Imagine a city.
Maybe you’re picturing a specific place – New York City or Karachi or Indianapolis or Paris. Maybe it’s a place that you want to go, or maybe it’s a place you’ve been before. Maybe it’s busy, all hustle and bustle, boundless energy and huge crowds. Or maybe it’s quiet, the secret, beautiful places only you would know. Maybe you’re imagining art, museums, food, fashion, and restaurants, all luxury and excitement. Or maybe you’re thinking of long commutes, the always-lingering smell of trash, heat rising from black asphalt and black ice that takes you by surprise every time, all high rents and little pay-off. Maybe you imagine people, or maybe you imagine buildings, or maybe you barely imagine anything at all. Maybe you’re imagining home.
Did you imagine something like this?
We can perceive cities however we’d like; they are what we make them to be. But cities are also the product of choices made by others, not just residents living their daily lives, but city planners, government officials, environmentalists, business owners, and everyone else who has a stake in making a city work for them.
American cities are supposedly changing rapidly, making a "comeback" after decades of decline and disinvestment. You can find multiple news outlets, developers, and politicians heralding the “new age of the city”, often characterized by an emphasis on renewed downtowns, increased business investments, an influx of “millennials” to a city core, and a hip, new trendiness in cities that were once considered dangerous and undesirable.
Detroit might be a prime example of these shifting narratives. The city has long been maligned as the subject of every horror story a city can encompass. Crimes, racism, white flight to the suburbs, lawlessness, and corruption have all been associated with the outsider perception of Detroit - so much so that Charlie LeDuff coined his book about the city "American Autopsy." Detroit as a disease-ridden cadaver, in need of a post-mortem inspection but incapable of resuscitation, was a narrative only strengthened by the sentencing of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the city's bankruptcy in 2014.
But to many, that's changed. An inflow of investment and development money has indicated the profitability of the city and a new administration has been credited with "turning the lights back on" -- even as Detroit's narrative has seemed to shift, the accusations that the city is developing inequitably and unevenly have grown. As the city continues to be perceived as "revitalizing, " important questions about what the city should and will be arise.
What is this site about?
Detroit might be going through some big changes, but this project will focus on just one – potential changes to the I-375 freeway, a stretch of freeway that is just over 1 mile long and provides access to the downtown area. You've seen this freeway before - the video earlier in the site is an aerial view of this particular feature of the urban landscape. The Michigan Department of Transportation is hoping to move forward with plans to change parts of what you saw to a surface boulevard.
This might seem like a highly technical decision – unless it directly impacts you in some manner, you may prefer to just let the experts handle it. And maybe you should; after all, they know what’s best for the city and so you can trust them to make the right choice. But do they prioritize what should be prioritized? Have they identified the same assets as other stakeholders? Do they imagine the city the way others have imagined it? Should they?
These are the choices that shape cities for decades to come, signaling priorities and embedding them into the fabric of the land, creating built environments that last until we go through this process again, decades later. So before deciding what's best , let’s demystify this vague specter of the “they” controlling the process. What do the important stakeholders – residents, environmentalists, developers, politicians, and more – care about in this one decision and what does it reflect about their overall visions? What is Detroit as they see it now and what is the Detroit that they believe can exist? What does success look like for them? What costs do they believe are acceptable to attain that success? And how do these visions complement one another and where are they in tension?
What is the I-375 Improvement Project?
In April of 2013, The Michigan Department of Transportation announced that it was looking into improvements for the I-375 corridor.
The goal: to determine an innovative and collaborative plan that reflects the current and future transportation needs in the rapidly developing corridor.
The freeway in question was built in 1964, during a time of “urban renewal” in the city. More than 50 years later, it is in dire need of repair. According to officials, the road has outlived its usefulness. And so the question becomes: what should we do with this freeway? What should be its new use?
Conversations surrounding improvements to the freeway have coincided with the redevelopment of the Downtown and Midtown areas, where investments have been centered and facilitated what many in the media have been calling the “renewal” or “revitalization” of Detroit, although this claim can be controversial . As Detroit joins the larger conversation about what 21st century cities should look like, proposed improvements to the freeway are mirroring the philosophies of a new, trendy urbanism.
