned the corner. But it doesn’t do any good, she said, for the families raising children next to vacant buildings that have been taken over by drug dealers.

To jump-start neighborhood improvement, nonprofit groups have begun petitioning for title to abandoned properties, arguing that they can move more quickly than the city bureaucracy.

In the northwest corner of Detroit, a group called Motor City Blight Busters has taken title to hundreds of properties. Volunteers knock down the worst eyesores. Anything salvageable, the group renovates for sale to low-income families.

Driving through the working-class neighborhood of Brightmoor, where the Blight Busters have focused their efforts, founder John George keeps up a nonstop narrative of accomplishment: “There used to be an abandoned home here and a crack house here and that one was abandoned and we restored this one for an elderly couple....”

He breaks only to explain his philosophy: “We try to instill some neighborhood pride. We try to get that keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing to catch on.”

Toya Robinson, 26, says it seems to be working -- at least in Brightmoor, where Blight Busters is restoring a brick house for her family.

“The neighbors see us out there doing things to improve the property, and they go out and do it too,” Robinson said. “It’s very encouraging. People are starting to care.”