John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

The City of Detroit’s Planning Department used to do remarkably little planning. Mostly the staff processed federal grant money for public housing or demolitions. One director of the Planning department confided to me years ago that he had more accountants on his staff than planners.

But under Mayor Mike Duggan and his chosen director Maurice Cox, the city’s planning efforts now promise to rival those under the legendary Charles Blessing in the mid-20th Century. That earlier era saw the city building grandly conceived projects like Lafayette Park, the Detroit Medical Center and the downtown Civic Center.

We are seeing something like that spirit once again animate the city’s planning department, but this time with a major difference. Under Cox, the attention now focuses not on the already revitalizing downtown but in places where city planners for decades have paid little if any attention — Detroit’s hard-hit neighborhoods.

“As I’m fond of saying, this is the big payback,” Cox told me recently about 10 months after Duggan appointed him. “This is the thing that everyone has been waiting for, for attention to turn from the downtown to the neighborhoods. If there’s any directive I was given, we want to bring the neighborhoods of Detroit back.”

It’s an ambitious goal, but Duggan chose Cox, an associate dean of architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans, to pursue that very aim.

“I absolutely wanted a planning director who was focused on growth not shrinkage,” Duggan said. “We started looking internationally. Went through a lot of candidates who talked about managing decline, and when I met Maurice it took me about 15 minutes listening to him to hire him because he understood immediately what I wanted him to do.”

Cox has spent most of his first several months on the job staffing up the depleted planning department, more than doubling the number of planners on staff and adding new skills in landscape architecture, historic preservation, and more.

With his team in place, Cox has been spending more time working on plans for specific neighborhoods. Much attention has been paid to the Fitzgerald district in northwest Detroit, where Cox with Duggan’s blessing has been developing concepts for what he calls 20-minute neighborhoods — the concept that a thriving urban neighborhood should offer residents all they need for their daily work, shopping, and recreation within a 20-minute walk.

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That goal calls for new density in the city’s neighborhoods by using a variety of tactics, from encouraging retail and residential development to employing “greening” tactics — reforestation, say, and urban farming — to infill areas of widespread vacancy.

Cox also expects to soon release plans for the east riverfront, a project designed to better connect near-east-side neighborhoods north of East Jefferson Avenue more directly to the riverfront parks. And in recent weeks, City Council has approved $1.6 million in funding for four more major planning efforts in various parts of the city.

“We’re going to make the quality of life so good that other people will want to live there as well,” Cox said. “We will be able to grow the city but we’ll grow it by making sure the folks here have the highest quality of life possible.”

All this flurry of activity has left longtime neighborhood activists appreciative of the new attention but a little stunned at the speed.

“I think his team is doing a great job,” said Lauren Hood, acting director of the Live6 community development organization active in the Fitzgerald district. “I work very closely with them. My only constructive criticism would be to slow down just a little bit. ... It takes a little bit of time to convey these messages to the people that have toughed it out in the neighborhoods.”

She cites the creation of bicycle lanes along Livernois on the northwest side. Cox’s team held community meetings to introduce residents to the concept and benefits of non-motorized transit options. But only some attended and many residents were surprised as the bike lanes were installed.

“A lot of people said things like, ‘Oh we’re getting ready for the hipsters,’” Hood said. “I think it’s great that (Cox’s team) are very action oriented…. I just wonder if there’s a way to include more people in the process. ... People should feel that things are happening with them. At this rate, sometimes I think it’s like it’s happening to them.”

Other activists echoed that.

“We are happy to see planners assigned to different parts of the city and getting out into the community more,” said Tom Goddeeris, director the nonprofit Grandmont Rosedale Community Development Corp. on the city’s northwest side. “Many of the new planners are also new to Detroit, so there are bound to be a learning curve as they get to know the city and its neighborhoods. ... We plan to make sure that our community residents and stakeholders are integral to the process.”

If the changes under Cox and Duggan are still so new that everyone is still adapting to them, the goal remains an all-inclusive approach that engages residents in decision-making about their neighborhood remains the goal.

“If you talk to people in the neighborhoods, they feel like City Hall has been either indifferent or even hostile to their aspirations,” the mayor said. “And I wanted a planning department where there was enough staff where the planners could be engaged with the neighbors. Now any time I go to a neighborhood group they tell me about the planner that’s working with them.”

Cox echoes that.

“I think people are often a little surprised to see planners in their neighborhood. It’s been a long time. And they are even more surprised that we’re there to listen. We’re very mindful that they know their neighborhoods better than we do. And at best we can be very, very astute interpreters of a vision that they have for their neighborhoods.”

Nobody doubts that planning and development in Detroit remains a difficult, time-consuming process. The city remains hamstrung by environmental challenges in many neighborhoods. Finding money to pay for renovation work still takes much longer than it does for greenfield sites in outlying suburbs.

And the city’s bureaucracy, while less cumbersome thanks to reforms started during Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy of 2013-14 and continued under Duggan, finds some neighbors still complaining that it takes too long to buy city-owned parcels or get approval for projects.

But less than a year into Cox’s tenure at City Hall, the changes promise to generate new life and hope in Detroit’s once-moribund planning process.

“The learning is starting to happen and the support for the strategies is starting to grow,” Cox said. “The best thing we can do is set a framework for true experimentation. I would rather have 10 experiments going on in 10 different geographies of the city than to have one answer.”

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