Bill McGraw

Special to the Detroit Free Press

Detroit in 2007 meant no Astro Coffee, Kuzzo's Chicken & Waffles restaurant, Dequindre Cut, QLINE, Slow Roll or basketball games on Cadillac Square.

Ten years ago was before Dan Gilbert and Mike Duggan moved in from the suburbs; before the dog park under the Shinola clock at Cass and Canfield; before all the streetlights came on, before Kwame Kilpatrick — “America’s first hip-hop mayor” — found himself in legal trouble.

What we found:

♦ 10 key Detroit developments since 2007

♦ How and why we did this update

♦ Interactive map

♦ Watch Driving Detroit 2007 videos

So much has transpired that it seems like 2007 was 20 years ago. And 2007 happened to be the year the Free Press did “Driving Detroit,” an effort to figure out what was really going on across the vast city landscape. It was a puzzling time, at the beginning of the Great Recession and at the end of the Kilpatrick era. Boosters had already proclaimed that Detroit had turned a corner and was headed for greatness, but yet there were piles of dumped trash in many neighborhoods, almost half of the streetlights were out and blight seemed to be metastasizing.

“It’s a great day and a great time in the city of Detroit,” an ebullient Kilpatrick said in January 2007 while promoting the Winter Blast festival, then a new downtown event. “Detroit is truly coming back.”

In 2017, no one could have predicted the changes that have taken place in the city over the past decade, from the city's historic bankruptcy to Gilbert’s purchasing of about 100 downtown buildings to a judge sentencing Kilpatrick to 28 years in prison on federal corruption charges.

Today, a lot of people — not to mention the national and international media — believe the city is transforming itself. “Detroit: The most exciting city in America?” a New York Times headline asked in November.

But Detroit also is the most violent and poorest big city in America, two data points that represent widespread human suffering that is often swept aside in the new renaissance narrative. And beyond the dizzying makeover of downtown, Midtown and adjacent areas, the magnitude of the city’s damaged neighborhoods remains breathtaking and shocking to many visitors.

That contrast is the basis for the debate about “two Detroits” that has surfaced frequently since 2007, including in the Guardian newspaper from London, which described Detroit in a 2015 story as “a city both collapsing and gentrifying at the same time.”

♦ Have questions about Detroit? We've got answers!

With those contradictory concepts in mind, we decided to update “Driving Detroit.” After a decade of constant change, we wanted to see what had changed at random corners of the city.

We didn’t drive all the streets again, but photographer Romain Blanquart and I traveled across the city for much of the past four months, checking in on people and places we had photographed — and in some cases written about — 10 years earlier. We also went out of our way to explore a variety of Detroit neighborhoods to see what is new across the cityscape outside of the flourishing downtown areas.

Here’s what we found:

Optimism about Detroit. Our interviews were in no way scientific, but in the end they had a theme. We came across a lot of people who feel good about Detroit, much more so than those we encountered in 2007. This year, we met a 25-year-old Mexican-American woman who left Detroit with her family in the past decade because of crime worries in southwest Detroit. But she is getting married next year and she and her husband plan to move back into the city because she believes Detroit has changed.

We met a 65-year-old Canadian who is renovating a Palmer Woods mansion that, as we reported in 2007, had fallen into near ruin. He moved because he believes Detroit is a city of opportunity. We met a longtime resident of the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood who helps neighbors fix up their homes. We met a hair stylist who has helped renovate a store on West McNichols that in 2007 was an abandoned eyesore. He wants to expand his building into the vacant lot next door.

“There are a lot of things going on in Detroit,” said the stylist, Martin Wheeler, 38.

Detroit is much cleaner than in 2007

Kilpatrick curtailed bulk-trash pickups that year, and the result was piles of discarded junk, both large and small, sitting on many city streets. A lot of debris had sat for years on vacant lots and had alchemized into a Detroit phenomenon — old mounds of junk covered by weeds, wildflowers and grass. Some mounds were as big as a one-car garage.

