Detroit by the numbers: New report aims to give statistical portrait of the city

An idea has slowly grown in recent years that data honestly collected and rightly used can help reinvigorate Detroit.

The latest manifestation of this concept is now available — a 77-page compendium of relevant Detroit data titled “139 Square Miles.”

Created by the nonprofit Detroit Future City office, the booklet aims at offering a common set of statistics about Detroit — its people, its jobs and economy, its neighborhoods and housing market and much more.

"Transformation happens when we are all working from one common and trusted set of information, and this is what '139 Square Miles' provides," said Anika Goss-Foster, the executive director of the Detroit Future City office. "It is our hope that through this report, the city can maximize its success, start to close the gaps."

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation paid for the book. “All Detroiters deserve to be empowered with information that is open, accessible and verifiable,” Katy Locker, Knight’s program director of Detroit, said in the foreword to the book, which will be available online Sunday at www.detroitfuturecity.com/tools.

Some of the data points in “139 Square Miles” underscore the financial crisis facing Detroiters. Some 37% of city renters spend more than half their income on housing. That burden — roughly twice the recommended share that housing should take in a family’s budget — limits those households’ ability to afford every other necessity and extra.

“This is a really critical issue,” Goss-Foster said. “This is not a housing cost issue as it might be in other cities where you’re seeing the rising cost of housing affecting middle- class and lower-class families. For Detroit, this is really Detroiters not making enough money to live in stable affordable housing in Detroit.”

Some of the data points should place in perspective Detroit’s slide in the rankings of American cities. Over almost 70 years, Detroit has slid from America’s fourth largest city to its 23rd largest. But of the 25 largest cities in the U.S., 19 cover a greater square mileage than Detroit. That’s the result of Sunbelt cities like Houston and Phoenix gobbling up post-World War II suburban growth in a way that was denied to Detroit.

As the report notes, Detroit is becoming an older city, with residents older than 55 now making up 25% of the total population. Yet the 25-34 age cohort is gaining, too, adding 10,000 new residents in the city just since 2011.

And other data points evoke an “I didn’t know that!” reaction. Getting to work in Detroit remains a solitary endeavor — some 69% of commuters drive alone each day, while only 13% carpool. Only 9% take public transportation — a reflection of metro Detroit’s fractured and inadequate public transit networks.

It’s possible to quibble over some of the data in “139 Square Miles.” The report repeats the commonly used stat that 24 square miles of Detroit are vacant. I’ve always thought that number understates Detroit’s vacant land.

That stat counts only “buildable” vacant land, or land where houses and other buildings have been demolished. It doesn’t count abandoned roads or railroad lines, schoolyards where the school itself has been shuttered, parks no longer used or maintained, and other vacant sites that would add several more square miles to the total.

Detroit is hardly alone in turning to data to understand itself and guide reform. A variety of universities and researchers around the world have begun to use “big data” to analyze urban life in many forms, from the flow of traffic to the removal of garbage, with a goal of making cities run more efficiently.

The “139 Square Miles” publication is one of various data-producing efforts in Detroit in the past few years. Among others, the Motor City Mapping website offers a parcel-by-parcel reference on virtually all of Detroit’s more than 300,000 individual parcels.

The publication of “139 Square Miles” marks another step forward for the Detroit Future City office, a small nonprofit endeavor that grew from the 2013 publication of the mammoth Detroit Future City 50-year framework for revitalizing Detroit.

“We really want to position ourselves as a think tank and resource for data and information for all Detroiters,” Goss-Foster said, “so that we can help convene and innovate and help the city grow. So this report is the first publication that we’ve done that I think really reflects that.”

Numbers, of course, only get us so far. Detroiters still face hard choices about where to invest limited resources, how to spread the progress downtown to the neighborhoods, and similar tough questions.

But if data solves little by itself, it can provide the essential underpinning for almost any decision. That’s why efforts like “139 Square Miles” ought to be on every leader's reading list.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.