PEOPLE
Ensuring All Detroiters Benefit from the Motor City’s Revival Six years after emerging from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, construction cranes once again dot Detroit’s skyline and large-scale investment is flowing into scores of high-end commercial and residential developments throughout the city. Ford is in the midst of remaking Detroit’s once grand but long since decrepit Michigan Central Station into a hub for tech-savvy workers and engineers working on autonomous vehicle projects. Detroit native and Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has snapped up dozens of landmark properties in the city’s downtown core and surrounding neighborhoods, churning out hundreds of thousands of feet of highend office space and gleaming luxury residential units. Without a doubt, the Motor City has come a long way since the auto industry
Ofori (left) and Pohorelsky at HKS
14
Communiqué
Fall 2019
cratered, sparking an investment and population exodus that brought what was once the nation’s fourth-largest city to its knees. But just a few miles away from the gleaming downtown towers of General Motors’ headquarters in the Renaissance Center, it becomes all too apparent that the city has amassed thousands of vacant commercially zoned real estate parcels across Detroit, many of them along key urban corridors with significant unmet retail needs. “Many of these properties came into the city’s ownership through tax foreclosure, and the city hopes to get them back into productive use,” explained Kyle Ofori MPP/MUP 2019. With funding from the Ash Center and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, Ofori and HKS classmate Jana Pohorelsky MPP 2019 spent the better
