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City’s lessons for Detroit

Moving residents failed, but Youngstown sees success in reshaping itself

By JOHN GALLAGHER FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

   YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Urban planners around the world began to pay attention in 2005 when Youngstown announced its intention to creatively shrink to fit its drastically reduced population.

   Ironically, the part of the innovative Youngstown 2010 plan that drew the most attention — the idea of moving people out of distressed neighborhoods to concentrate limited resources on stronger areas — was a bust. More than five years after the plan’s adoption, nobody has been moved.

   But if shutting off parts of the city never worked, Youngstown leaders are proud of what they have accomplished:

   In a key pilot program, the city focused its redevelopment efforts on a single neighborhood, the Idora district, chosen because it featured strong assets (historic homes, access to stunning Mill Creek Park and a strong neighborhood association ), but also distress in the form of abandoned homes, lack of retail and crime.

   The city and its partner nonprofit agencies poured resources into Idora — demolishing empty houses, planting urban gardens, beautifying vacant lots, negotiating to draw more commercial activity back to the district. As a result, Idora, a neighborhood of a few hundred houses, today is considered a Youngstown success story and a model for what the city hopes to accomplish elsewhere.

   Youngstown still has its critics, of course, who point out that most neighborhoods have seen little of the effort put into Idora and the downtown core. Crime remains a problem, and Youngstown’s public schools are rated the worst in Ohio.

   “This is a work in progress,” Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams said of his city’s reinvention efforts. But he added, “Over the last decade, we are no longer being defined by the problems of this community. We’re being more defined by our approach to the problems.”

   SUCCESS MAY BE

   HARDER IN DETROIT

   Can Detroit, under Mayor Dave Bing’s Detroit Works Project, achieve anything like Youngstown’s progress?

   There are key similarities. Each city has lost about 60% of its population since its peak years, and each city saw its industrial might — autos in Detroit, steel in Youngstown greatly diminished. Each city took pride in its tradition of working-class home-ownership, and each city has seen thousands of those blue-collar bungalows abandoned.

   Vacancy remains a huge problem for both cities. Detroit is, by many estimates, about 30% vacant today, while Youngstown’s rate runs even higher, at around 44%, said William D’Avignon, the city’s director of planning and community development.

   Despite these similarities, key differences may make it harder for Detroit Works to repeat even the modest successes of the Youngstown 2010 plan.

   One is the huge scale of the challenge in Detroit, which measures 139 square miles compared with Youngstown’s more compact 36 square miles. The amount of estimated vacancy in Detroit — about 40 square miles — could swallow Youngstown whole.

   “I can’t imagine that,” said Ian Beniston, an urban planner and deputy director of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Plan, a key nonprofit working in the city. “Even just thinking about the scale of Detroit, and the amount of people and resources it would take to even do this in 10 neighborhoods like we’ve done in Idora, it’s very, very significant.”

   COMMUNITY INPUT A KEY FACTOR

   Then, too, Youngstown leaders spent much more time preparing their plan, engaging with city residents and holding community-wide discussions on race relations, than what is planned under Detroit Works.

   Detroit Works anticipates a 12- to 18-month process to meet with residents and draw up a plan. But Hunter Morrison, an urban planning professor at Youngstown State University who helped develop the Youngstown 2010 plan, said leaders spent three years in the citizen-engagement phase.

   “We didn’t start out with a planning process. We started out with a lot of listening,” he said. “You have to let people talk it out. They care about their city. They’ve got concerns, they’ve got frustrations. You’ve really to have to let them vent it out.”

   Eventually, after numerous discussions about immediate problems, citizens began to engage on the core idea of reinventing Youngstown along some new line.

   “Planners’ nirvana is that meeting at which either nobody attends because everybody’s agreed, or the people attending say, ‘Haven’t we met enough? Let’s get this thing done,’” Morrison said.

   Besides the scale of the problem and the time allowed for residents to engage, Detroit may find it politically difficult to target one or just a handful of districts for heavy new investment as Youngstown did in the Idora neighborhood.

   “It wasn’t about picking winners and losers,” Williams said late last month. “It was about trying to identify a neighborhood that had the potential to leverage the investment that would be directed there.”

   SMARTER HOUSING STRATEGIES

   Besides concentrating resources on the Idora neighborhood, Youngstown took other steps to reshape itself.

   In a key move, it placed a moratorium on scattered-site tax-credit housing in Youngstown. Prior to this, private developers would build affordable in-fill houses anywhere in the city they could find an available lot just to get tax credits.

   But those houses had little or no impact on their neighborhoods and often were abandoned within a few years. So the city told developers it would no longer help them build those houses.

   Presley Gillepsie, a former banker who now heads the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., a nonprofit that works closely with the city, said that in his former role as a banker, he encouraged scattered development across the city. Now, he favors the more targeted approach.

