8 reasons why the Silverdome and Northland Mall failed

First Northland, then the Pontiac Silverdome.

Two icons of Detroit’s late 20th century suburban sprawl now face the wrecking ball. That a major suburban mall and a huge domed stadium could fall within the lifetimes of the people who built them represents waste of staggering proportions.

The near-term causes are clear: The Silverdome lost its main tenant when the Lions moved to Ford Field years ago, and the demographics of suburban shopping no longer favor Northland, a pace-setting suburban mall opened in 1954.

But beyond those immediate causes lies a more intriguing question: How could metro Detroiters go so far wrong when they bet big on suburban sprawl from the 1950s onward? Wouldn't a much more compact urban area today, with walkable communities linked by public transportation, have offered better living at a lower cost in resources and pollution than our region's low-density, auto-dependent world?

Those of us who criticized suburban sprawl over the years as a vast game of musical chairs now feel justified in saying we told you so. The demolition of Northland and the Silverdome exemplifies the throw-away culture that can discard infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of dollars when tastes change.

How and why did Detroiters buy into suburban sprawl so readily and completely? It’s a complex story, but here, in no special order, are eight reasons:

1. Home Rule

Michigan law gives every local community wide leeway in deciding its own development policy. That has led to a lumpy development map across the region, with some townships opting to remain more rural while others go for more intensive development and the taxes that brings. What’s best for the region as a whole never gets considered.

2. Bad demographic estimates

Back around 1950, when Southeast Michigan still enjoyed a heady population growth, some regional leaders believed that perhaps 10 million people would call the region home in the year 2000. Today the real number is a little more than 4 million. Planning for a population surge that never came lay behind much of the urgency in suburban growth.

3. Urban planning

Urban planners during the era of suburban sprawl paid more attention to the concerns of vehicle traffic than to concepts of walkability and urbanity. The result: Vast expanses of low-density suburbia are given over to paved parking lots and extra-wide streets. Northland and the Silverdome were typical in being plopped amid acres of concrete.

4. Racism

Toxic racial conflicts between blacks and whites did more than drive middle-class residents out of the city of Detroit. It also gave the newly minted suburbanites a sense of correctness – that Detroit had become a hell-hole best left abandoned. Better race relations no doubt would have lessened the urge to sprawl.

5. Federal policy

The U.S. government subsidized suburban growth to an astonishing degree, from paying for highways to promoting mortgage deductions for all the new subdivisions built in the farmlands. That these policies drained central cities of their vitality was recognized only belatedly.

6. Lazy Politicians

Two or three generations of elected and appointed leaders were more interested in promoting short-term gains in jobs and tax base than in asking questions about the long-term impacts of sprawl.

7. Home Builders

Over the past half-century the region’s home-building contractors and developers built 10,000 to 15,000 new units of housing each year on the suburban fringe until the Great Recession put a stop to that. So many people benefited from suburban sprawl as a profit-making enterprise that proved irresistible.

8. Road builders

As with home contractors, road builders reaped huge profits from creating the infrastructure of sprawl.

Racism, bad intel, profits, taxes – all played a part in our unsustainable suburban sprawl. The pending demolitions of Northland and the Silverdome bring that home. What lessons we learn remain to be seen.

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