“(Cox) figured that mostly millennials with no families and few large responsibilities would be the likely candidates he would attract,” Lewis says about Cox’s goal to bring new energy to the department. “What he found, quite to his pleasure and amazement, was numerous mature professionals who saw the opportunity to be part of something historic in a black city poised for redevelopment but with a citizenry on the verge of being further disenfranchised in the face of rampant redevelopment.

“You now look at the complexion of the department and its leadership and you see gender diversity, racial diversity, but a clear dominance of African-Americans,” he adds. “All of us as a group including leadership and staff are fairly like-minded in our agreement in this experiment, which is how do you wrangle the ugly g-word — gentrification — into some order that allows or creates lanes for as many diverse citizens to participate as possible,” he says. “As bad as gentrification is perceived, in some communities it is, in fact, the economic engine that fuels development.”

Lewis says that he returned to government because he saw that the only way to ensure development leads to equitable outcomes is to be part of the process. In Detroit, the window of opportunity is still open. Much as other residents like to snark at the all the new restaurants that follow the paint-by-numbers layout of reclaimed wood, metal stools and white subway tile, gentrification hasn’t led to the displacement of people of color seen in cities such as D.C., which saw its black population dip below 50 percent for the first time in about 50 years in 2011. But the warning signs are there. In one downtown senior-citizen high-rise, its residents were notoriously evicted so their units could be refurbished into luxury apartments marketed in a much-derided video featuring overenthusiastic, mostly white millennials. And as high-end development swells downtown and in Midtown, residents in adjacent neighborhoods like Core City and North End can sway in two directions: Excited for the future, or worried about being the next to be forced out.

“How do you wrangle the ugly g-word — gentrification — into some order that allows or creates lanes for as many diverse citizens to participate as possible?”

Now the city’s planning department must make sure all Detroiters are included in this current revival — and note, this is the umpteenth revival for Detroit, a city whose populace has learned to live with broken promises.

“They finally have a sense that there’s a payback coming back,” says Cox. “They have stuck in with this city and now it’s time for some attention to be paid to those who are still here.”

CODE-SWITCH

The city of Detroit mandates that all new residential development must be 20 percent affordable. But, Lewis says, “I want to be careful when I talk to my white counterparts in organizations like Bedrock [Real Estate Services] and others, to caution them to not default, when they talk about affordability and low-income, to black folks.”

More frequently these days, but certainly not a stranger to the practice as a black professional, Lewis says he has to code-switch between the two Detroits: The white folks in the boardrooms who hold the purse strings, and the black folks outside the ivory tower. “You can see it in the body language,” Lewis says about white developer types. “They haven’t shared our experience, they don’t understand.”

The city’s planning department and its employees have become the bridge between the two, having to put more pressure on firms like Bedrock Real Estate Services — a division of Gilbert’s empire — to not only be inclusionary, but to be considerate.

“If Dan Gilbert brings thousands of Quicken employees, few of whom look like us as far as I’m concerned, they are the economic engine that is fueling what is going on here,” Lewis says.

But, “don’t overlook the large number of black middle-class and upper-class individuals that we have in the city who should be targeted as a market to participate in all of the new development, ownership and residency in all areas of the city that are experiencing this development pressure,” he adds.

A man bikes through the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood.

Detroit at its peak was the nation’s capital of black middle-class home ownership, a mentality that still persists despite many homeowners becoming renters after the 2009 housing crash. In recent years, the city of Detroit has embarked on several programs to convert renters to homeowners, including a mortgage program backed by foundation funding, and another program that offers of a select number of rehabbed homes to qualified buyers.

After decades in L.A., Lewis sees untapped opportunity in neighborhoods where many black families still have deep roots.

“There is tremendous economic power in the black community,” he says, pointing to retired NBA player Magic Johnson’s millions of dollars in investments in Southern California. “We have money in the black community that floods out.”

In his new hometown, the money tends to flood out into the suburbs. If black folks aren’t shopping there, they’re moving there. Cox and Lewis want to be part of the charge of keeping the money — and their earners — in the city.

“We need to be around each other for cultural reasons,” Lewis says. “Black folks have had to swim in two streams seemingly the whole time we’ve been here. We know how to do that. We still have different kinds of conversations when we’re among different kind of people — code-switching. And I think most white folks don’t really understand that … because it’s their world and we’re just living in it. There’s still a joy in the banter and communication that occurs between us that happens at the neighborhood level.”

DRAWING A NEW MAP

But the days of fantasizing that all of these families will come back with a mortgage and a swing set for the backyard are over. Cox and Lewis are blunt about the need to accept that Detroit’s future will look different than its past.

“As architects and designers, we believe that the greatness that defines Detroit is from an architectural standpoint,” Lewis says. “But we’re not going to be building single-family neighborhoods like that anymore.”

