ACCOZZAGLIA

“There’s a new age dawning for a friend of mine
It’s a revolution in the latest style
Nothing left but a desperate trust
Kiss that chrome, make a wish, before it turns to rust

“Everybody’s glory bound, got it made in Motortown
Spread the news all around, come on down to Motortown

“The cars roll by the old steelyard as the weeds grow high
It’s a miracle, a miracle, a miracle.”

“Motortown” by The Kane Kang
© Dave Brewis, Martin Brammer, Paul Woods, 1987

In this paper:

Introduction
Social not spatial: where Detroit planning went amok
The chimera city: Minneapolis & St. Paul
Bottom-up over top-down: the topsy-turvy of the NRP
Climbing on governance: resident participation
Basic survival: Detroit now
Conclusion: incomparable cousins?
References

Introduction

Detroit and Minnesota’s Twin Cities illustrate how dramatically divergent two Midwestern metropolises of similar age and provenance could wind up so differently situated. Both regions basked in prosperity prior to the Great Depression. Both had populations of over a half-million in 1950 (Teaford 1990, 2). Although New Deal policies and World War II helped to revive economic activity, 19th century structures in these city cores fell into disrepair and disuse, even as many continued as residential slums (Adde 1969, 222). Northern U.S. cities faced a combination of aging infrastructure and stiffer competition from surrounding suburban towns, better poised to lure new families and post-war wealth with plentiful space, cheaper housing and better accommodations for the automobile. While Fordist industrial activity continued apace around the urban centre, happy days were no longer a sure-fire bet in these industrial powerhouses, as the car made it practical and affordable for many to live away from the factories and socio-economic disparities, actual or perceived, which divided people along ethnic lines. Ways to rejuvenate aging central business districts (CBDs) challenged policy makers and business elites alike to conceive wholly novel methods of revival in this unexplored territory of urban evolution.

But then Detroit and the Twin Cities, though later linked by the I-94, forked down different paths. By the 1990s, Detroit was devolved as a ghost town — ravaged by gouged neighbourhoods, rioting, a suburban mass exodus of people and commerce, and abandoned factories. Its decline came at the automotive industry’s inability to adapt in the face of global competition and oil crises after the 1970s, just as much as that industry had packed up for the suburbs, starving the city of tax revenue (Sugrue 1996, 260). Meanwhile, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul also struggled with its share of inner city decay and attempts at recovery, the former derisively called “Murderapolis” at one point, but by and large maintained stability throughout the post-war period; by the late 1990s, prosperity was no stranger to the Twin Cities, home to some of the most recognized corporate brands in the finance, biomedical, food, technology, publishing, transportation, and merchandising sectors (Myers & Chung 1998, 323; Paul 2005, 2116).

Extensive academic literature on Detroit’s decline offers in exhaustive detail the political, socio-economic, and racial nightmares befalling the city, but less academic discussion explores the longevity of success which the Twin Cities came to know. Where did they go right? Is the picture as rosy upon closer scrutiny? This comparative study shall review post-war political, economic and social trajectories for both MSAs, paying particular attention to consequences of urban policy decisions. These policy platforms inform how each MSA now approach urban development, and how each may be instructive for other cities when considering their own urban renewal strategies — and what to wholly avoid. More importantly, can Detroit look to the Twin Cities on ways to climb past the tar pits which left it and other nearby regional cities as echoes of their former selves?

Social not spatial: where Detroit planning went amok

“Once upon a time” could appropriately describe Detroit. Once the fourth largest city, it is the American embodiment of an urban fabric torn asunder (Solnit 2007, 66). Hardly a secret, the Motor City has continued for decades as a ripe topic for academic, political, and economic discourse. Regimented (if not misguided) renewal efforts since the 1940s to revitalize the city core and its neighbourhoods have fallen largely to disheartening ends. It becomes hard to shake the feeling that these persistent efforts at restoration, recovery, rejuvenation — whatever one wants to call it — were more like urban theory fads than long-term, holistic visioning and nurturing of a self-sustaining city. Largely speaking, these Hail Mary projects fell flat as Detroit bled its lifeblood in two ways: draining a majority of its population to the outer suburbs, where dominantly white residents were no longer beholden to the tax base to pay for infrastructure costs in the big city. This relegated those remaining in Detroit, a largely disenfranchised African-American population, to haemorrhage and rot from the inside as financial resources from the evaporated revenue base dried up and federal assistance began to wane as federal neoliberal policies took root.