   “I financed millions and millions of dollars in real estate across the city, and I cannot point to a neighborhood where it really had an impact anywhere near (Idora),” he said.

   In a similar vein, the city formerly provided housing rehab funds under a federal program to any Youngstown homeowner who met income guidelines. But the city found it was putting up to $40,000 into houses that might be worth only $20,000. So it stopped doing that.

   The lessons learned in Youngstown may argue for an equally aggressive and targeted approach in Detroit.

   “It may take you 25 years. Hopefully it doesn’t,” said Morrison, the urban planner. “But 25 years from now will be 25 years from now, whether you deal with these issues or not.”

   • CONTACT JOHN GALLAGHER: 313-222-5173 OR GALLAGHER99@FREEPRESS.COM  

Like Detroit, Youngstown, Ohio, struggles with such problems as population loss and vacancy.

In a target neighborhood, a fence creates a more attractive perimeter around a house to be razed.

January photos by MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free Press An abandoned gas station is painted over with a message of community involvement in lifting the city.

Hunter Morrison, an urban planning professor at Youngstown State University, helped develop the Youngstown 2010 plan.

Jewel Stevens of Youngstown talks to contractors as they bring down a house. The city has poured resources into demolishing vacant homes.

Mill Creek Park is a gem Youngstown likes to emphasize when trying to attract and retain residents. A rehabbed neighborhood is nearby.

Editorial

Fashioning a new avenue of development

Livernois corridor strategy shows how to shore up neighborhoods

   The lack of spots to shop in Detroit has spawned a retail desert that forces residents to trek to the suburbs to buy socks, televisions and countless other products. It has made city living a lot less convenient — and it has cost Detroit $1.7 billion a year in so-called retail leakage, including $200 million in grocery expenditures alone. It’s money Detroiters spend outside their city to buy products they need at home.

   One Detroit developer, arguing for a city-based Chamber of Commerce during a community meeting last month, lamented that Detroit has become a suburban labor and consumer market, enriching Oakland and Ma-comb counties by sending its residents to work and spend there.

   Even given the regional nature of southeast Michigan’s economy, Detroit can’t prosper without capturing a greater share of its retail market. For the administration of Mayor Dave Bing, that means assisting neighborhood businesses that pay taxes to the city, serve local customers and employ residents.

   Beyond the center city

   To thrive or even survive, Detroit must stop bleeding. Over the last 40 years, jobs in Detroit have dropped more than half, from 735,000 to 300,000, while the population has fallen from 1.5 million to below 800,000, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments estimates.

   In 1970, Detroit accounted for nearly 40% of the region’s jobs, compared to an anemic 10% today. In one respect, Detroit needs to look and act more as central cities did 60 years ago, when they served as economic and population cores laced with walkable neighborhood commercial districts.

   Today the city must focus its resources on those areas with enough people and businesses to make a comeback. Even then, real revivals in targeted areas of the city will take years of incremental change, working with community stakeholders and making thoughtful decisions about economic development and urban land use. For Bing, short-term political gains must take a back seat to long-term sustainable growth.

   Up to now, too much of the city’s economic development efforts have focused on downtown and big business. Fortunately, that imbalance appears to be changing. Last month, while working with local residents and urban land use experts from around the country, the Bing administration rolled out a collaborative model for neighborhood economic development on Livernois in northwest Detroit — including the former Avenue of Fashion.

   Reimagining Livernois

   Near freeways and thoroughfares, the corridor harbors many assets, including two universities , relatively high neighborhood income, solid housing stock and distinctive architecture. There are also obstacles to redevelopment, including a lack of parking, poorly maintained property, inadequate lighting, unattractive signs and the lack of a distinct identity.

   The Avenue of Fashion, which made up part of the corridor, is clearly yesterday’s brand. Today, the neighborhood loses an estimated $100 million a year in retail business to the suburbs.

   To help revive the commercial district, faculty and panelists with the Urban Land Institute’s Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use gathered in northwest Detroit. The urban planners, developers, city managers and architects spent four days generating ideas to turn the Livernois corridor — from 6 Mile to St. Martins, north of 7 Mile — into a thriving urban main street that could meet the retail and entertainment needs of one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Similar Urban Land Institute efforts will take place this year in Charlotte, Sacramento and Houston.

   They met with neighborhood stakeholders, including Livernois businesses, Marygrove College and the University of Detroit Mercy and Kim Tandy of the University Commons Organization, a coalition of neighborhood associations. Detroit officials who participated included Karla Henderson, Bing’s group executive for Planning and Facilities, and Olga Stella, vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, a private, nonprofit that works with city government on business development.