Dumping remains a problem, but the city today often cleans up the refuse quicker than a decade ago. Officials say they remove 600 tons of illegally dumped debris every week.

The city in 2017 began sweeping most of the streets for the first time in seven years, and officials say workers cut the grass and weeds of more than 100,000 vacant lots four times this year. Duggan is proud of demolishing more than 13,000 abandoned buildings — mostly homes -— in the past four years.

Graffiti has largely disappeared

The city was covered with both bad and artsy squiggles and images in 2007, despite Duggan’s anti-graffiti crusade while he was Wayne County prosecutor in the early 2000s. Duggan remains obsessed with graffiti, but as mayor, he has money and crews to wash off the paint. The mayor’s office said workers from the General Services Department have erased 50,000 illegal tags in recent years. City inspectors are more aggressive than ever in ticketing art that they deem illegal, which has led to numerous squabbles with buildings owners who have to pay the fines.

Meanwhile, authorized murals — many of them spectacular — are thriving, especially around Eastern Market and along Grand River Avenue northwest of downtown.

Parks are in much better shape

Many had fallen into disrepair by 2007, with broken swings, crumbling fences and too much litter. The mayor’s office says the city maintained 275 parks in 2017 as opposed to just 25 parks that city workers kept up in 2013. Forty parks have been redone this year.

On the far east side, Balduck Park, with nearly $3 million in recent renovations, is in its best shape in 50 years. On the far west side, Rouge Park, Detroit’s biggest, has new trails, signage, gardens, plantings and roadways that are free of dumped garbage, unlike 10 years ago.

”It's a good day for Detroit parks,” said Andrea Galluci, an expert on the park system’s history. Because of shifting populations, officials also have quietly decommissioned some parks in recent years, mainly in old neighborhoods.

White migration

It’s old news that a recent U.S. Census Bureau population estimate has confirmed what is obvious: A steady stream of white people moving into Detroit’s downtown, Midtown and nearby neighborhoods, the reversal of a decades-long trend of white flight. That movement, in turn, has ignited discussions about the need for newcomers to respect the values and achievements of African Americans who have remained in place and fought for change during the many lean years.

But we found anecdotal evidence of a possible twist on that trend: A number of young white people seem to be settling far beyond the comfortable confines of Midtown, in neighborhoods that have been overwhelmingly African American for decades, and where prices are lower.

Those places include Brightmoor, Russell Woods, near Livernois and West Davison; along the boundaries of the Boston-Edison Historical District; in the Bagley neighborhood in northwest Detroit; along Gratiot Avenue east of Eastern Market, and the North End, which is north of East Grand Boulevard and east of the Chrysler Freeway.

In another out-of-the-box move, this year white businesspeople opened Post, a self-described “curated shopping experience” of handcrafted jewelry and art, some with a Detroit theme. It’s in an old post office on Kercheval Avenue, in a largely abandoned district four blocks west of the Grosse Pointe Park border, an area that Grosse Pointers generally have avoided.

Neighborhood improvements

We reported in 2007 that the city’s best neighborhoods — from Palmer Woods to Indian Village — were suffering ills familiar to less wealthy areas: growing abandonment, home foreclosures, scrappers and burglars. In 2017, most of the historic and upper-crust neighborhoods show a rebound in occupancy, home-sale prices and spirit.

Streets like Trumbull Avenue, from the Ford Freeway to Fort Street, and Livernois, near 7 Mile, have blossomed in the past 10 years. Alter Road, north of Mack Avenue, has seen a radical improvement in housing stock, like several nearby streets, but the surrounding area remains one of Detroit’s bleakest. One trend that has grown since 2007 is the establishment of small, nonprofit, community-based programs in many neighborhoods. One example: Food Field, a six-year-old urban farm on 4 acres in central Detroit.

Blight remains overwhelming

The bad news is the city is filled with mutilated neighborhoods, some of them so bad that photographers captured their ruins for lush coffee-table books over the past 10 years. That phenomenon, in turn, gave rise to the term “ruin porn,” the notion that some thoughtless forms of photography and journalism in Detroit neighborhoods can be insensitive and exploitative. Experts have written books about that issue, too, since 2007.