Following World War II, the dimension of the American city changed as veterans returned home to a country altered by recovery from the Great Depression. Cities in the Northeast and Midwest, having reaped population explosions during the early 1900s, as industrialism spawned prosperity, were rapidly being regarded as relics replete with inner city slums and a perceived decline of the central business districts (CBDs); none annexed significant territory in the post-war era (Teaford 1990, 11, 2). This perception coupled with a new emphasis on residential and business development in outlying suburban areas, triggering both suburbanization and, in extreme cases like Detroit, disurbanization (Pacione 2005, 83). Nevertheless, despite assumptions at the time that impediments of the CBDs were more about physical infrastructure failure, they were more indicative of socio-economic and socio-ethnic schisms (Teaford 1990, 8).

Detroit was one of the earliest cities to arrive the urban redevelopment table. Ironically, it is also considered a “pioneer in . . . urban renewal” (Chandler 1999, 106–7). By 1946, the city launched the Detroit Plan as a way to combat urban blight. It didn’t help that the recurring refrain at the time likened blight as a metaphor for cancer spreading into healthy tissue. Given this analogy, the course of action for removing malignancy recommended surgical excision; this manifested as the demolition of aging buildings. In Detroit, the process got underway once the city declared a district a “redevelopment area” — condemning and expropriating the land from current ownership, demolishing existing structures, and reselling the land to private developers at drastically lower prices as a way to encourage new development and increase the tax base (Ibid., 108).

Unfortunately, this methodology displaced lower-income residents, since provisions for redevelopment, led largely by the city’s executive, required no mandate on replenishment of the urban housing supply. Ultimately, in a major, 129-acre redevelopment area, all 3,600 planned units of public housing were never built (Ibid., 108). This housing shortage displaced lower-income residents, many of whom were African-American, and cut gaping holes in the geographic and social fabric of neighbourhoods. This gouging was only the beginning, as slightly more accommodating variations on the excision theme — “The War on Poverty” and “Model Cities” — were championed by federal urban development plans during the 1950s and 1960s (Teaford 2000, 459). These plans, unlike the original Detroit Plan, factored poverty and displacement concerns through social programmes intended to retrain poor Detroiters, but the original zones falling under these plans were scaled back due to dwindling federal assistance (Chandler 1999, 111–2).

This squeezing of unemployed and marginalized residents, coupled with a racially divisive evacuation by wealthier white citizens to suburbs around the city of Detroit, further aggravated tensions as well as deficits in infrastructure spending. Despite round after round of federal programmes meant to stem poverty, few residents were able to qualify because the geographic catchment areas were highly limited. As a consequence, concentrations of poverty worsened, and urban localities where concentration was greatest suffered a severe collapse of social infrastructure. By 1967, this overflowed into a riot, pitting white police against predominantly black youth. As the Kerner Commission later explained, “The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident . . . a high school dropout . . . better educated than his nonrioting Negro [sic] neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job” (Kerner Commission 1968). While the Model Cities programme in Detroit may have improved opportunities for a few, the urban milieu was for many an effective wasteland with meagre hope (Chandler 1999, 112). Escaping to segregated, wealthy suburbs was also not on the table for most non-white residents.

