Detroit has made great progress in the last 15 years in the downtown core. I’m amazed. This light rail project should be built… has to be built. Getting people out of cars and onto transit needs to be done.

Hopefully Detroit after it builds this… will built transit to Detroit Metro airport to Downtown… (along Michigan Ave.) that bus route takes approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. Then it needs to build going outward to Grosse Point… make the city walkable… and with timely transit… people will move… development will happen.

I’m hopeful that the new train could even help the racial divisions, because the Woodward line will be something everyone can be proud of. (Nobody much is ever proud of a bus, even a whole new bus route.) The LRT will make a symbolic statement that Detroit and its residents are not being abandoned. The mostly black poor of the city have got little thrill from earlier symbolic structures. They can’t afford tickets to the baseball and football games at the downtown stadiums. The Renaissance Center, now the GM headquarters, might as well as had a sign reading “No ni@@ers allowed”, it was so fortress-like and intimidating. I’ve never visited the casinos, but I expect that the sagging pants guys would never make it past Security, no matter how much money was in their pockets. The restoration of the Fox Theater, the renewal and expansion of the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, not really for the poor. Yet anybody and everybody will be able to board the new trains and feel good about their city.

I also expect the trains will attract a significant number of tourists — students from Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Lansing, day-trippers from the burbs, out-of-towners and Canadians. People who fear to drive in — make a wrong turn and you’ll get car-jacked, raped, and murdered, or worse! — will feel secure taking the train between the city’s major attractions. If most of these visitors are less affected by the “Alabama North” mentality that Mr Jennings reports far below, even that change of mood could help racial relations.

In much the same way, I expect that LRT will make Wayne State a tolerable choice for segment of prospective students (and their parents) who would not consider the city today.

Finally, designating one corridor as a special place can let other good things happen there. I could imagine Meijer’s being pressured to open a store, or Target, locating near a transit stop. Hauling the groceries and stuff home on a train then will seem doable for many prospective residents. One destination retailer can attract other specialty stores, the way a department store anchors a mall. This one change by itself would increase tax revenue, bring back jobs from suburban retailers, make one-car households more possible, and help to fill the loft and apartments in those renovated and to-be-renovated old office buildings downtown.

Because so many of the potential benefits the Woodward Avenue line are soft and unmeasurable, it seems appropriate for philanthropists to be doing the heavy lifting. But I don’t have reason to oppose the new train line. I applaud it.

White auto workers simply did not want to share good paying “white” factory jobs nor did they want to live next door to African Americans. Detroit and surrounding suburbs were Alabama North.

“Don’t get caught in Dearborn after dark!!!”

Violence erupted and homes were burned whenever African Americans moved into white neighborhoods. Racism as much as economics killed the Motor City. I graduated from Nolan Junior High in 1959 when it was less than 10%black…now it is all-black!

Most of all I miss Hudson’s and the Michigan Central Railway cathedral…and the newstand at Grand Circus Park where I used to steal the little male physique pocketbooks, but these comments confirm that nothing can be done to resurrect the Motor City, an urban tragedy.

I am another former graduate of Ann Arbor (TCAUP) and a veteran of transit planning in Detroit (I worked for the MPO, SEMCOG, and helped to develop the SpeedLink BRT plan as well as the still official regional transit plan c.1999). I lived in Cass Corridor (mid town Detroit).

I have to agree with Yonah’s overall assessment of the challenges surrounding this project. The City faces profound economic challenges, as well as political and social problems. I also agree that no one single project, including LRT, is likely to make a dent in those problems as they are not fundamentally transportation related. How will LRT improve the schools? The illiteracy rate? Crime? Racial divisions?

One element that no one has discussed, either on the PBS doc or in any new story I can find, is whether the proposed LRT will replace all bus service along lower Woodward, forcing transfers on the large transit dependent population.

Also, who is paying to operate and maintain this line? If it’s the City, then DDOT’s overall bus service will have to be reduced, again, to accomodate the LRT operating budget. If existing bus users are harmed in the name of ill-conceived “progress”, this project may end up in the same category as urban renewal.

In a viewing of the PBS documentary held at the University of Michigan, Prof. Robert Fishman told the audience to be aware of the role of philanthropy in getting the M1 project to this point, even if that didn’t show up in the doc itself.

