Detroit's reputation is rising, but recovery still has a long way to go

John Gallagher | Detroit Free Press

It's fair to say that Detroit's reputation has flipped fairly quickly from "Ruin Porn Capital" to "Comeback City."

But that easy generalization is too simple, almost a cartoon, to capture the complex nature of Detroit's reality and its changing image. So Detroit Future City, the nonprofit consulting office that grew out of the 2013 Detroit Future City report, has surveyed city and suburban residents and national business leaders on their attitudes toward Detroit.

The latest survey, known as the 2019 Detroit Reinvestment Index, released Sunday, carries mostly positive news. City residents, suburbanites and national business leaders all reported rising rates of confidence in the city.

In one key finding, 83% of national business leaders rated Detroit a good or excellent place to invest and do business. The view of business leaders toward Detroit has been rising steadily since the first survey in 2016. And that speaks well to the city's prospects for future growth.

"For a city like Detroit that’s low cost, that doesn’t have all the amenities, we’re just coming back, it was still worth the investment for a lot of the national business leaders," Anika Goss, director of the Detroit Future City office, told me in an interview. "And I think that’s something worth paying attention to."

But the survey of national business leaders turned up a surprising result: Many of those leaders thought that Detroit's city government was still mired in bankruptcy, instead of being five years past its emergence from bankruptcy in November 2014.

Some 21% of the 300 business leaders surveyed believed Detroit was still in bankruptcy, while another 34% thought Detroit was still emerging from bankruptcy.

"For us, bankruptcy is old news," Goss said. "Nobody’s talking about that. Locally, I think, people don’t care about it. Nationally, I think it’s still an issue."

She added, "That was really surprising and something we should probably pay attention to."

City, suburbs growing closer

But perhaps the most surprising finding of this latest survey showed that both city residents and suburbanites were beginning to converge in their attitudes toward Detroit.

Both city residents and suburbanites picked the same three priorities in the same order and almost the same percentages: safe and secure neighborhoods, affordable housing and a good place to raise a family.

Rip Rapson, president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation, which pays for the annual Detroit Reinvestment Index, said these converging attitudes and growing positive views of Detroit among regional residents show that old animosities across 8 Mile Road are lessening.

"What’s happening now is the sense of confidence coming out of Detroit is actually affecting the region and loosening the resistance," Rapson told me. "I think this is more that just optics. I think it’s beginning to play into our region’s reconceptualization of itself."

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But concerns remain

There are, of course, still plenty of concerns, and they often stem from the rapid changes that Detroit is undergoing.

The survey found that Detroit residents who see the most change in their neighborhoods — new people moving in, property values rising, blighted houses being demolished — generally rate the changes favorably. But there remains an undercurrent of worry, too, for many residents.

Some 59% of Detroit residents said their utility bills were rising — perhaps a result of new water bills — while 26% said they saw neighbors being displaced by the changes in the city. Those sorts of worries reflect Detroit's growing debate over the nature of its recovery and who's benefiting from it.

The full report can be found at the detroitfuturecity.com website.

Changing views

Obviously this reputation business is a tricky thing. As someone who has covered Detroit for more than 30 years, I've been struck by how quickly Detroit's image has flipped from awful to promising.

LIke Goss and Rapson and probably lots of others, I get frequent requests from out-of-towners — academics, urban planners, other journalists — who are visiting Detroit from Japan or Germany or wherever who ask me to show them around town. In past years, often the request was to see the ruins — the Packard plant, the abandoned houses, a city scarred by Devil's Night arson.

But beginning a few years ago the requests were all about the recovery — the vibrancy in Midtown and downtown, or the urban farms that were reclaiming vacant land. Now out-of-towners come to the city having heard about Detroit's recovery and primed to see it.

Rapson told me he still sometimes gets asked if Detroit's recovery is just a bubble — artificially propped up by the likes of Dan Gilbert and likely to fall back to earth sooner or later.

But while some of the new projects may fail, the city's progress doesn't feel like a bubble. It feels more solid than that — just not complete yet.

What's left to do

As the worries over displacement and rising costs reported in the latest survey show, a lot of residents in Detroit are hopeful. But they still need to see the recovery spread throughout the city, not just in Corktown and Midtown and downtown.

This lack of recovery in many parts of Detroit, and the city's continuing lack of opportunity for many of its residents, worsened by our legacy of racism and poverty, means that Detroit's comeback remains incomplete.

Yes, if word of Detroit's recovery, incomplete as it is, has spread to the suburbs and far beyond into national business leadership circles, that's a good thing.

But it doesn't mean our work is done. Detroit's recovery to date has been remarkable. But we still have a long way to go.

Our jobs now is to work the problem, and let the reputation take care of itself.

Contact John Gallagher at 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.