‘Two Detroits’: Even Far From Downtown, Contrasts Abound In City Neighborhoods

Detroit Free Press

When people talk about the problem of “Two Detroits,” they generally mean the contrast between an affluent downtown teeming with projects by Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family and the city’s significantly poorer neighborhoods.

But a closer examination of the city’s complex landscape reveals another, and perhaps as significant, version of “Two Detroits”: Even far from downtown, some neighborhoods do relatively well, with rising incomes and lessening poverty, while many other neighborhoods continue to slide downhill.

Detroit’s challenge is that the vast majority of its neighborhoods remain headed in the wrong direction, as least as measured by Census statistics. Of the nearly 300 Census tracts in the city, each covering several square blocks, two-thirds showed an increase in the poverty rate between 2010 and 2015, and more than two-thirds showed a decline in median household income during that time span.

Consider two contrasting neighborhoods, both distant from downtown. One, straddling West Vernor Highway in southwest Detroit between Livernois on the west and Clark Park on the east, has enjoyed a rising economic tide in recent years.

In a Census tract covering the western part of the district along West Vernor, median household income shot up from $22,328 to $32,685 from 2010 to 2015 and the poverty rate dropped from 51% in 2010 to 32.5% in 2015. Somehow, a working-class district known for its Hispanic restaurants and tortilla factories has managed to improve its outlook even in a city still suffering widespread poverty.

But in the wedge-shaped northwest side district known as Crary St. Mary’s, bordered by Grand River on the south, Greenfield on the east, and Puritan on the north, the indicators are all headed in the opposite direction.

In the Census tract running north from Grand River west of Greenfield, the poverty rate rose from 15.1% in 2010 to 51.2% in 2015. Median household income there dropped like a stone from $40,859 to $16,688 during those same five years. In a relatively short time span following the Great Recession and foreclosure crisis, a once middle-class neighborhood fell off an economic cliff.

No single fact explains why a neighborhood like West Vernor overcomes Detroit’s loss of industry, population flight and environmental challenges while others like Crary St. Mary’s fall behind. Every neighborhood shows its own unique assets and liabilities. But longtime neighborhood activists and urban experts agree on some things.

The biggest difference — what may represent the key element separating the successes from the disappointments — is that successful districts enjoy a professional community development organization with paid staffers and adequate financial resources to work on neighborhood problems.

West Vernor has long benefited from one. The Crary St. Mary’s district lacks such an organization.

Along West Vernor, the Southwest Detroit Business Association was founded 60 years ago after the then-new Northland Center in Southfield began to draw shoppers away from city neighborhoods. Headed for the past 35 years by Kathy Wendler, the SWDBA now has nine paid staffers with skill sets that include finance, urban planning, grant writing, social media, networking and development assistance.

Of critical importance: Wendler’s group won approval from voters in 2007 for the city’s first BID or business improvement district. In such a zone, local business owners agree to tax themselves a little extra on their property tax — 2% of assessed value annually — with the money raised going to neighborhood improvements.

Over the past 10 years, the BID has poured some $15 million into graffiti removal, facade improvements, new street lighting, and other improvements. BID-financed crews have hauled away tons of trash and scrubbed clean thousands of examples of graffiti.

“We’ve noticed that when facades get done and the place looks clean and spiffy, which includes all the new historic lamp poles that we’ve put up along West Vernor, the houses immediately behind the commercial district also invest because they see the trend on West Vernor being an upward rather than a downward trend,” Wendler said. “People, property owners, are less inclined to let them deteriorate. Residents are proud to live next to stuff that’s being cared for. It’s placemaking.”

Lydia Gutierrez, owner of Hacienda Mexican Foods and a local civic leader, said the SWDBA has helped the neighborhood by focusing broadly on many issues.

“A business association isn’t just concerned with the businesses,” she said. “It’s concerned with the community. It’s concerned with the residents. Is it parking? Is it lighting? Is it graffiti? Is it garbage? What is it we have to do collectively to make this a better place for people to come and feel safe?”

But in Crary St. Mary’s, Carl Baxter, a retired phone company worker and union official who heads the local Crary St.
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Mary’s Community Council, can only look on the SWDBA’s paid staffers and BID financing with envy. His community council has no paid staffers and essentially no budget other than what can be raised at occasional picnics and the like.

“I’m 56 years old, and I’m the youngest person on my community council,” Baxter said. “And that’s more the norm unfortunately across the city than it is a rarity, where you have the older citizens who are not able to do as much anymore.”

Paid staffers dedicated to block-by-block community work make a big difference. “You don’t have to worry about if the volunteers show up or have other priorities,” Wendler said. “With the job there’s a bigger obligation to show up, get the work done and follow through on commitments. And that doesn’t in any way, shape or form diminish volunteers. It’s just a different commitment.”

