The word came up, as it almost always does in Detroit these days, less than two minutes into the conversation.

“Detroit is at the forefront of this thing called gentrification,” Simone Lightfoot, national director of urban initiatives for the National Wildlife Federation, said at a housing summit on Detroit’s east side in late April.

“Some people aren’t even willing to say it’s happening. In black circles, it’s talked about all day. But in white areas, it’s called development.”

Five days later, at a very different gathering – the Urban Land Institute’s spring conference at Cobo Center – two billionaires redeveloping downtown and Midtown, Dan Gilbert and Chris Ilitch, offered a radically different vision of Detroit, one they say benefits all.

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“Detroit is at a special moment in time, ripe with opportunity and promise,” said Ilitch, whose firm, Olympia Development, is remaking large swaths of Midtown with its $1 billion mixed-use development, The District Detroit, which includes the sports and entertainment venue Little Caesars Arena.

Three and a half years after emerging from bankruptcy, Detroit’s changes are undeniable: Tax values are up, access to loans has increased, and a 60-year population skid has slowed to a trickle. But the comeback is accompanied by lingering questions about whether all residents benefit from the revival of downtown and Midtown.

Much of Detroit’s progress has come through heavily subsidized developments and tax breaks that represent a bet that development in a few areas will create enough momentum to revive long-suffering neighborhoods in the 139-square-mile city.

It’s a debate that no doubt will intensify with last week’s announcement that Ford Motor Co. bought Detroit’s most visible symbol of decay, Michigan Central Depot, which has been closed for three decades. Ford plans to redevelop the building and bring 2,500 employees to the Corktown neighborhood, a deal that will require significant tax credits.

The discussion about seismic changes in Detroit is often accompanied with a loaded buzzword – gentrification – that doesn’t adequately describe what’s happening, argues Alan Mallach, an urban scholar and author of the new book “The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America.”

Classic gentrification involves an influx of newcomers that raises rents and home values and prices out longtime residents, Mallach said. By and large, that isn’t happening in Detroit, he said.

Despite the sale of $1 million lofts and six-month waiting lists for Midtown apartments, “the broad data indicates there’s no displacement (of residents) and we have to make sure displacement does not take place,” said David Egner, CEO of the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation that helps finance Midtown development.

“The recovery of Detroit has got to stretch to the neighborhoods,” said Aaron Seybert, social investment officer of the Kresge Foundation, which has a leading role in funding and planning Detroit’s revival.

“If all we ever did was invest in downtown and Midtown, it would be one thing. But we have a strong belief we need a strong nucleus (in these areas) we need to grow out of.”

Kresge is one of the funders of the city’s recently expanded Strategic Neighborhood Fund, a $130 million venture that funds neighborhood streetscapes, park improvements, vacant home rehabs and financing for mixed-use developments. (Disclosure: The Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation and Kresge Foundation donate to The Center for Michigan, the nonprofit that operates Bridge Magazine.)

Booming values. Static bottom line

How divided are opinions about what’s happening in Detroit? Even opinion surveys disagree.

In April, the University of Michigan released a survey of residents that was overwhelmingly pessimistic.

Asked about who benefits most from downtown and Midtown investments, more believed it was non-residents (38 percent) than city residents (20 percent); white people (47 percent) as opposed to black people (2 percent); and wealthier people (70 percent) over poorer people (2 percent).

“The negativism is a little starker than we thought,” said Jeffrey Morenoff, director of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, which conducted the study.