First, a little bit more background about myself, so you know where I’m coming from. I lived in Detroit during 2005 and 2006 after spending the previous two years in Ann Arbor at grad school (and spending a lot of time visiting, especially while completing our capstone project “On Target: A Housing Strategy for Detroit On Target: A Housing Strategy for Detroit”). I first lived here (487 West Alexandrine, the 3 story with the blue dormer):

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/#/3h46zohg2crthxgl

Across the street is a fraternity house, and the block had a number of properties in various states of redevelopment. The building next door was owned by the developers of this project one block west:

http://www.midtowndetroitlofts.com/springfield.htm

I then briefly lived here:

http://www.loftplace.com/01/johnrapartments/index.php

before moving following my wife’s carrier to a different state. I tell you this so that it is clear that I’m giving you not only the perspective of professional and academic transportation planner, but also somebody with lots of boots on the ground experience as a resident.

That map you linked to (which I hadn’t seen on this blog) is fundamentally flawed because the 2000 census was taken before most of the residential development in the area happened.

For a bit of background about what has happened in Detroit since 2000, go here:

http://detroitmidtown.com/05/develop.php?msub=5

For a more up to date article, read this:
http://detnews.com/article/20100125/METRO/1250372/-1/ARCHIVE/Detroit-s-Midtown-district-is-on-a-roll

I highly recommend skimming through the large PDF of the 2004 Free Press series (on 1st link). Also look through the various subsections on the right. Note that this organization does not consider Downtown (south of I-75) or New Center (North of I-94) to be part of its service area. You won’t find much information about these areas on their site. Much of what you read on the UCCA’s site is about proposed projects, because the nature of the business, the current short-term financial and housing markets, many of them are somewhat stalled, but few people who know anything about the city think progress is going to revert.

The picture that you put at the top of the post that apparently “proves” that nobody wants to live there in fact show the opposite if you know the area. (Remember that I lived less than a block from that location.) In the early part of the last decade, there was a huge effort in the Brush Park area to demolish old structures, refurbish others, and build new housing. During that time, new basic infrastructure (streets, sidewalks, etc) was installed. The buildings on the left side of the street in that picture, among others, were stabilized so they could be rebuilt later. About 700′ from that spot, this is what the neighborhood looks like:

http://tinyurl.com/yaabapm

This vacant land is ready for construction. I think the existence of vacant land 5 miles away in the other part of the city has little bearing on the demand for this land, especially if transit links its to the job and entertainment centers nearby. Currently, you are right, there is little reason to build here. Most residents are going to own cars and drive them to work. The 53-Woodward bus is crowded and experiences significant bunching; distances are too far to walk for most people. That is exactly the reason that the city needs to build this system.

The other aspect of that map that is fundamentally flawed is that it only shows residential density. Job density is something that is impossible to map using census data at that level. Many of the census blocks shown on that map are almost completely filled with non-residential institutions (the core of WSU or the hospital). It is almost true that central Detroit is not much more population dense than many other parts of the city, but it is much more job (and education) dense.

There are a number of large companies and institutions in Central Detroit, but there is also a movement towards fostering a more entrepreneurial, small business economy. One of the places that is happening pretty successfully is in Techtown (I hate that name, but the organization is doing great work.)

http://techtownwsu.org/

Right now, a worker for Walker-Miller Energy Services ( a Techtown energy startup) might want to live in Central Detroit. But without a quality transit system, the person is still likely to need a car to get to work. Once they know they need to get in a car every day, driving a few extra miles to Ferndale or Royal Oak might make a lot of sense. But if they can leave their car most days and take light rail, the corner of John R and Alfred starts to look much more attractive.

Similarly, if I want to start a biotech startup, such as Asterand (a Techtown biotech), I can look all over the metro region, and because I have to use cars to do everything, all locations are pretty much equal. Southfield might be a good location, since it is at a major freeway junction, but traffic can be rough, so maybe Novi is a better choice.

But if I my employees can use a quality transit system to meet with doctors at the nearby hospitals, or researchers at the nearby university, or bankers in the nearby financial district, then maybe central Detroit starts to look more attractive than other possible locations.

So in closing, I’m puzzled that you think that Detroit needs to concentrate jobs and housing around transit, but you write that creating the transit is a mistake. Nobody in Detroit thinks they are going to revitalize the entire city of almost 140 square miles by building transit everywhere. There has been a lot of movement towards a shrinking-cities model of consolidating density in the last few years. But this light rail project is necessary to have an economically functioning city center and it is required if the sort of consolidation you claim is necessary is to be executed.