Since then, a similar business district has won approval downtown, but in an already heavily taxed city, the idea hasn’t caught on elsewhere.

Baxter can only dream of what his volunteer organization in Crary St. Mary’s would be able to accomplish given the funds the BID has raised in the West Vernor area.

“Oh, man, I think quite a bit,” he said. “We would actually be able to look at purchasing some of the homes through the Land Bank and actually rehabbing them and investing that money back in the community and actually get new neighbors in the community. I would love to do that as well as try to promote the small businesses within the community. We have a few. We would like to see more. It comes down to financial resources.”

Across Detroit, districts with professionally staffed community organizations enjoy the grass-roots muscle and savvy needed to make progress. Most prominent, probably, is Midtown Detroit Inc., the nonprofit group headed by Sue Mosey that has played a huge role in Midtown’s emergence as a successful district. Elsewhere, nonprofit groups like the Eastside Community Network, Vanguard Community Development Organization and U-Snap-Bac have taken leading roles in community revitalization.

The presence of a professional community organization is just one factor. Successful neighborhoods tend to enjoy some assets to begin with — Southwest Detroit’s Hispanic immigration, which has mitigated, if not actually reversed, population decline in that part of the city; Midtown’s cluster of eds-and-meds universities and hospitals; the East Riverfront’s waterfront access, or Indian Village’s historic architecture. Such assets provide something to build upon.

Indeed, it can easily be argued that Midtown Detroit’s success as a community organization would have been impossible without the eds-and-meds assets. And distressed districts like Detroit’s lower east side, while showing widespread poverty and vacancy, might have suffered even more were it not for an activist neighborhood group like

Eastside Community Network that has been active there for many years.

Success builds on success. Once a neighborhood group like Wender’s SWDBA has notched some wins, successful districts tend to draw in new investment from philanthropic foundations and lenders such as JPMorgan Chase. Chase’s $150-million commitment to Detroit has included cash for southwest Detroit.

To Janice Wells, a retired public school teacher in Crary St. Mary’s, such money lavished on neighborhoods like West Vernor smack of “the rich get richer.” But to those who must decide where to put philanthropic funds or investment dollars, the choices are by no means easy.

Dave Blaszkiewicz, president and CEO of Invest Detroit, a civic lender, oversees the Strategic Neighborhood Fund that will put $10 million each into three neighborhoods — southwest Detroit, West Village and Livernois-McNichols.

Before choosing those three districts, Invest Detroit applied a complex screening process that looked at many neighborhoods’ assets, including the existing housing stock, commercial and economic life, population density and several other factors. The presence of a civic leadership group like the SWDBA makes a big difference, but so do other factors such as a tight-knit community culture.

“We want to engage in places where we can put our shoulders into these efforts and actually feel confident we’re going to make a difference,” Blaszkiewicz said. “The question we ask internally is, how can we deploy our limited resources in ways (that are) going to have the biggest benefit and the biggest impact on the city of Detroit? And we have to make value judgments on that every day, and that’s tough to do.”

Tosha Tabron, head of philanthropy for Detroit for JPMorgan Chase, echoed that. She said prerequisites for investment include the presence of anchor institutions within a neighborhood as well as employment centers and other assets.

“All those pieces become key conditions for us,” she said.

“We’ve got a theory of change,” said John Van Camp, president and CEO of Southwest Solutions, a nonprofit group that has built new housing and delivered social services in the West Vernor area. “You’ve got to be working in nine different game-changing arenas all at the same time in a neighborhood — from income and employment, housing, transportation, education, health, early childhood, food security, public safety, financial empowerment.”

It’s a tall order. But that broad approach remains essential.

“It takes the integration of everything that we’re doing, plus time, to turn a distressed neighborhood into a neighborhood of opportunity,” he said.

Under Mayor Mike Duggan and during previous administrations, Detroit has tried to fix the many ills hurting its neighborhoods. Street lighting, once chronically dysfunctional, has been mostly fixed. More buses are running on time. Police and fire response times have been trimmed from a reported worst-in-the-nation to better than average.

And city programs such as Motor City Match, which provides cash to aspiring entrepreneurs and landlords with storefronts to rent, are targeted to older commercial corridors in the neighborhoods.

But such efforts barely begin to fill the need in a city still suffering from suburban sprawl, loss of industry, decades of institutional racism, and neglect of city schools. It seems likely that stories like that of Crary St. Mary’s will, for a time, remain more common in Detroit than upbeat outcomes like West Vernor’s.

In the meantime, Carl Baxter of Crary St. Mary’s advises patience.

“There are things being done in the neighborhoods,” he said. “Is it to the speed that some people want? No. I try to tell my neighbors we went through 30 years of decline. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take some time to come back.”

