Detroit City Council is back.

Just months after shedding the last remnants of state control over the city's operations, Detroit's governing body is starting to flex its political muscle in what looks like an effort to placate allies and remind Detroit's power brokers that the city's resurgence hasn't benefited everyone.

Downtown has its trendy cafes, luxury retailers, yoga studios and iPhone-activated scooters. But most of Detroit's neighborhoods are still marred by housing blight, schools with drinking fountains that have been shut off because of elevated lead levels and one in three residents living below the poverty line.

City Council members have been using the growing disparity between downtown and the neighborhoods — the proverbial "two Detroits" narrative — to push an economic equality agenda that pits workers against businesses and creates a more activist role for the council.

In June, City Council injected itself into the contract negotiations between janitorial service companies and the Service Employees International Union, advocating for a $15 minimum wage, which the janitors eventually won in a new four-year contract.

Last week, City Council turned away a $164 million, 500-room hotel project that Cobo Center needs to land convention business because council members wanted the Crowne Plaza's owners to sign a neutrality agreement with Unite Here Local 24 to unionize hospitality workers.

The hotel's foreign owners balked and say they'll take their money elsewhere.

Now, City Council President Pro Tem Mary Sheffield is pushing a new agenda that will probably be viewed by business interests as resembling the heavily regulated business climate of late 20th century Detroit.

Sheffield wants stricter enforcement of the Coleman Young-era requirement that 51 percent of the work hours for all city contracts and taxpayer-subsidized real estate development projects go to Detroiters. She wants to extend the requirement to include city-funded demolition contracts. That wouldn't include most blighted housing demolitions that are federally-funded.

The councilwoman also is pushing to lower the $75 million threshold that requires real estate developers to forge a community benefits agreement with the neighbors surrounding a new development.

"This is simply about economic justice, creating economic opportunities for Detroiters here," Sheffield said Monday at a news conference in front of the Spirit of Detroit statute outside City Hall. "... If you're a bona fide Detroit resident, you deserve access to a job. If you're qualified, you deserve access to a job."

But the development roadblocks Sheffield seeks to put up come as outside investors — the ones everyone says Detroit needs — are weighing whether to use a new federal tax incentive known as Opportunity Zones to make investments in Detroit housing and commercial real estate.

At face value, Sheffield's populist demands and her forthcoming "People's Bills" seek to get more Detroiters working and get a share of the prosperity that is budding downtown.

But they're an implicit suggestion that all of the various job-training programs Duggan's administration has launched — Detroit at Work, Grow Detroit's Young Talent, Motor City Match — aren't reaching enough Detroiters fast enough.

"We want an administration that has a mindset that you cannot build a city if you don't first build its people," said Damion Ellis, an economic policy adviser for Sheffield.

Monday's news conference for Sheffield's rollout had the elements of a mayoral campaign that's three years away — complete with a "Mary for mayor" chant.

Duggan's office pushed back gently on the rhetoric Monday, saying the 51 percent Detroit employee requirement is being enforced evenly among city contracts for street paving and underground water and sewer projects, as well as big development projects, such as Dan Gilbert's skyscraper at the former Hudson's department store site.

Contractors were fined $5.2 million for Detroiters working only about 25 percent of the hours it took to construct Little Caeasars Arena.

"We follow the executive order," said Alexis Wiley, the mayor's chief of staff.

Duggan's office also is trying to follow the budget prescription U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes approved four years ago when the city emerged from its historic Chapter 9 reorganization.

One aspect of Sheffield's "People's Bills" is to cut the city's $45 fine for unpaid metered parking to $30 and discount the fee by 50 percent if it's paid within 10 days. The parking fines are widely cursed by motorists, but represent $2 million in revenue for the city's budget.

Sheffield said the city should reconsider its tax breaks for corporations and a few unnamed "billionaires" in lieu of slapping motorists with the $45 parking fee.

Duggan's office warned of what happened the last time a City Council made unchecked spending decisions.

"We have to make sure that we actually look at the details," Wiley said. "What may be labeled as the 'People's Bills,' we have to make sure that doesn't backfire and become the emergency manager's bills."

But City Council's ability to remind everyone who's boss was on full display last week when they voted down a second 28-story tower for the Crowne Plaza, apparently over their desire to see a union set up shop in the big hotel next door to Cobo Center.

And that was for a $164 million project in which the property owner wasn't asking for tax breaks, even for the skywalk they planned to build over Washington Boulevard to connect the new hotel to Cobo Center.

In an interview, Sheffield said she supported Crowne Plaza's second tower — "the hotel space is needed," she said — but wanted to see the hotel operator raise its wages and be neutral on its workers joining the hospitality workers' union.

"I think you can have both," she said. "That was my hope — to have this expansion built, but also protect the workers that are there."

Sheffield argues City Council has been supportive of new business investment in the city.

"We're just taking a firm stance to make sure we're supporting decent wages for people — and also the right to unionize, too," said Sheffield, who represents District 5.

But after rejecting one project that sought no tax breaks, City Council now has to weigh $104 million in tax breaks for Ford Motor Co. to rehabilitate the derelict Michigan Central Station and subsidize the cost of the automaker's $740 million Corktown makeover.

Duggan's office is pushing for approval within a month. The Crowne Plaza project twisted in the council's wind all summer.

Sheffield wouldn't say how she'll vote on Ford, but she said the 51 percent work rule for Detroiters will be enforced on the company.

"We have not yet determined what the actual penalty will be," Sheffield said. "But I think that's something that we need to negotiate."

Going forward, everything with this City Council could be a negotiation.