Lessons from Detroit Civic Commons: 5 questions with Maurice Cox
In March, those working on Reimagining the Civic Commons demonstration projects met in Memphis for Civic Commons Studio #5. As part of this studio, we interviewed the demonstration project leaders about what they’ve learned over the past three years — and where they go from here. This Q&A between The Kresge Foundation’s Carol Coletta and Maurice Cox, the Planning and Development Director for the City of Detroit, is the first in a series from these studio interviews.
Setting the context. In Detroit, investment in the Fitzgerald neighborhood is turning vacancy into an asset as a new model for neighborhoods across the city. Vacant lots are being turned into a park and a greenway, along with a series of neighborhood hubs for community gardens and smaller recreation spaces. The commercial corridor is being reactivated with retail uses, and a storefront center for neighborhood design and planning houses staff from collaborating partners and public programming. You can read more about this work in this collection of articles.
Carol Coletta [CC]: You and your entire team have been working in the Fitzgerald neighborhood now for several years, but the work’s not done. What do you see next in Fitzgerald and how will the civic commons continue to inform your work?
Maurice Cox [MC]: It really does feel like we’re at the beginning of this work. We’ve been at it for three years. The partnerships are strong. There are some physical changes that have been made. Then you begin to realize that it’s not enough, that this work tends to drive your aspirations higher. The finish line keeps moving further and further away. But I think that’s good. It propels you to think more strategically, and to think about what more can be done.
Recently we’ve started exploring partnerships with groups like Opportunity Insights at Harvard University to think critically about how the improvements that we’re making in one neighborhood can change the lives of young people who happen to live there. We’ve got these young people living in the neighborhood that helped build Ella Fitzgerald Park. Their fingerprints are literally on the park — as part of the park’s mural. We wondered, could you possibly trace how this work is changing the trajectory of their lives over five, ten, fifteen years? Does living amongst all of these improvements fundamentally change their life trajectories? We keep upping the ante with what we’re trying to prove with the civic commons work, and I think this is the next frontier.
CC: In the Fitzgerald neighborhood, you’re investing in a visible public asset right in the center of the neighborhood — Ella Fitzgerald Park — pathways that connect to it from key anchors, renovating housing and revitalizing the nearby commercial corridor. Based on this, what can the public sector invest in that you think will drive private market decisions?
MC: Interestingly, I think it’s everything outside of a person’s home — it’s the amenities that go along with the home. It’s a neighborhood park just blocks away from that home, it’s being able to jump on a pedestrian and bicycle greenway and get to an early childhood learning center at nearby Marygrove College. It’s being able to walk to a neighborhood main street and get a cup of coffee and go to a family-oriented restaurant. The house is great, but you can get a great house in other neighborhoods. It is the proximity to other quality of life amenities that will drive people to want to buy a house in a particular area.
Ultimately you buy a house in a neighborhood, you buy a house on a street, you buy a house next to a neighbor, and so the civic infrastructure to support living well in that house is dependent upon the block thriving and upon your neighbors thriving. People kind of make light of block clubs and block associations, but we have a lot of them in Detroit and have noticed that the blocks that have the most residents participating in these kinds of groups have the strongest sense of community.
If you create a spanking new rehabbed house on a block that doesn’t have this civic infrastructure, you’ve got surprises coming, because nobody cares that you’re there. Part of the whole cliché of somebody welcoming you into the neighborhood — of bringing you a cake or a pie — is real. This stuff is important. There has to be some civic infrastructure in place for these capital projects to work.
We must understand that the physical improvements have to be grounded in resident engagement. People have to know that this is a project about them, about their neighborhood, so that they can immediately feel that they are a part of something bigger.
CC: One of the things that I’ve thought about from the very beginning of Reimagining the Civic Commons is the changing nature of retail. How can neighborhood commercial storefronts become viable in today’s retail world? How do we begin to think about neighborhood main streets in a 21st century way?
MC: The nice thing about main streets in most U.S. cities is that they are a legacy of the 20th century. We used to have these commercial corridors in our neighborhoods — before they shifted to become more auto-oriented and lost their walkability, and then were abandoned. The bones are still there.
In Detroit, we realized that before we can attract people into shops, we have to attract people into the street, to make it a place where they want to walk. Thus, we are investing in the public realm on our commercial corridor — sidewalks that are tree lined so that you’re walking under a canopy of trees, protected bike lanes that separate the moving vehicles from the pedestrian. We believe that if you make a really attractive public realm on a commercial corridor, then you can begin to attract entrepreneurs to fill in the businesses.