Among those new considerations are:
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Walkability
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Green space
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Bike lanes and room for multi-modal transit
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Connectivity between neighborhoods and the Riverfront
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Nearby economic development and growth
What is the freeway like right now?
I-375 is currently a six-lane, below-grade freeway. It branches from I-75 (a cross-country route that extends from Florida to Northern Michigan) and extends a mile to the GM Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. The freeway was built 54 years ago, which means it's four years past what experts define as a road's "useful life." The approach of this deadline has been used to frame discussion about any changes to the area, but even before that, there had been a vocal contingent of people who believed the freeway was an issue for the city, and emblematic of the larger mistakes that had happened in the past.
The freeway handles a lot of traffic, especially from suburban commuters coming to Detroit for work or school. There have been complaints about the amount of traffic and concerns that a remodel wouldn't be able to handle the volume of cars. But the conversation about the freeway is also a result of the changing conversation about cities -- one that priorities people and "placemaking" over car access.
Where is the freeway?
The highlighted region of the map on the right is the Michigan Department of Transportation's area of study, which includes section of I-75 as well as I-375, also known as the Chrysler Freeway.
To use the map:
In the bottom-right corner, there is the option to toggle between different map views. Choose between terrain, satellite, road, and hybrid view to get a feel for where the proposed changes might take place.
Zoom in and out using the controls in the upper-right hand corner (or SHIFT+scroll) to understand the placement of the freeway in the larger context of Detroit and Southeast Michigan. Notice the placement of Ford Field and Comerica Park on the west side of the freeway versus the residential neighborhood of Lafeyette Park on the east.
In a meeting about the freeway improvement project in June 2017, residents cited walkability and pedestrian access as a main concern. According to residents, parts of the walkway on (and above) the freeway were dangerous and unappealing. One resident described it as a "death walk".
The photos on the right show the street perspective at certain spots along the freeway. Because I-375 is a "depressed" freeway, there are bridges spanning above the freeway for both cars and pedestrians. There are not always working crosswalks and the intersections can be confusing for people trying to walk.
Is it "walkable"?
Suburban Access
As part of another revitalization attempt in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Detroit built the Ford Field and Comerica Park to anchor an entertainment district that would lure visitors to downtown and residents and investments into the city. Ford Field hosts the Detroit Lions, as well as many well-known artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. During large events, nearby areas experience high levels of activity, but the crowd doesn’t last or linger.
Many people who come to those events are from the Metro-Detroit suburbs. To find out how to get to Ford Field by car from these suburbs, click the boxes below:
For each of these suburbs, and the many like them, the directions have some constants: "take the exit toward Madison Ave from I-375 S" before turning right at St. Antoine St. and you'll be at your destination in about a minute. That means the drive will look almost exactly like the video at the beginning of this site, with no interaction with the larger city of Detroit or the residents who live there. The current freeway structure only serves to reinforce the divide between the suburbs and the city, providing an easy way to ignore every part of the city that isn't solely dedicated to providing entertainment.
What has this area looked like before?
Detroit, like every other city, must contend with a complicated racial legacy, where segregation was key to the construction of the city as we know it and that construction later facilitated further discrimination and white flight. This is apparent in the city’s design, in the location of the neighborhoods and, yes, especially in the location of the freeways.
“Urban renewal is Negro removal”
– James Baldwin
Before there was an I-375 to demolish, there was what many have described as a thriving Black business and residential district. The Black Bottom neighborhood, and neighboring Paradise Valley, acted as the original landing place for many African Americans who traveled to Detroit in the Great Migration in search of well-paying jobs. Although segregation and housing discrimination in the first half of the 20th century relegated Detroit's African American population to these neighborhoods, residents were able to build a tight-knit community. These neighborhoods became the center for black-owned businesses, social institutions, and churches - supported by the black middle class in Detroit, the nation's largest.
The maps below indicate where the historic neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were located before their demolition. The second map, created by Crain's Detroit Business, also indicates some important businesses that were on Hastings St., which later became the freeway.
The Black Bottom neighborhood was one thing for many of its residents and another in the eyes of the (white) city government. As a result of Northern racism, housing segregation, and systemic unemployment, the largely African American neighborhood was denied adequate city services that could have kept the area livable and forced into disrepair. Many of the buildings were dilapidated, rats were rampant, and the neighborhood was seen as a general embarrassment to city officials who refused to accept or change the circumstances they had created. Many Black residents also wished to leave the confines of these two neighborhoods and their incredibly poor conditions, but were systematically barred from housing in other, whiter neighborhoods.
