It's another example of the impact of a bottom-up approach.
Tens of millions of dollars in state and federal funds are critical for the turnaround, but so is innovation by the city and a variety of stakeholders who are putting the funds to work more effectively through an online technology platform, the Detroit Demolition Tracker. Today Detroit is running the largest blight-removal program of its kind in the nation. An estimated 78,000 structures, some 29 percent of all of those in the city, were in need of demolition or other intervention to restore neighborhoods, attract investment and end decades of decline.
Housing blight was another visible sign of Detroit's decay. "Now my neighbors say, 'Maybe I can stay here now, because the lights are back on.'" city to be entirely lit by LED lights," wrote the authority's chair, Lorna Thomas, in its 2016 annual report.ĭell Young of the Charlevoix Village Association described the change in more personal terms: "My neighbors were talking about leaving because the lights weren't working," he wrote. The project was completed on schedule and under budget, and "today we are a national leader, as the first major U.S. In three years' time, more than 65,000 street lights were replaced, and the city's nighttime image was transformed. State legislation created a Public Lighting Authority for the city with both the power to issue bonds and a funding stream from the city's utility user tax. How bad was it? The estimate was that 40 percent of the street lights weren't working for a variety of reasons including copper theft, vandalism, bulb outages and lack of funds to pay for repairs. Prior to 2014, and for at least a 20-year period, very little investment had been made in Detroit's street-lighting system, and it was in a serious state of disrepair. Two examples, both relying heavily on bottom-up approaches, are contributing to an unfolding success story. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent New York Times column, the big divide is "between strong communities and weak communities," and those that are making it enjoy "diverse adaptive coalitions" that create success from the bottom up.ĭetroit may long have served as a symbol of urban decline, but it has taken some remarkably effective steps to rejuvenate blighted neighborhoods and the city as a whole. (Governing) - When it comes to city and neighborhood decay, the story is not simply one of industrial decline in the Rust Belt heartland.
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