Federal policy in the 1970s shifted emphasis by adding social relief to the pre-existing spatial remedies of urban slum clearance. The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) attempted to directly address systemic shortcomings for low-income urban residents, but results were inconsistent as city governments were torn between addressing low-income social infrastructure funding and accommodating higher-income desires to clear blight (Teaford 2000, 459). This gave way to Empowerment Zones in the 1990s, which arguably offered the first genuinely holistic approach to urban recovery; through grants given to entrepreneurs and community organizations in predefined “zones”, targeted monies are injected into resource-starved communities (McCarthy 1998, 321). Unfortunately, city government still esteemed greater value on commercial revitalization of the CBD rather than worried about improved self-sustainability for Detroit’s most vulnerable: “Despite the public euphoria over the city’s empowerment zone designation . . . downtown revitalisation remained the central focus of the pro-growth regime’s policy agenda that rely on entertainment or sports-led projects” (DiGaetano & Lawless 1999, 563).

In short, there remains in Detroit a top-down hierarchy to community-level economic and social health largely constructed by bureaucratic and private enterprise architects. With decline now in its seventh decade, its most vulnerable residents have lost from past generations any collective memory of self-driven community building — essential for neighbourhood-level vitality. Instead, residents confront a daily reality that, on matters of governance, they are largely wards of the city.

The chimera city: Minneapolis & St. Paul

Let’s turn the tables a bit. To Detroit’s west is the Twin Cities, equally a metropolis of the so-called rustbelt, but a metropolis that failed to collapse. On the contrary: it not only survived, but it now thrives as a both regional powerhouse and even as a global city (Paul 2005, 2104).

It is instructive to distinguish the particular dynamic of the Twin Cities. While only sixteen kilometres separate the city centres of Minneapolis and St. Paul, each city is respectively contained within separate, self-governing authorities of Hennepin and Ramsey counties. But both cities, along with Bloomington (the third-largest incorporated city in Minnesota, located in southern Hennepin County and home to the Mall of America), fall under a regional administrative plan called the Metropolitan Council, a seven-county area encompassing the Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA (Orfield 1997, 9). While research on the Twin Cities typically discusses “Minneapolis”, it is practically speaking impossible to exclude this city from its fraternal twin. The functional reality of the Twin Cities is predicated on a novel interdependency to support the entire region as a cohesive metropolitan unit. Unless explicitly specified as the city of, “Minneapolis” typically refers to both Minneapolis and St. Paul (“Glaring Across the Water” 1997, 31).

Bottom-up over top-down: the topsy-turvy of the NRP

Largely speaking, the Twin Cities were spared Detroit’s infrastructural collapse during the post-war era. Perhaps this was related to a general pragmatism prescribed by Twin Citians: unlike Detroit’s over-dependence on a single industry’s gold mine, the kind of prosperity fever ascribed to boomtowns was less prevalent in the Cities (Teaford 1990, 212–3). This might also be related to Minnesota’s history generally: as a state whose commodity markets were built around agriculture and milling (e.g., Minneapolis Grain Exchange Building, Minneapolis Lumber Exchange Building, St. Paul Stockyards Exchange Building, etc.), Minnesota was unquestionably affected by the Dust Bowl drought. But unlike Detroit, whose high-order goods have always been dependent on economic prosperity (a laid-off auto factory worker might not afford to buy a new car), Minnesota-based companies — like Pillsbury and General Mills, whose low-order staple food products maintained consistent demand; and Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, whose technological innovations using iron taconite ore (from the state’s Iron Range) assisted World War II efforts — gave the Twin Cities an exceptionally diversified economy (George 2003, 113).

Still, it wasn’t impervious to national recession. By the 1970s, the city of Minneapolis faced a situation of neighbourhood and urban decay plaguing several U.S. cities. After years of municipal governments showing more interest in revitalizing the CBD — creating commercial activity within new skyscrapers — citizens by the 1980s mobilized a backlash against relative perceived neglect in their neighbourhoods (Fanstein & Hirst 1996, 99). Concurrently, Minneapolitans were electing new council members who represented their concerns on increasing neighbourhood development (Teaford 1990. 241). In 1987, the city council began investigating ways to revitalize municipal neighbourhoods through allocation of funds on a neighbourhood level; initially, leaders on this initiative recommended using tax-increment financing to support a Neighborhood Revitalization Program, or NRP (Fanstein & Hirst 1996, 101). While residents were motivated by this shift in policy, they largely at this point remained on the sidelines (Ibid., 100).

