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Making Detroit walkable key to vitality and livability
By ANN RICHARDS
For more than 40 years, since riots erupted in neighborhoods surrounding its downtown, Detroit has experienced some of the most negative stereotyping of any major city in the country, according to University of Michigan sociologist Reynolds Farley.
But even before the 1967 violence -- beginning in the 1950s -- Detroit’s population had been withering while surrounding suburban communities had expanded. A 1961 University of Michigan study found that 22 percent of the residential units within three miles of downtown were empty. Six years later, in the aftermath of the riots, Detroit’s fortunes plummeted further, its reputation in ruins.
Today, even though the city and its suburbs remain the eighth largest and 12th wealthiest metropolitan area in the U.S., Detroit is regarded by many as one of the nation’s most troubled metropolitan areas.
Thus, the revitalization of Detroit -- and specifically its downtown -- “is arguably the most important and difficult problem now facing American urban design,” according to Robert Fishman, an urban historian and professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning in Ann Arbor.
Across the country, downtowns are making comebacks, thanks to pent-up demand for walkable, vibrant places where it is possible to live, work and play, says Christopher B. Leinberger, land-use strategist, author and, for the past two years, director of UM’s graduate Real Estate Development Program, which is led by Taubman College.
The goal of the program is to promote alternatives to conventional, sprawl-oriented development. It focuses on introducing business, architectural, and urban planning and design students to the concept of “progressive development.”
“In 1985, about 10 percent of the country’s downtowns were reviving. In 2005, 60 percent were on the way back. That’s the market speaking,” Leinberger said.
“Demand is creating a new role for cities. We’re not recreating what was. We’re reusing existing buildings in fundamentally different ways.
He says recent studies show that up to half the households in the U.S. want an alternative to suburban living. There’s a growing interest in high-density, mixed-use development that provides everyday basic services -- including jobs -- that are within walking distance.
“We’re re-entering an era of ‘walkable urbanity,’” Leinberg said, “and it’s being fed by boredom with the choices now available.”
Detroit’s downtown has begun development of this kind of pedestrian-friendly, high-density living and is ripe for more, Leinberger said.
In 2006, with a $100,000 grant to UM from the Mott Foundation, college students spent the summer collecting data about Detroit in collaboration with local developers, the Urban Markets Initiative of the Brookings Institution and Social Compact Inc.
The grant represents a cross-program collaboration knitting the Foundation’s interests in land use and growth management in Michigan, building organized communities, and community revitalization and economic development.
The study, commissioned by the Downtown Detroit Partnership, a public/private group of the city’s corporate and civic leaders, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, uncovered some surprising new information about Detroit's downtown neighborhoods.
The students found that the average household income in these neighborhoods -- $59,300 -- was 33 percent higher than census trend projections. Furthermore, the research indicated that 83 percent of Detroit’s new downtown residents have college degrees and one-third of these have master’s or other professional degrees, compared with a national average of 10 percent.
According to the research, Detroit’s downtown population also is larger than previously supposed. About 74,300 residents live downtown or in neighborhoods oriented toward downtown, or 13.3 percent more than was indicated by 2006 census trend projections. Each day, 80,500 people work in downtown Detroit. And the downtown area also hosts 15 million visitors annually.
UM students, under the direction of Professor Larissa Larsen, linked much of their data to individual parcels of downtown property by using a geographic information system database. They also facilitated a number of community input sessions to identify potential development opportunities and conducted one-on-one interviews with downtown retailers.
The student’s research was used to inform the 2007 Detroit Urban Design Charette, an annual, four-day design workshop held in Detroit since 1999 under the auspices of UM’s Taubman College.
At the 2006 workshop, which also was supported by Mott, groups of students worked with faculty and design professionals to produce a strategic plan, focusing several “catalytic” real estate projects in the city’s central business district.
Despite monumental challenges -- 31.4 percent of Detroit’s residents live in poverty and unemployment is estimated to be more than 14 percent -- there are strong indications that sections of the city are in the early stages of resurrection, and downtown is well on its way, Leinberger said.