You can meander for miles in Detroit and never leave streets scarred by hollowed-out homes with tilting porches, charred facades and overgrown lawns. A 2014 task force on abandonment identified more than 78,000 structures that were either blighted or showed strong indications that they would become blighted in the future. Duggan’s 13,000-plus demolitions brought welcome relief to hundreds of streets, but put only a small dent in the overall problem.

Neighborhoods that were hurting in 2007 seemed more precarious this fall, and it begs the question what will happen to them in the coming years as Duggan — whose election slogan was "Every neighborhood has a future" — works feverishly to improve other sections of the city. The historically black middle-class area surrounding the site of the legendary Hartford Avenue Baptist Church, at Hartford and Milford, has deteriorated badly. About a mile away, Vancourt Street between Cobb Place and Tireman is potholed and ghostly, with dozens of tall houses standing empty.

The neighborhood southeast of 7 Mile and Woodward continues to disappear. Huge swaths of the east side are in critical condition, as you can see from a drive north on Chalmers from Jefferson to 7 Mile, or along Joann Avenue north of Gratiot or the length of French Road next to Coleman A. Young International Airport. One thing that has remained the same over 10 years: Even the most devastated neighborhood has a number of homes whose owners keep them in good condition.

Empty land

Detroit has lost so much population — 1.2 million people in 67 years — that it more than ever seems too small for its britches. Traffic is light on major streets in some neighborhoods. While everything from agriculture to storm-runoff systems has taken root on the city’s empty acres, the Duggan administration has taken mostly small steps in addressing the enormous amount of vacant space. It’s a touchy topic for politicians — the third rail of Detroit politics, if you will — because residents often equate the concept of “shrinking” the city with kicking people out of their homes.

Detroit Future City, the nonprofit urban-planning organization that has studied the city deeply, says more than 24 square miles of Detroit’s 139 square miles of land are empty, a measure that is growing steadily as the city continues demolishing abandoned homes at a rapid pace. Detroit has 120,000 vacant lots, most zoned for single-family homes, says Detroit Future City, which advocates using the empty land as an asset for such purposes as natural areas, buffer zones and so-called “green infrastructure,” low-impact water management.

An evolving city

The status and evolution of Detroit’s neighborhoods were the topics of a recent documentary screening titled “Arise Detroit: The City. The Heart. The Hope.” The film tells the story of Arise Detroit, a coalition of community groups that for 11 years has worked to grow what has become an enormous amount of volunteerism across the city, from Detroit residents, suburbanites and people from far outside of Michigan.

The film deals with such touchy subjects as the unraveling of Detroit, the influx of white migrants from the suburbs and blight. But the tone is generally optimistic.

“We’re starting to see investment in this community that we haven’t seen in decades,” John George, founder of Motor City Blight Busters, says in the movie, speaking of Detroit’s Old Redford neighborhood around Grand River and Lahser.

After the film, the Rev. Carl Zerweck, executive director of Rippling Hope, a volunteer organization that does home repairs in a large chunk of northwest Detroit, said the area where he works has thriving blocks adjacent to blighted neighborhoods.

“Where we live” — near Birwood and Fullerton — “we have three abandoned houses across the street and two burned ones next door to us,” he said.

Zerweck’s teams of volunteers do repairs on hundreds of homes each year. There are two requirements: The recipient of the help must be the homeowner and must be active in the local block club.

“We believe the that revitalization of neighborhoods will come through those block clubs and those neighborhood groups,” Zerweck said.

Arise Detroit founder Luther Keith was asked what Detroit neighborhoods had gone through in 10 years.

“It’s been a mixed bag,” he said. “We’ve been through foreclosure. We’re climbing out of that. People want an instant solution. But we had a massive problem.

“My thing is, work on the problem and get the needle moving in the right direction. It takes patience to do that.”