Paradise Valley, the neighboring entertainment district, was seen as a place that invited vice - gambling, alcohol, "dangerous" music, prostitution, and any other perceived evil, exacerbated by White racism towards the mainly African American center. However, these places of leisure were also a main source of income for many in the neighborhood and Black-owned nightclubs booked popular artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. Although the clubs and theatres used to attract a relatively mixed-race crowd, white residents didn't venture into Black Bottom and Paradise Valley as much after riots in 1943. Most of those businesses were forced to close or move after the neighborhoods were razed for the freeway.
The following maps, compiled from Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, highlight the centralization, then dispersal, of the city's black residents between 1940 and 1970.
The placement of the freeway, like many planning decisions, was not an accident, although their impact on the city was not predicted by the planners of the time.
Here's the map of slum areas as seen by the Detroit Housing Commission in 1941:
What represented a place of cultural and financial importance to Detroit's African-American community was instead seen as simply a slum to Detroit's Housing Commission. A place that needed help, reconstruction, and support was instead seen as a community that needed to be torn down and erased completely.
“Genuine, large-scale slum clearance to let in sunlight and air can be accomplished by opening up wide arteries and often can be hitched to an expressway project by going just a little out of the way at an inconsequential time loss.” -1945 Detroit Expressway and Transit Plan
So, in 1946, Detroit Mayor Edward J. Jeffries, Jr. unveiled “the Detroit Plan,” an urban development plan that called for slum clearance. That slum clearance, specifically in downtown, would make room for new businesses and attractive development. Of course, these new businesses and developers would be mostly white and cater to white residents of the city, while the Black residents of these "slums" would be dispersed from the communities they had built.
Although Detroit's Plan predated the Housing Act of 1949, there was a national movement for "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" to make cities more desirable and trendy. The project to create I-375 became even more desirable to city officials when they learned that the federal government would foot about a third of the bill.
City planners also believed that an expressway in downtown would streamline through-traffic and encourage economic activity in the area. Building a depressed interstate was also meant to reduce noisy traffic in residential areas and help those residents enjoy a certain quality of life.
Both the Detroit Plan and the Housing Act were supposed to include provisions for displaced residents, but they were rarely acted upon, or forced residents into sub-par public housing that came with its own stigma.
Below are some photos of the area before and after freeway construction:
The 1945 Transit Plan also included hopes for the following: “Walks and promenades with benches should be fitted into the landscaped slopes wherever possible. Bicycle paths could be included for some stretches at comparatively little additional expense. These features would be very popular and would make the expressways useful for Detroiters and visitors who are without automobiles.”
These are many of the same features that are in demand today, but they were never realized during construction. That's a reminder that a plan is just that: a plan. It is rarely fully accomplished, and it will rarely have the exact impact that is predicted. That unpredictability can be mitigated, however, when communities are respected, feedback is taken seriously, and people are able to be engaged with the process.
As the city changes once again, in a process that's been labeled "renewal" and "revitalization," this history is vital to planning what the future could be.
What could this area become?
In 2014, in collaboration with the City of Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, MDOT released a report exploring alternatives to the current I-375 freeway. They came up with six alternatives, which are explained in depth below. Also included are MDOT visuals of each plan.
Ultimately, MDOT decided to move forward with studies on Alternatives 4 and 5 -- as you read through stakeholder perspectives, keep in mind why those two might be the most appealing.
Reconstruct the freeway as it is now, but with ramp improvements.
Reconstruct the freeway as it is now, but with bike lanes and easier pedestrian use. This plan also includes a landscaped storm water management zone.
The freeway would become a surface street at Larned Road with a bike/walking path, along with an added local street.
The freeway would become a surface street at Clinton Road, with that street placed on the east side with room for residential or commercial development on the west side of the property.
The freeway would become a surface street at Clinton Road, with the street placed on the west side and the east side becoming available for development or green space.
The freeway would be replaced at Clinton with two one-way streets, and the property between those roads would become a mix of green space, bike paths, and pedestrian space.