Downtown Detroit has a strong and growing residential market, with demand anticipated for 1,700 new housing units over the next five years, according to Downtown Detroit in Focus: A Profile of Market Opportunity, one of three reports produced for the design workshop.
According to the study, Detroit’s downtown and its adjacent neighborhoods have unmet demand for stores selling clothing, furniture and home furnishings, electronics and appliances, building material and garden equipment, and groceries.
Despite these encouraging statistics and increasing demand, high hurdles remain for financing new development, Leinberger says. He recently published a book, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream, detailing the challenges and opportunities related to building more environmentally, socially and financially sustainable communities.
“Among the many hurdles they face, proponents of progressive development are constantly confronted by the difficulty of financing,” he said. “Generally, walkable urban places have higher construction and land costs as well as higher financial risk … than conventional suburban development.”
Because of urban sprawl, the manmade surroundings that provide the setting for human activity -- sometimes referred to as the “built environment” -- is too spread out in the U.S., says Douglas S. Kelbaugh, a professor of architecture and urban planning and Taubman College’s dean.
“America took a left turn after World War II in terms of urban planning. Suburban living was a relatively new idea, built around -- and with -- the automobile. A huge amount of infrastructure had to be built to accommodate this pattern of development,” he said.
“Environmentally, this type of development simply isn’t sustainable. It eats up land, consumes energy, and pollutes air and water supplies. You could argue that, spatially, it insulates people from each other by their income, ethnicity and race.”
According to Leinberger, the effect of treating real estate as a commodity has resulted in investments in projects that offer less risk and shorter returns. Conventional suburban development, based upon standard national formulas and car-friendly access and parking, performs well financially in the short-term but peaks in years 7 through 10. It is built cheaply to help drive early financial returns.
“We have been encouraging a disposable ‘built environment,’” he said.
Downtown development exhibits an opposite pattern. Construction budgets for downtown development are higher for many reasons, including constrained sites, multiple stories and underground work. Greater construction costs mean that financial returns are reduced in the early years of a project and require “patient equity.”
Cash flows from various forms of walkable urbanism appear to get better over time, Leinberger says. This is what is meant by “patient equity.”
“As more development takes place within walking distance, there are more people on the street, which drives rents and sales prices up, resulting in land and building values going up, resulting in higher tax revenues and cash flow,” he said.
“It generally takes time to achieve the critical mass or expand the walkable district -- hence the time lag in cash flow generation.”
There are a couple of places nationally where walkable urbanity is taking root, including suburban town centers; strip malls; and the increasingly popular open-air, “lifestyle” malls.
“When I first moved to the Dupont Circle area in Washington, D.C., there were two walkable, urbane places -- Georgetown and Alexandria -- in the area. Today there are 18,” Leinberger said.
The traditional neighborhood design of Seaside, the Florida beach town designed by architect Robert Davis, is another example of walkable urbanity.
But it is downtowns and downtown-adjacent neighborhoods that provide a ready-made infrastructure for this type of development.
“We take our assets for granted,” said Ann Lang, president and CEO of the Downtown Detroit Partnership.
“Dean Kelbaugh reminds us that no more than a half dozen cities in the country have the significant architectural inventory that downtown Detroit does. Our public environment works. The new RiverWalk is a world-class amenity. The Entertainment District is thriving. Now we need to build the connective tissue and to tell our story.
“The UM students elevated our attention to the need to tie together the various activity centers in downtown.
“We’ll end up using a lot of their recommendations.”
The most useful -- and unanticipated -- outcome of the UM work was the statistical information it produced, Lang says.
“Thanks to the market and demographic research, we now understand we have a much larger market in downtown Detroit than we thought.”
Given its economic challenges, Detroit still has a long way to go, Lang said.
“Still, I believe we’re at a moment in time when we have that critical momentum that will allow us to turn the corner. We have a remarkable group of talented and focused individuals and institutions involved in sustaining and strengthening downtown’s vitality.”