The idea behind NRP was novel: by partitioning urban development at the neighbourhood level, citizens could, by volunteering in the process, advance a more direct stake on how revitalization monies (through tax-base sharing) and neighbourhood-level planning could advance (Fagotto & Fung, 2006, 640). It marked a sharp departure from revitalization strategies deployed in other cities where assistance remedially concerned itself with only impoverished, blighted zones.

NRP’s operates on four objectives — irrespective of Minneapolis’s 81 neighbourhoods: build “capacity” of governance by concentrating community involvement; redesign public services customized within each locality; increase intergovernmental collaborations by facilitating between the five jurisdictional tiers (city, county, school board, parks board, library board); and to create a sense of community at the neighbourhood level (Martin & Pentel 2002, 437). Under the NRP, each neighbourhood is allocated a formula-derived sum proportionate to economic conditions within that locality. Neighbourhoods are categorized into three groups: protection (for the most wealthy); revitalization (areas of aging but decent housing stock); and redirection (areas where stock is in dire condition, compounded by an acute need for improved social services). (Ibid., 438). Thus, a protected wealthy enclave’s NRP allocation might receive $200 per-household, whereas a neighbourhood slated for redirection would receive $3,000. Regardless the NRP’s allocation, citizen involvement is foundational at every step, particularly by informing which residents will represent their neighbourhood before the NRP policy board (Fagotto & Fung 2006, 642).

Climbing on governance: resident participation

The implications of this type of localized governance are significant. Sherry Arnstein metaphorically uses a ladder hierarchy to distinguish eight basic flavours of citizen participation in local governance — from manipulation at the bottom rung (an extreme non-participation) to citizen control (the highest form of participation) (Arnstein 1969, 235–6). From the Detroit angle, manipulation (or the second rung, therapy), on behalf of the mayor and other power brokers, seemed to inform the redevelopment initiatives that displaced thousands of low-income residents in the city core — particularly African-American residents whose political clout was straitjacketed by limited property ownership, little political leverage, and disjointed (if much remained) community mobilization. After decades of this power imbalance against Detroiters, it’s not terribly surprising that a lion’s share of urban redevelopment initiatives have remained less concerned with neighbourhood-level challenges than desperate, pie-in-the-sky “renaissance” projects.

Contrast this to Minneapolis (or similar citizen-level participation in St. Paul). While once boasting top-down governance structures during the 1950s, the steady, but incremental shift towards neighbourhood-level involvement — including a hiccup in the early 1980s when city councillors tried to dismantle citizen involvement, resulting in the loss of several incumbent seats with successors amenable to citizen participation — altered the political landscape to ennoble citizens as key decision makers of their own locality (Fanstein & Hurst 1996, 99). Arnstein’s ladder of participation suggests that the NRP is, at a minimum, the second-highest level of participation — a citizen-based, delegated power. This, contrasted with Detroit, reflects the high stake in ownership over locality in ways that have not only kept the Twin Cities central urban area stable, but also able to flourish even as its outer ring suburbs continue to prosper.

Aside from direct participation, what vested interest do both wealthy and poorer communities within a city have to opt for and share in this form of local governance? Ordinary, it might make sense to assume that the highest concentrations of political power — typically wealthier areas of higher property and home ownership — would be disinterested to create consensus with other economic strata. On the contrary, NRP is designed for intra-urban cohesion for resource distribution in the face of a politically strong suburban ring (Orfield 2002, 294). Neighbourhoods work together to proportionately redistribute urban improvement and tax-base sharing for two reasons: to de-concentrate urban poverty; and to ensure that a stable tax base, along with improving housing stock, can maintain political leverage (or, barring that, equilibrium) against a suburban constituency that might otherwise stiff-arm measures to finance public works projects benefiting the suburbs at the overwhelming expense of the cities (e.g., sewage, roads, etc.) (Orfield 1997, 8).