Crary St. Mary’s
Crary St. Mary’s neighborhood was built out in the 1930s and ’40s with thousands of tidy brick-fronted houses, homes that look like smaller versions of those found in nearby Grandmont Rosedale. Commercial activity lines the main corridors of Grand River and Greenfield as in so many Detroit neighborhoods.

Today, the neighborhood from a drive-by windshield inspection still looks neat and sturdy with few obvious signs of blight. But look closer, and the signs of distress multiply.

The Motor City Mapping inspections found that one in every five structures in the district remains vacant today. Carl Baxter, president of the Crary St. Mary’s Community Council, a neighborhood group, estimates that about 2,700 of the roughly 5,000 houses in the district are now occupied by renters, not owners. It’s a result of the financial distress visited on the neighborhood by the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession.

Moreover, Baxter said squatters occupy many homes today, and many houses built for single families now contain two or more households. The district residents’ economic fortunes took a major hit during the financial crash of recent years.

A few of the commercial businesses in the neighborhood do well; the Greenfield Market at Greenfield and Puritan is packed with shoppers on a weekday, and the butcher shop in the back of the store does a brisk business offering many cuts of meat. But overall, Baxter said, unemployment has risen sharply in the 15 years he’s lived in the neighborhood.

And then there is the crime. “It’s overwhelming,” said Janice Wells, a retired public school teacher who has lived with her husband, Larry, in their house for 45 years. “It does make you feel so uncomfortable that you think about getting out of here. … We’ve been very fortunate on our particular block, but if you just go one block always somebody got shot.”

The city reports that between 2011 and 2014, the Census tract covering part of Crary St. Mary saw 881 major crimes, including three homicides and 139 aggravated assaults.

Crime shows up in smaller ways, too. A local park is lined around its perimeter with boulders; Baxter said that when a metal fence lined the park, thieves stole it for its scrap value.

Wells and her husband volunteer in various ways in the neighborhood, such as working with a local church to board up blighted houses. But that, too, can prove discouraging. “A year later half of them are right back where they were, some of them are beyond repair,” she said. City government is working on demolishing and boarding up blighted homes “but they’re slow getting out here.” Asked what the neighborhood needs, Janice replied, “It needs everything.”

Rodney Tyson, owner of the Lavish Styles-N-Cuts barber shop at 16008 Puritan, also cites crime as a problem. “We definitely need more recreation centers for the youth. We need more father figures and mother figures. We need to talk to the kids and show them the right way,” he said.

But like Janice and Larry Wells, Tyson, too, retains a measure of guarded optimism about his neighborhood.

“I think it’s moving up but it’s moving at a snail’s pace,” he said. “We need more people to participate. But it’s moving. It’s not a bad neighborhood, it needs a little TLC, tender loving care, that’s all it needs.”
West Vernor Highway

The West Vernor Highway district in southwest Detroit may be best known to visitors for its many Hispanic restaurants, taquerias and tortilla factories. But look closer, and a broader vein of commercial activity presents itself — insurance offices, groceries, barber shops, auto parts stores, pharmacies, shoes and clothing shops, medical offices, bakeries, providing an employment base for neighborhood residents.

It’s all part of a district that enjoyed a positive improvement between 2010 and 2015 even as the majority of Detroit’s dozens of neighborhoods declined or at best stayed even. And perhaps as remarkable, the West Vernor district has achieved that enviable quality of “walkable urbanism” that city planners are struggling to create in so many other districts.

“We’re right in the community,” said Lydia Gutierrez, owner of Hacienda Mexican Foods, a producer of tortillas and chips sold at Meijer and other stores. She employs 70 workers, almost all of whom live nearby.

“We’re surrounded by schools. People can walk to work. People can ride their bikes to work,” she said. “If you’re coming here at 3 o’clock, you find we have kids here and they’re doing their homework. And they love being here. We always feed them, too. And it’s safe.”

The West Vernor district ranks among Detroit’s most diverse. If the Hispanic population gives the neighborhood its predominant reputation, there are also African Americans, Middle Eastern immigrants and younger millennial whites living in the area.

If there’s a danger facing the neighborhood’s success right now, it comes ironically from the U.S. government. Under President Donald Trump, the nation’s immigration authorities have frightened some Hispanic workers in the district. Gutierrez said many such workers have sent their wives and children back to Mexico, sold their houses in the district, and live several to an apartment.

“We’re losing the families,” Gutierrez said. “We’ve separated the families. So their kids aren’t in the schools and that hurts the schools and they’re not buying as much in the grocery stores so that hurts them.

“In the meantime,” she added, “they’re making good money and sending all the money back to their family in Mexico. And then you’ve got three or four people living in an apartment waiting to be deported.”

It remains to be seen how big a setback that remains for a neighborhood that otherwise demonstrates that areas even distant from downtown can enjoy rising incomes and lessening poverty.