Kaplan: Detroit won't thrive without strong neighborhoods | Opinion

Seth D. Kaplan

American neighborhoods have declined over the past few decades, contributing to rising inequality, mistrust and depression. While the trend affects all places — rich and poor — in some form, neighborhoods with high levels of concentrated poverty are especially affected. Detroit, a city long known for its neighborhoods, offers a stark example. The city’s future success depends on its ability to revive or develop a set of strong neighborhoods that can attract residents and help them thrive.

Why do neighborhoods matter? For individuals, they determine the kind of day-to-day relationships one develops, affecting how much support is available when in need and how much help one gets when seeking to advance. Indicators show that everything from life expectancy to crime rates to student test scores to social mobility are not only correlated with each other but also with a physical location. Weak neighborhoods make everything from acquiring childcare in an emergency to ensuring streets are safe to getting help when facing a problem to looking for a job harder, disadvantaging everyone living there.

More broadly speaking, neighborhoods influence cities and society not just by how effective they are at building individual social connections, but by attracting talented people, boosting the local asset base (and tax revenue), and molding civic habits, norms and expectations. They play central roles determining how economically dynamic, socially vibrant, and equitable our country is.

Detroit needs to extend the radius of positive impact from strong neighborhoods to struggling.

When neighborhoods fail to perform their basic tasks, social problems multiply. And the more these problems are concentrated in specific neighborhoods, the more there is a multiplier effect on everyone living there.

Detroit provides ample evidence of these dynamics. Whereas once this great city’s strong neighborhoods helped engineer its rise to the country’s richest and fourth-most populated city, today it is, in some respects, a shell of itself.

Of the 550,000 homes and apartments that existed in the city in 1960, over 250,000 are gone, replaced with vacant lots. A significant number of the rest are in poor condition. Some neighborhoods are substantially abandoned. Many buildings that drew crowds — churches, schools, theaters, the main train station — have been deserted, with devastating effect.

While many factors played a role in the city’s decline, race and how it affected neighborhood dynamics surely played a significant part. The relationships between insiders and outsiders, suburbanites and urbanites, and Whites and Blacks have long affected how the city and its surrounding environs have evolved — with disinvestment, emigration, abandonment and blight the result today. Deep mistrust of government, outsiders, and Whites persists among many Black Detroiters.

Thankfully, the city is starting to recover, with the population stabilizing and islands of stability and even growth emerging. But Detroit still has a long way to go. Given limited resources and great challenges, a “neighborhoods strategy” is essential. This should focus on a combination of what I call “poles of success” and nearby places with a chance to recover.

Building outward from relatively strong neighborhoods (such as the Boston-Edison Historic District) to bolster more vulnerable adjacent neighborhoods and extending the radius of their positive impact to more and more places is essential. In addition, the city should invest strategically in “middle neighborhoods” — places teetering between success and failure — with the potential for recovery.

Increasing access to capital for mortgages, home improvements, housing rehabilitation and business expansion as well as improving community infrastructure and amenities (including green spaces, common areas and gathering places) are especially important. Private financial markets are likely not providing sufficient money for local needs given the modest real estate prices. In both cases, places that already have major assets — whether cultural, built, natural, economic, or educational — will be particularly good entry points, as such assets can often be used to improve not only that neighborhood, but also the several right around it.

Carefully withdrawing resources from the weakest, already-emptying neighborhoods — as the city is already doing — is sad but necessary. This may also include certain especially vulnerable nearby neighborhoods, which are harder to renew than those situated near a neighborhood doing well or on the rise. Similarly, isolated neighborhoods are harder to renew than those with dynamic areas nearby. Of course, the more help given to remaining residents to salvage their assets and move to better locales, the less painful such steps will be.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who came into office in 2022, established a dedicated office of neighborhoods tasked with leveraging the city’s “robust network of partners, resources, and community leaders to enact place-based strategies, improve operations, and empower neighborhood voices.” As his office’s transition report argued, “neighborhoods are our single best organizing framework for being responsive to resident needs and working across sectors. A better Atlanta is one where all neighborhoods are healthy, thriving, equitable, and accessible.”

While material investments will inevitably be essential to this strategy, the city should not undervalue the importance of boosting the social capital of each priority neighborhood. The wealth of “organizational life” — the various formal and informal institutions and neighborhood activities that bring people together around joint activities — is especially important if any place is going to flourish long term. This enables the informal cooperation and management that any thriving neighborhood needs.

Much of this organizational life is unofficial, such as neighborhood watch groups, residential associations and weekly children’s activities. These groups and activities, as Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson writes, “generate a web of ‘mundane’ routine activities that can lubricate collective life, although seldom planned as such.”

Supporting local nonprofits that focus on such issues is essential. For example, Life Remodeled, a Detroit nonprofit, has used the transformation of the former Durfee Elementary-Middle School building into a one-stop neighborhood hub, the Durfee Innovation Society (DIS), to bring in and encourage the development of institutions that can support and enrich everyone in the neighborhood, nurturing a virtuous cycle of social repair. By working with neighborhood adult and student leaders to develop the hub’s vision, recruiting new stakeholders willing to commit long-term to collaboration and revitalization, and adopting a service mindset to model giving back to the community and improving the neighborhood, it is bolstering community resources and social linkages outside the area.

When neighborhoods fail to perform their basic tasks, social problems multiply, Kaplan writes.

As Terence Willis, a member of LR’s advisory council, says, the goal is “not just to invest in a building, it’s also to regenerate a neighborhood by setting an example and sowing seeds that others in the same area — or elsewhere — can learn from, generating a self-propagating process of renewal.”

Neighborhoods sit upstream from many social ills, and only by strengthening them can we address such problems. While setting priorities in a place like Detroit will never be easy, our goal should be to build up “neighborhoods of possibilities” — places where every person, especially every child and those most likely to be socially impoverished, can thrive.

This may require rethinking many of the ways we work, as it means focusing more on place-based dynamics than individuals, something that runs against how most American policymakers, philanthropists, and nonprofits work. But ultimately, the goals are the same. Detroit should focus on neighborhoods as a core strategy to tackle its challenges, making it a laboratory of how cities can recover.

Seth D. Kaplan, Ph.D.,is a visiting fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, senior adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to organizations such as the World Bank, USAID, State Department, and OECD. He is the author of the forthcoming “Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time,” which includes a chapter on Detroit.