   The city’s efforts on Livernois are independent of the nascent Detroit Works Project, a plan by the Bing administration to concentrate the city’s residents and resources in certain core neighborhoods. Even so, the city’s commitment to the Livernois corridor signals that it regards the neighborhood as part of Bing’s overall strategy to shore up Detroit’s stable communities.

   To grow, the group concluded, the Livernois corridor needs contiguous off-street public parking, perhaps running behind businesses, that won’t create pedestrian-unfriendly gaps in the streetscape. Public art, better lighting, narrower streets to slow traffic, bike paths and walkways, more security, an enterprise zone, modern signs and attractive bus stops would also help businesses.

   Rebuild one block at a time

   The corridor also needs an identity, and the two universities must support nearby businesses and become a larger part of the neighborhood’s economic and social life. To create momentum, corridor improvements must focus on certain blocks, instead of trying to do everything everywhere.

   With these and other recommendations, the city has solid plans for redeveloping the Livernois corridor. It’s up to the Bing administration, working with neighborhood stakeholders, to carry them out, as the mayor acknowledged.

   The flight of people, jobs and capital from Detroit occurred over 60 years. Recapturing some of the central city’s retail market will take patience and perseverance. Still, in collaborating with community groups and national experts, the Bing administration is creating an effective model for neighborhood economic development that Detroiters can build on, one block at a time.

WILLIAM ARCHIE/Detroit Free Press Kim Tandy, of the University Commons Organization, center, leads a group of urban planners on a tour of the Livernois corridor, including the area known as the Avenue of Fashion, in northwest Detroit last month. The group spent four days in Detroit, generating ideas to redevelop the area and attract new residents, businesses and shoppers.

Debra Campbell, planning director of Charlotte , N.C., inspects a Detroit map after touring businesses on Livernois.

Residents can be driving force to city’s rebirth

   Two years ago, native Detroiter Don Studvent lost his job as a Chrysler autoworker. An experienced chef, Studvent took the money from a buyout, bought an office building at 19416 Livernois, and opened the 1917 American Bistro restaurant. Today, Studvent, 42, has 18 employees and a thriving business that serves arguably Detroit’s best blackened catfish, with live jazz on Thursdays and Fridays.

   “With prayer and my wife’s support, I decided to pursue my dream,” Studvent told me.

   One of Detroit’s countless untold stories, Studvent was another reason a high-octane group of urban thinkers found Detroit to be a city of hope and possibility. I hope their optimism proves contagious.

   Part of a national panel assembled by the Urban Land Institute, the eight experts — urban planners, architects, developers, city managers — visited Detroit last month to find ways to redevelop the Livernois corridor in northwest Detroit. Working with neighborhood residents and city government, they seek to turn the struggling thoroughfare between 6 Mile and 8 Mile — including the old Avenue of Fashion — into a thriving urban main street that can meet the retail demands of one of Detroit’s most affluent neighborhoods.

   To start, they toured the neighborhood, talking to residents and entrepreneurs like Studvent, as well as city shot-callers such as Karla Henderson, Detroit’s group executive for Planning and Facilities, and Olga Stella, vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation.

   True enough, they saw blight and vacancy during their four days in Detroit, noted the troubling lack of mass transit,heard stories about an unresponsive city bureaucracy, and lamented Detroit’s reliance on single-family housing. To retain and attract residents and compete with other cities, they agree, Detroit must develop adequate mass transit and multi-family housing that appeals to both the young creative class and older retired folks. But these visitors from cities such as St. Louis, Philadelphia and Houston also found Detroit surprisingly diverse and hopeful.

   “Statistics and visuals from the national media do not tell the whole story of Detroit,” Debra Campbell, planning director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, told me. “There are some really wonderful places there.”

   What impressed Campbell most was not the scrubbed neighborhoods around Livernois, or the architectural ice of the Guardian Building downtown, but Detroit’s “intellectual capital’’ — smart and committed people inside and outside of government who understand the city’s past and seek to create a new future.

   Panel cochairman Calvin Gladney, a developer and urban consultant from Washington, D.C., also found promise here and even blogged about it. In “This … is also Detroit,” he showed why the city is much more than “a place of maladies.”

   “I was surprised by the energy of the people on the ground,” he told me. “ The folks I met held their heads up. They just need tactics. They know where they want to be.”

   Detroit needs more leaders, Gladney said. Campbell noted that Detroit, like most urban regions, needs to get past lingering angers and hurts. “We can either dwell on the past, or we can move into the future and learn from past mistakes,” she said.

   Still, both flew home with a contagious conviction that Detroit had the juice to recreate itself. They want Livernois to become a model for how local residents, working with government, can transform a neighborhood and, ultimately, a city.

   Meeting them, and entrepreneurs like Stud-vent, would make anyone a believer.