Sorry, Dan, it wasn't just that lingering bad rep that scuttled Detroit's Amazon bid

Dan Gilbert on Wednesday asserted in his trademark vigorous way that only Detroit's past reputation as a Rust Belt failure doomed its bid for Amazon's second headquarters.

Sorry, Dan. It wasn't a bad rep that scuttled Detroit's bid, but hard facts.

By almost any measure, Detroit's comeback is underway. But by almost any measure, that comeback remains in its early stages, with years of work ahead of us.

The two areas Amazon cited in its feedback to Detroit's bid committee — talent and transit — both represent areas that need improvement.

From the dismal test scores in too many Detroit schools to the below-average percentage of metropolitan residents with college degrees, Detroit is yet to become that talent magnet we see in cities like Boston and Denver and Austin. As the Free Press reported last week, only one of the cities on Amazon's shortlist, Miami, shows a lower percentage of young adults who have earned a bachelor's degree or higher.

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True, as Gilbert noted in his letter to the city's leaders, we have great universities nearby and a growing number of tech-savvy young folks coming to Detroit to work for the likes of Google or his Quicken Loans. And Gilbert was correct when he wrote that metro Detroit enjoys the "largest and fastest growing population of engineers of any American metropolitan area."

And it's also true, as Gilbert wrote, that tech-savvy people flock to where the jobs are, be that in Detroit or Seattle, and that would be true of whatever city Amazon picks.

So this may be more a matter of degree or emphasis. The verdict of Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber and one of the leaders of the city's bid, probably comes closer to the mark: Detroit's talent base, he has said, is good and getting better. But it's not yet good enough to win a high-stakes economic development competition like Amazon's.

As for transit, Gilbert agreed in his letter last week that we need to resolve our regional transit issues, and fast.

"Having a strong mass transit solution is the ante to play for a millennial workforce, as well as for the most successful and dynamic companies in the world," he wrote. "It’s time to get in a room and figure it out. Now." He's right about that.

But asserting, as Gilbert did in his letter, that all we need to do is get out-of-towners to visit here to see all the progress — "Once we get them here, we've got them," he wrote — seems to imply that recent progress ought to satisfy a player like Amazon.

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In fact, across a range of efforts, Detroit remains in the early stages of a 50-year recovery.

Consider these markers:

• Downtown Detroit has made astonishing progress in recent years. The central Campus Martius area and Woodward corridor up through Midtown, and sites like Eastern Market and Cobo Center, remain showcases for Detroit's revival.

But even in downtown, we see so much that remains to be done. Step a few blocks east or west of Woodward and we encounter far too many vacant lots and empty buildings.

Many of those, like the multiple parcels in the Ilitch family's District Detroit area, may soon be filled with projects that are now in planning stages. But that, too, will take years to happen in full.

In short, downtown Detroit could improve for another decade at the same rate as the past 10 years and still not "finish" the work of bringing downtown back.

• And then there are Detroit's neighborhoods. It may not be true, as skeptics charge, that all of the neighborhoods are suffering. West Village, West Vernor Highway, the Livernois-Six Mile district, are all showing positive signs of recovery. Classic neighborhoods like Indian Village and Palmer Woods now see homes selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But it's inescapable that far too many districts in the city outside the greater downtown area still await progress of almost any kind. Nobody should harbor any doubts about the poverty and abandonment in many Detroit neighborhoods.

• Even Detroit's RiverWalk, a testament to the vision and energy of civic leaders who built it, remains a work in progress, years away from realizing its complete vision.

The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy hopes to break ground this year on a major design of a 22-acre parcel on the west riverfront, and to fill in some of the gaps in the RiverWalk on the east riverfront as well. That will take time. And the vacant parcels adjacent to the RiverWalk slated for development as housing and retail remain mostly in planning stages at this point.

By contrast, Chicago began working on its lakefront redesign more than 100 years ago. Decades of hard work created Chicago's incomparable series of waterfront parks. Depending on when we start reckoning, Detroit has been at it no more than 15 to 30 years.

Great cities take time. Detroit's RiverWalk is probably 10 years away from its fully realized vision.

And what about Detroit's reputation? The bad rep that Gilbert wrote doomed the Amazon bid, the "elephant in the room" as he called it?

It's just no longer true that the world writes off Detroit only as a Rust Belt failure. Indeed, journalists around the world commonly portray Detroit as the "next Brooklyn" or the "comeback city" or, as a New York Times columnist wrote recently, as "the most exciting city in America right now."

For at least the past 10 years, scores of overseas experts have flocked to Detroit to see what new and innovative efforts were underway here. These visitors — journalists, film makers, urban planners, academics, economists — hailed from places like Britain and Japan and South Africa. They came to study the urban farms, the arts scene, the entrepreneurial startups, and found much to like.

Sure, the "next Brooklyn" myth-making may be overdone. But it's Detroit's rapidly improving reputation that probably got us as far as we did in the Amazon competition. Amazon told Detroit leaders that the city missed the cut to 20 finalists by a fraction. That speaks to the rapidly improving image the city enjoys, which in turn reflects real progress toward a 21st Century city.

Personally I think Amazon missed the boat by passing on Detroit. No city would have done more than Detroit to satisfy its needs, including giving away far too many tax benefits. But that's now in the past.

In so many ways I share Dan Gilbert's impatience for a better narrative for Detroit. Gilbert expects and demands rapid action, and he cares only about results. These qualities have proved of tremendous benefit for Detroit.

But he and others need to let go of this idea that only a bad image holds us back. It's more than that.

Detroit's recovery is well underway. But we have years of hard work ahead of us to achieve a city that works for all.

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