Understanding Stakeholder Perspectives
Residents
Residents of the neighborhoods near I-375 are generally concerned with balancing changes that make their neighborhoods more desirable and better to live in with changes that find them priced out of those very neighborhoods or unable to enjoy their previous quality of life.
While the current freeway structure has been identified as a dividing point between downtown and residential properties, all residents don’t see that as a negative thing. For some, that “divide” is crucial for their safety and for reducing noise from the sometimes-crowded entertainment districts.
State Representative Stephanie Chang surveyed the residents of her district about MDOT’s alternatives in 2017 and found that those surveyed prioritized walkability and connectivity to the Riverfront. Of the alternative options, residents generally preferred alternative two, an option that MDOT has already eliminated. However, alternative 5, which is the west-edge boulevard, also featured consistently in resident’s top three choices.
Lafayette Park, the racially integrated neighborhood that replaced Black Bottom, has generally been seen as an upscale development. The “renewal” project was intentionally designed to fit the vision of a modern, post-war apartment and was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who is widely recognized as a pioneer of modernist architecture. The area was designed specifically to what were then the highest standards of architecture and what that meant was a traffic-free, green oasis (similar to some current thinking around what a city should look like). A large green space (meant to be reminiscent of Central Park in New York City) is surrounded by apartment buildings of varying heights and amenities for residents. Part of the neighborhood’s appeal lies in the quiet and the separation from the hustle and bustle of what downtown life could be.
Residents of that specific neighborhood responded differently than those of other neighborhoods to Representative Chang’s survey questions. For those residents, Alternative 2 – the reconstructed freeway with connection to the riverfront – was the most preferred, but the option that favors reconstructing the freeway with no changes was frequently in the top 3. Neither of those options are the two that MDOT ultimately decided to move forward with.
The vision of surveyed residents is directly in conflict with both developers and city government; while the land that will clear up for development uses is incredibly appealing to both of those stakeholders as a way to make a profit in some capacity, many residents would prefer that it become a green space instead of a commercial or residential development. How the city decides what to do with any available space will be contingent on whether these residents will be able to organize for their position effectively (or if enough of them change their mind).
Detroit is a city with a lot of land – 139 square miles of it. But this land wasn’t created equally nor does it have equal value to investors; this is a fact well known to any casual observer, who would notice the ways in which certain areas of the city are revitalizing while others wait for significant investments. It is also a fact well known by developers, who often operate in a high-risk, high-reward atmosphere and need to ensure that they’re investing in land and projects that they believe will be profitable.
One of the benefits to I-375, as proposed in the 1940s and 50s, was that it would invigorate the downtown commercial district. For many developers, the removal of the freeway in the coming years might actually help to do the same.
As it exists now, Downtown, Greektown, and Midtown (three of Detroit’s “trendiest” neighborhoods”) are separated from the Eastern Market and Lafayette Park neighborhoods by I-375, although there are some sidewalk bridges connecting the two sides. Turning the freeway into a surface boulevard, as proposed by both of MDOT’s final alternatives, would connect the two of these high-investment areas of the city and – most importantly – free up 12 acres of land for development uses.
As a real estate developer, the most important thing is keeping costs low and profit margins high. Changes to the downtown area that are intended to attract even more people, especially people with money, and increase connectivity to amenities like the Riverfront are generally attractive to developers (although, ideally, they would already own the land that would soon see an increase in value).
So who owns land in Detroit, especially in the areas immediately impacted by an I-375 renovation?
“Speculators,” people who have bought land or property with the intention to sell or develop it when its value is appropriately high, own almost 20% of the city. Many of these investors have no current incentive to contribute to neighborhood upkeep or maintain their properties, but a state/city funded improvement project that makes their land more desirable could be incentive enough.
The map below highlights speculator properties in Detroit. The area around I-375 has many properties that fit this criteria, although it appears to be less than other areas.
Detroit is also home to Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans and a businessman whose vision for a revitalized Detroit has been both lauded and critiqued. He has made no secret that his dedication to change in Detroit is motivated in part by self-interest; Gilbert (and his real estate company Bedrock) own multiple properties in the Central Business District and just landed a deal for the “fail jail” site on Gratiot and I-375. That site, along with others, is highlighted on the map below.
