Here's why Detroit development takes so long

John Gallagher | Detroit Free Press

In case you didn't notice, several major development projects announced of late will all be coming online at about the same time in 2022 or 2023.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge should open to traffic then. Ford should be moving into the Michigan Central Station after a four-year renovation job. Detroit's 22-acre west riverfront park will be finished about that time, as will Wayne County's new criminal justice complex in Midtown.

And, not least, businessman Dan Gilbert's new skyscraper on the Hudson's site will open as Detroit's next tallest building.

Yes, 2022 in Detroit should be quite a year for ribbon-cuttings.

It raises an interesting question: Why do economic development projects take so long? Not the construction phase; four years to build a new international bridge or a towering new skyscraper is reasonable.

No, it's the pre-construction phase that stretches out year after year, vexing city officials and flummoxing everyone who tries to understand what's going wrong.

More than 30 years of covering economic development has engendered in me a deep skepticism about predictions of when a project will actually open and what it will cost. Whether airports, nuclear plants, waterfront development or more, everything takes about three times longer than initially expected, and almost always costs more, too.

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How long did the Hudson's site sit waiting for new development? Nearly 35 years since the old department store closed in 1983 until Gilbert broke ground last December. In the same way, for decades, the Michigan Central frustrated efforts to find a new use. And how long have we been debating a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor?

Back in the early 1990s, writing about the delays in finding a use for the former Duns Scotus friary in Southfield, I wrote in the Free Press: "One could train an MBA (two years), design a new car model (three to four years) or go through an entire business cycle (five to seven years) in less time than it often takes to turn the first shovel of dirt."

That's still true today.

There are lots of reasons. Getting planning and zoning permits in the best of circumstances takes a long time. And often that process is gummed up by objections, either real or fanciful, from neighbors and critics.

Then, too, it can take a painfully long time to line up money to pay for a project. That's especially true in a city like Detroit where low appraised values make almost any deal look risky to investors.

And, of course, many projects spark public debate that slows things down. Nobody said it would be easy to resolve all the issues involved in building a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor. Nor was it an easy call for Wayne County to scrap its "fail jail" project downtown and accept Gilbert's offer to build the new justice campus in Midtown.

One theory I like that helps explain why delays are endemic to development was neatly captured in a phrase once offered by a Danish professor named Bent Flyvbjerg — "democracy deficit."

In the early 2000s, Flyvbjerg looked at mega-projects — enormous public developments like Boston's Big Dig highway project, the first leg of which opened in 2003, five years late and about $12 billion over budget.

Flyvbjerg theorized that some important elements of risk were not being calculated into the original planning of many projects around the world. Planners and developers seemed to ignore, miscalculate or understate the problems likely to arise once a project got underway.

Flyvbjerg used the term "democracy deficit" to describe a lack of full public involvement at the front end that led to delays later on.

"Most appraisals of mega-projects assume, or pretend to assume, that infrastructure policies and projects exist in a predictable Newtonian world of cause and effect where things go according to plan," Flyvbjerg wrote. "In reality, the world of mega-project preparation and implementation is a highly risky one, where things happen only with a certain probability and rarely turn out as originally intended."

I suspect that one reason why politicians and developers sound so optimistic when announcing a project — so sunny in their projections of how soon a project will open — is that they're trying to imbue a project with an aura of inevitability. They hope that will smooth its way through the process.

So they present their plans as simple, easy and virtually cost-free. That economic development is never simple, easy, and cost-free leads to all sorts of delays and disappointments.

And we see this repeated ... over and over.

So I'm glad that the new bridge and the Hudson's project and the rest are all moving forward. Just remember that they come about only after a process that can take a generation or more.

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