Agreed. As someone who lives in Detroit and was a transplant to this city from out of state, the people who can’t see the positive changes that have occurred in the last 4 years is astonishing! Sure, a lot of the development has been focused on Downtown, but how is a city that has literally been in decline for 60 years going to improve impoverished neighborhoods without focusing on the core first?

I remember not too long ago coming to Detroit as a kid and not being able to get out of the car and walk Downtown, let alone in most neighborhoods. It takes more than a couple years to rewind 100+ years of racism, poor management, and economic collapse. Anyone who sees what Duggan has done and thinks that we need to move on to someone else already knows nothing about how economics works.

I live on 6 Mile, a pretty distressed area of the city but always fairly tight knit. The amount of change that is happening on the Live6 corridor is incredible! Bike lanes, new and updated black-owned businesses, street lights, better 9–1–1 response times, less crime, and property values are going up like crazy! We have two black-owned coffe shops that just opened, a Bakery that won a huge grant with Motor City Match, all kinds of community events have been started, we even have a Market now! I know that kind of movement isn’t happening in every neighborhood, but we shouldn’t expect it to, especially in a short, 4 year time frame.

1/2 of the properties in this city are vacant… that kind of destruction doesn’t just go away overnight… and lord knows we don’t need to go back to anymore of what we had before. I don’t like everything Duggan has done, there are aspects of the deals being made that I don’t agree with 100% of the time, but until there is a genuine challenger to him that knows what the hell they’re doing, Duggan can stay. And anyone talking about candidates like Coleman Young II don’t know what it means to govern or manage a city.

    Miranda Steinhauser

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    Automotive Designer, vintage moped wrencher, & restoring a vacant 1927 Tudor home South of 8 Mile. Featured on Detroit Curbed, The Neighborhoods & Be Yourself.