Mike Duggan made a declaration at a Feb. 15 groundbreaking for the redevelopment of a long-abandoned B. Siegel women's clothing department store that once anchored the Livernois Avenue of Fashion — one that no Detroit mayor has been able to say confidently in the past half-century.

"We're competing with the suburbs every day for people and business," Duggan said in a parking lot at Seven Mile and Livernois, a commercial shopping district just a short mile from the Oakland County border.

Duggan has never so bluntly assessed how the nascent revitalization of Detroit is starting to change a half-century-old dynamic of the suburbs dwarfing the city with seemingly endless land for subdivisions, shopping malls and manufacturing plants.

But as a new generation of young adults spurns the suburbs many of them grew up in, the Detroit mayor is starting to contrast what he has to offer — dense, walkable living and work environments — with the cul-de-sacs well beyond the city's 140 square miles.

"We're not going to compete with them by being like them," the former Livonia resident said of the suburbs. "We're not going to do it by building a (commercial) building with a whole sea of asphalt around it."

Duggan made these remarks against the backdrop of the stalemate that's formed with his suburban counterparts to north of Eight Mile Road over building a seamless regional mass transit system.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel have mounted a resistance to the plans Duggan and Wayne County Executive Warren Evans have pursued for regional transit that rely heavily on suburban cooperation — and wealth.

Suburban leaders are well aware that a resurgent Detroit is back on the map in terms of competing for jobs and people.

Southfield office towers have lost several tenants to Detroit in recent years, including Microsoft abandoning its suburban office for a space in Dan Gilbert's One Campus Martius.

Ford Motor Co. is moving 200 employees from Dearborn to a building on Michigan Avenue in Corktown that the automaker purchased in a bid to create an urban workplace to attract the world's top talent to develop a business strategy for selling electric and autonomous vehicles of the future.

Google is preparing to leave its decade-old office in downtown Birmingham for some new digs next to Little Caesars Arena. And the advertising agency Doner is actively considering a move of its 450 employees downtown from Southfield.

Many suburban communities are rapidly aging, as evidenced by budget cuts in recent years in school districts such as Utica, Grosse Pointe and Rochester that are facing declining enrollment.

All the while, suburban roadways built in the boom years of 1970s, 80s and 90s are starting to crumble — a political problem not lost on leaders like Hackel, who wants more money for fixing roads before considering a vast expansion of bus service in the region.

Suburban leaders are wrestling with the real prospect of stagnation, while Detroit leaders are continuing to harp on the need for mass transportation options to link together a region built for car-driven sprawl.

At the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual Detroit Policy Conference last Thursday, the hand-wringing over the region's woeful mass transit spilled out in a session focused on the Motor City's failed bid for Amazon.com's second North American headquarters.

The conference centered on creating a culture of civility in Detroit and beyond. The elephant in the room was simmering tensions between Detroit and suburban leaders over making transit a priority in the face of Amazon's rejection.

An Amazon economic development official made it clear to local leaders that the Detroit region's lack of an efficient and comprehensive mass transit system cost it in the race for HQ2.

Indianapolis, Columbus and Nashville made the cut. All three of those cities have better mass transportation than the Detroit region, said Khalil Rahal, assistant county executive for Wayne County.

"We need to take that lesson and carry it forward," said Jared Fleisher, vice president of government relations for Quicken Loans, who was one of Dan Gilbert's top lieutenants on the Amazon bid.

Metro Detroit's disjointed transit system is the "significant thing that has held us back," despite the glossy sales book the regional bid committee sent Amazon, Rahal said.

"What we have to do is fix ourselves," he said. "The book can get prettier, the book can change, but that's not what's going to attract people."

What Detroit and Wayne County officials have yet to do is make a compelling case for why the region as whole needs to change. They haven't even made public the revised regional transit plan Patterson publicly rejected.

It's hard to get complete regional buy-in when it looks like a one-way investment for suburban residents and leaders bracing for an uncertain future.

And that's the challenge ahead, especially as Duggan fashions a competition for investment, residents and employers between the suburbs and the city that suffered for so long while they flourished.