Detroit has competing visions of its future that must finally meld if it is to realize Detroit’s great potential to re-create itself. Re-creation involves three distinct phases that must all begin immediately and in parallel, with each having different goals and differing endpoints, but with all participants in Detroit’s posterity understanding the importance of each phase being complementary of the others.
The first phase is Orr’s emergency planning phase. It should be expeditious and its pain and discord should end as swiftly as possible. All must sacrifice, but their sacrifices must be in keeping with optimizing the next two phases.
The second phase is the turn around phase. Detroit will not have the opportunity to grow if it cannot repair the structural impediments that are draining the city. For the turn around to succeed, crime will have to be dramatically reduced, 100,000 jobs will need to expeditiously return to the city targeting existing residents, schools must dramatically improve to contribute to reduced crime and to support an influx of new business, and home ownership must immediately be stabilized. What must be done to quickly implement these requirements? What impacts will they have on Detroit’s stakeholders?
The third phase is the most exciting for it is the growth phase in which Detroit has the opportunity to recreate itself. To sustain and to grow Detroit, the city must be re-tooled into an interwoven blend of modern livable communities that support existing and newcomer residents, including innovators and millennials who demand world-class standards in the cities they call home. How will Detroit integrate livability standards to compete as a growing, world-class city while meeting the needs of all its stakeholders?
Who are some of the stakeholders of Detroit who will demand that a collaborative solution for Detroit meet their needs as well? An optimal system-wide solution will ethically balance the best alternatives of each stakeholder, given the real alternative that Detroit’s sinking population might force dissolution if urgent actions are not taken to create a best effort model that can begin to go forward:
Current residents: Seek jobs, preservation of existing neighborhoods, lessening of crime, and better services
New residents: Must make up the remainder of a sustainable target population and want a highly livable city that meets professional, social, community, health, safety, and development goals
Detroit communities: existing and newly developed as part of a future envisioned Detroit
Property owners: Whether homestead or remote, that must upgrade and maintain their units, plus banks and trusts that must work with Detroit in the best interests of a master plan
Existing Businesses: Detroit’s Legacy industry and community businesses that anchor will key commerce zones in the new Detroit layout
New Businesses: Growth industry targets that will lure the innovators and entrepreneurs, and manufacturing industries that can optimize existing assets and fully employ Detroit’s existing citizens
Creators: Detroit professional and community planners such as the Downtown Economic Growth Corporation, Rock Ventures, Detroit Works, Greenways Coalition, and the Universities, Developers such as Detroit Venture Partners, and businesses that will tear down and construct, move homeowners, reuse and revitalize Detroit’s assets
Community activists that speak for the disabled, the elderly and the young, that seek balance against issues such as environmental injustice, and industrial racism, who will react to the solutions involving 100,000 feral cats and wild dogs.
Political activists that will protect against a shift in political and economic power that can isolate the minority as Detroit changes direction from decay to productivity and livability.
Philanthropists and Historic preservationists that seek a better Detroit and a preservation of Detroit’s character
Investors, shareholders, bankers, all who seek the profit motive of an optimal solution, ensuring efficiency of effort
Detroit services such as Detroit Emergency management, Police and Fire
Disenfranchised youth and organized crime that will be impacted by a shifting economy
Governments: City government, interconnected regional, state, and federal governments
People of United States who have a stake in the outcome as can be modeled by those that follow and Citizens of the world who have a stake in America living up to our ideals.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 