This kind of wrangling might otherwise occur at the county level (Minneapolis, while the largest, is only one municipality of several within Hennepin County; the same applies to Ramsey County for St. Paul) or at state legislature. But by de-concentrating poverty, the means to address the most recalcitrant problems within particular localities becomes more manageable to grasp and curtail (Ibid., 8). In turn, the NRP fosters greater liveability in neighbourhoods, increasing a sense of ownership and thus raising the property tax base to pay for improved public services throughout the city. Greater citizen involvement can also translate into political clout on a larger scale as more residents are better informed of their direct stake in affecting the political process.

Basic survival: Detroit now

Detroit, meanwhile, has not employed a variation of the NRP. This may not be a function of Detroit’s disinterest, but one of logistics: the city fabric was so pockmarked by earlier “renewal” excisions (with no citizen input); untested renewal theories (taking expensive gambles); and the not-so-theoretical “white flight” (polarizing further the MSA’s population), that both the social cohesion needed to cluster citizen participation and grassroots empowerment at the neighbourhood level remained too diffuse (or simply absent) to have significant effect against the far more populated, far wealthier, and better mobilized outer suburbs (and inner suburbs like Grosse Pointe). In fact, only the Twin Cities have tried programmes like the NRP, largely because it is located in the only state with legislation passed — the Minnesota Fiscal Disparities Act of 1971 — to promote tax-base sharing as a way to thwart “annexation and consolidation of local governments” (Orfield 2002, 298). Population replenishment for the city presents another obstacle: while other major cities raised their population base from immigration, Detroit ranked fourth lowest as a destination for new immigrants during the 1990s among “23 living cities”; its suburbs, meanwhile, received roughly eight times that figure (Thomas & Rudell 2005, 9).

Nevertheless, academic inquiry on improving Detroit constitutes a growing voice: in 2005, a Michigan State University team profiled seven “comparable cities” from which Detroit could adopt successful strategies to attain self-sustainability. Of these profiles, Minneapolis is considered for its NRP initiative; another city the report cites as a strong reference point was Pittsburgh, whose industrial history also mirrors Detroit, but whose urban recovery actually arrived — not at once, but in two waves (the 1950s and the 1980s) — and, much like the Twin Cities (though closer to a CDBG), also incorporates a neighbourhood-level participation of governance (Ibid., 45).

Conclusion: incomparable cousins?

Detroit and the Twin Cities now appear remarkably different, even radically so. Having spent time in both cities, it becomes evident that the social dynamic at the street level is pronounced. In the former, social interaction tends to be sparse along the large boulevards which cut through the city core, clustering only around major commercial centres. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, it becomes evident quickly how many more people are outside and seen using the city and its infrastructure. Again, this is anecdotal and not necessarily indicative of qualitative research.

This climate, however, might indicate why the degree of core-city gentrification within the Twin Cities is dramatically greater than in Detroit: the demand to live in the core — be it for quality of existing housing stock or quality of life — is greater (Wyly & Hammel 2004, 1227). By the same token, gentrification also raises the spectre of economic discrimination due to lending practices which weed out prospective homeowners with “blemished or ‘subprime’ credit histories”; given the current mortgage lending crisis in the U.S., this situation is likely to remain particularly germane for the foreseeable future, harming lower-income groups disproportionately (Ibid., 1217).

Detroit will need support from the state legislature, which ultimately has the authority to authorize tax-base sharing, much the way Minnesota implemented during the 1970s. But with leadership heavily favouring Detroit’s suburbs (where much of the automotive industry now conducts its business), and still-present schisms along social and racial fault lines, it is uncertain whether Michigan will consider using this tool, coupled with federal assistance, to develop a fiscal equilibrium between Detroit and its suburban ring with neighbourhood-level, direct participation.

Top-down action tends to work better with convertibles anyway.

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^{Prepared 27 March 2008 for Prof. Deborah Cowen (GGR339H1S, University of Toronto).}