The decision in Fitzgerald was to make transformational public realms and then do a couple of catalytic demonstrations of neighborhood businesses.
In this neighborhood, our cross-sector team including multiple departments in city government, Live 6 community development corporation and Invest Detroit CDFI, have brought residents who live nearby to come to a decision to transform the public realm in ways of taking sidewalks from 15 feet to 24 feet on Livernois Avenue. You don’t expect to see 24-foot-wide sidewalks in a typical single-family neighborhood — you expect to see that stuff downtown. And yet this community is doing it. And in order to do it, they have to reduce the number of travel lanes on Livernois. And so, it’s a big audacious transformation. But it took dozens and dozens of meetings to get the community to that place.
What we’re starting to see is private investors are anticipating this transformation of the public realm and are already starting to think about rehabbing storefronts or doing selective infill. The big lesson for me is that private investment follows public investment. You lead with the public and the private will follow, but that’s not normally the way cities have operated.
CC: You see Fitzgerald as a model, and though you’re not finished, you are beginning similar work in other neighborhoods. How does what’s happening in Fitzgerald inform the model for your work in other neighborhoods, and what about the public private partnership in Fitzgerald will inform the way you work?
MC: The civic commons effort in Fitzgerald has pretty much established the framework for Detroit’s approach for catalytic neighborhood reinvestment. From the very beginning we planned to do a park, a greenway, a neighborhood main street and housing rehab. We didn’t have a library or a fancy building that we could rehab. We just had neighborhood fabric. I don’t think we realized that we were setting the template for all of Detroit when we took on this notion of reimagining and connecting a portfolio of assets, but we were.
Reimagining the Civic Commons started as a philanthropic partnership, but it forced the questions: “what can the public sector do?” and “what can the private sector do?” The public can build the greenway and do the streetscaping, the private can rehab the houses and plant the gardens. Reimagining the Civic Commons immediately brought other players to the table to form this public-private-philanthropic partnership, which is now the model.
Fast forward to today and we’re now trying to do this in nine other areas of Detroit. We have an incredible ecosystem of foundations that are lining up to co-invest in four types of neighborhood assets (public spaces, streetscaping, commercial corridors and housing stabilization), and investing in them as a portfolio. The public sector is investing road bond resources, and now seven corporations located in Detroit have all come forward with a multiyear multimillion-dollar investment in neighborhoods that are effectively miles from where their core headquarters are located. The banks can support adaptive reuse and rehab of housing, while others can support the greenways and parks.
We’ve created something called the Strategic Neighborhood Fund. Which is $130 million of aligned public-private-philanthropic investment in 10 neighborhood areas across the city. This is a very, very big deal for Detroit. And it is happening in part because we’re investing in more than one type of asset — the portfolio approach gives our partners at least four different ways to enter the partnership.
Similar to how Philadelphia leveraged the original Reimagining the Civic Commons investment into a sugary beverage tax to support a $500 million investment in civic assets, Detroit is leveraging the Civic Commons investment in Fitzgerald into something much, much larger.
CC: I could ask you so many questions, but to wrap up — what would make this type of neighborhood revitalization work easier?
The hardest part is getting people to believe that it’s possible. It’s trying to change the culture to where people believe that these strategies are going to actually happen. Because neighborhood revitalization is a process that can be painfully slow.
We promised to renovate a hundred homes in a ridiculously short period of time — so far, we’ve done maybe ten. Ten homes is a big deal, but in the context of a hundred homes, it doesn’t seem like much. And sometimes the things that are the easiest to execute — like paint on asphalt for protected bike lanes — tend to be the most controversial. We are trying to get enough quick wins to give people a little sample that something real is changing in their community. Protected bike lanes and then the park and soon HomeBase — these have been our early wins. (Editor’s note: HomeBase is a recently opened storefront community space on McNichols Road that provides nearby residents with meeting and gathering spaces, while connecting them with neighborhood organizations, nonprofits and city government. Learn more here.)
We are constantly trying to find ways to bring more people along and give them hope that change is possible. At the same time, we also ask that they are patient, because this is hard work.
CC: Yes, a little patience wouldn’t hurt. Maurice, you and your team, have been inspirations throughout this work and I’m so grateful that you and your team in Detroit are participating in Reimagining the Civic Commons. We continue to learn so much from you.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