The blue markers represent Gilbert owned or affiliated properties. The green markers represent properties owned by the Illitch family, another influential Detroit family.
A surface boulevard right next to the downtown central business district is predicted to make the area more desirable for residents and tourists alike. For developers, especially those with large concentrations of land nearby like Dan Gilbert and Bedrock, that means that their properties will draw more profit and attention - ultimately a win for the wealthy who invested early.
Development
City Government
For a city government, and a mayor trying to execute a successful re-branding, a project like this one is likely subject to two questions: will this make the area a place people want to be? And will it help expand Detroit’s tax base?
That second question can also be worded as: does it attract the people who want and can afford amenities? Or, when paired with the deeply intertwined nature of poverty and race in the area, is seen by many as: how do we attract newer, whiter residents?
A project like the I-375 improvement would generally have a high desirability for the city because it:
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Attracts residents who want (and can afford) amenities like bike lanes and high-density neighborhoods
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Would be at least partially funded by the Michigan Department of Transportation, which is a statewide entity
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Connects neighborhoods that are already receiving, or have been targeted for, private investments (Central Business District, Eastern Market, the East and West Riverfronts)
Even though this is a project led by the state of Michigan, the city of Detroit has a vested interest in having as much control of nearby property as possible. Owning the land around the freeway provides opportunities for the city to decide what kind of investment they’ll make – more specifically, they could choose to use the land for affordable housing, an issue of concern for many long-term residents who believe that they’re being intentionally priced out and left out of the neighborhoods that are seeing the most improvements.
One of the more useful tools that local governments have to shape private development, inclusionary zoning, is illegal in Michigan. Because of this, the city of Detroit has a more limited toolbox for controlling development in the area, although they still have options like creating Planned Unit Developments (PUDs). If private developers own the land, the city will have a much harder time attempting equitable development. The map below shows the current zoning distinctions in the city, followed by Future Detroit's plan for future development and distinctions.
However, having private developer control of much of the surrounding land is not necessarily a bad thing from the city’s perspective. If the city wants to create a well-maintained green space with minimal effort, nearby land owned by the state or private developers will incentivize those stakeholders to take care of it on their own.
But what is the city willing to compromise to abdicate that responsibility and does it minimize city control too much?
Environment
In a city that’s storied history as an industrial center has left the area with legacy pollution, toxic emissions, brownfields, and one of the most polluted zipcodes in the country, any change to the built environment has to examine all environmental impacts seriously.
One environmental concern in Detroit is the presence of brownfields, which is formally defined as a place that has been previously developed and needs significant change for redevelopment. Often, the redevelopment of areas designated as brownfield sites are made even more complicated by the presence of contaminants and hazardous substances.
This is a map of brownfield sites in Detroit. Notice that sites near the improvement project are less clustered than in other areas of the city, but these sites are still those that might stand out to speculators and other developers to invest in later.
The alternatives that MDOT has identified as the best options for the redevelopment – one with an East Edge Boulevard and one with a West Edge Boulevard – both need to be studied for potential air (and noise) impacts but they are expected to reduce nearby pollution as vehicle speeds decrease and heavy traffic is contained and/or diverted from the new surface boulevard. The alternatives are also meant to provide access to green spaces as well as encourage walking and biking, all of which are better for the environment than car-centric models of community.
The areas most impacted by the redevelopment of I-375 are already home to many green spaces, including the Riverfront (which the boulevard would increase connectivity to) and the Dequindre Cut Greenway.
This specific improvement project would create even more of a concentration of green space and parks towards downtown, but wouldn’t necessarily increase the environmental and health outcomes of the city as a whole. Another redevelopment project, the new bridge to Canada, is happening where dangerously high asthma rates and industrial toxins have wreaked health havoc on residents. Residents of affected neighborhoods have secured a $48 million agreement to relocate to other, healthier areas of the city – time will tell if that concession will create positive long-term impacts on their lives and health, but the new bridge is guaranteed to bring increased traffic and emissions.
All this to say: the overall potential for projects to have positive environmental impacts on a city is difficult to quantify based solely on one project alone. Although the I-375 improvement plan itself has great potential to create green spaces, lower emissions, and encourage environmentally friendly actions like walking and biking, there are other plans for the city’s future that might interfere with that overarching vision.