“You can’t keep telling folks who have lived in neighborhoods that have lost population that folks are coming back,” Cox says. “Instead is there a way to regenerate those neighborhoods just for the people that are there?”

The architect uses the term productive land reuse to describe his vision of neighborhoods with a mix of small businesses, farms and orchards and greenways.

“One pilot that we are playing with going into a quarter square mile of a neighborhood, and go in and get rid that of all blight and all the buildings that are not salvageable,” Cox says. “Then we go in and renovate — with historic preservation in mind — all of the houses that are left. So you’ve got 100 homes and take the tens of acres that are vacant and come up with a design plan for every single acre in the neighborhood.”

This vision will take hundreds of millions of dollars and many years to realize. But just as difficult as the development, is the job of convincing longtime Detroiters to not only buy into the new map, but help draw it.

“It’s my impression that Detroiters have been waiting an awfully long time to be engaged in a forward looking conversation about the future of their neighborhoods,” Cox says.

It wasn’t, after all, that long ago that former Detroit Mayor Dave Bing made international news with suggestions that the city could benefit from a “right-sizing” that would reduce city services in sparsely populated parts of the city and encourage residents to move closer to the city downtown core. Not unlike the equally contentious post-Katrina imaginings of New Orleans, the planned retreat would have meant reducing public investment in largely black areas that had already suffered through redlining and other harmful public policies. For many black Detroiters, the idea hit like a slap in the face.

Duggan’s administration is careful to avoid suggesting that any one part of the city won’t be inhabited in the future. Catch any of the city’s Land Bank officials outside the office at a neighborhood watering hole, and you’ll hear the repeated mantra of keeping existing neighbors while adding in new ones. More people need to stay than leave. Yet the vision being shopped around by Cox’s team contain the same underlying principles of compact design and many of the same elements, including urban agriculture and higher-density residential development along busier commercial corridors, with housing above retail. “That will bring populations back that will serve the tax base,” Lewis says.

Touchy is the word Lewis uses to describe how Detroiters feel about the remake of their neighborhoods.

“Our average layperson, they’re going back to Donna Reed and Andy Griffith, and what the idea or mental image of what home is,” he says. “We are of the mind that we are in the 21st century and our city should reflect that, and that collides often with the aesthetic preference of many laypeople want.”

And Duggan’s being the first white mayor in more than 40 years doesn’t make the work of rebuilding public trust any simpler.

That means folks like Cox and Lewis are more out front than ever.

“My goal is for my staff to meet people where they are,” Cox says. “We should promise only what we can deliver and plan for implementation. So when we go into neighborhoods, we go in not to plan for planning’s sake, but to plan for their priorities and to plan what we think we can deliver. We start demonstrating change in the very beginning of the planning process.”

Lewis puts it more plainly: “If we come from them who are them, and we can’t get this done, it ain’t gon’ get done,” Lewis says.

In June, five development teams — four of which were led by black business owners — announced a collective $52.4 million investment in Harmonie Park, a sliver of downtown Detroit populated with a handful of minority-owned businesses. Plans range from a cigar bar and jazz club to boutique hotels and office space. The area will be rebranded as Paradise Valley Cultural and Entertainment District, a throwback to the black-populated Paradise Valley entertainment district — Detroit’s Bourbon Street — that was destroyed via urban renewal in the 1950s.

“Part of this is creating early successes where black folks are present in development deals in a number of places where people wouldn’t ordinarily see them,” Lewis says.

A rendering of the renovated Harmonie Park in downtown Detroit (Credit: Detroit Economic Development Corp.)

And then there are the smaller displays. In another neighborhood along the city’s riverfront, requests for purchases were opened to developers, but Cox held interviews in public libraries for neighbors to hear what they had planned before granting the RFPs. “Nothing like that had ever happened before,” Lewis says.

“If you have a plan for action, a plan for engagement, you rebuild trust that the city will deliver on the promise that it makes to residents,” Cox says. “And we have that willingness to deliver, willingness to engage, to listen and let them drive the planning decisions of their neighborhood.”

Cox witnessed this when he and the city recruited 300 volunteers from the University of Detroit Mercy on the city’s west side to paint bike lanes and board up vacant homes in the surrounding neighborhood. “For me, engagement is doing stuff with residents and demonstrating the power and transformation that design can produce.”

Bike lanes alone cannot save a neighborhood. But, Cox says, “it gets [residents] used to change. You don’t have wait 12 months for change. But when the change happens, they’ve seen a little bit of it — it gives them a sense that it’s happening now.”

In October, Lewis and Cox presented at a conference on how their identities as black professionals play a role in the work they do in Detroit. It touched on disinvestment in the city, and what’s needed to ensure the city’s majority is part of the way forward. Including difficult conversations.

“We were going to call it ‘The Big Bet,’” Lewis says. “But now, it’s called ‘The Big Payback.’” he laughs.