EXPANDING THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS OPPORTUNITY

From Page 9 people who are experienced with working in a manufacturing environment.

Some manufacturing workers may need to upgrade their skills to work with new software or machines, Krauss said, “but if you have to train someone on a new piece of equipment, you’d rather have someone who’s worked in a factory before.” ey found what they needed in Detroit, with 60-70 percent of their hires from the city, Krauss said.

Diversity of talent is also important for companies, and Detroit is authentically diverse. at’s a big advantage for the city and region, Krauss said.

It brought data analytics company Majorel to Detroit.

Majorel was looking for a diverse and skilled workforce, people who were comfortable working on the computer, databases and websites.

“It’s a global company, and they have a really good career path for people who work for them … to get to that middle class.”

Encouraging startups, entrepreneurs

Support for Black entrepreneurs would also help move more of the city’s residents into the middle class, DFC’s Goss said.

“In other cities, entrepreneurship is a direct pathway to wealth. (But) not here in Detroit,” she said.

Black and Brown business owners are not receiving the access to capital, and they’re not growing, she said.

“I’m not just talking about startup capital; I’m talking about investment in existing businesses ... . ere are more of those smaller startups than there are anything else in Detroit.” e city has also provided entrepreneurs with support since 2015 through Motor City Match. To date, it has provided $11.4 million in grants to 1,696 businesses.

Detroit at Work has teamed up with Wayne County Community College to o er an entrepreneurship training academy, a two-week program providing aspiring entrepreneurs a basic primer so they can decide if they want to move forward in starting their own business, Williams said.

Another program, Detroit Means Business, was developed during the height of COVID to help struggling small businesses stay a oat during the lockdowns, to reopen and, now, to thrive, Johnson said.

“What we do know is that entrepreneurship leads to wealth generation,” he said.

Beyond city-led and other e orts, the New Economy Initiative, a foundation-funded economic development e ort housed at the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, is working to increase access to support for early entrepreneurs and to create a system for second-stage entrepreneurs looking to scale, said President and CEO Wafa Dinaro.

Boosting safety e orts

Economic mobility is one part of growing the city’s Black middle class. Keeping Black middle-class families in the city by ensuring it’s a place they want to live is the other.

“Safety is at the core of everything,” DEGC CEO Johnson said.

In his State of the City address in ey purchased their rst home in the city last fall after renting for a decade. e couple had looked for a home in other cities, said Marzina Clarke, an assistant teacher at Planting the Seed Montessori in Detroit, who lived in Ann Arbor and overseas before coming back.

Native Detroiters Marzina and Steven Clarke moved away for college and jobs before coming back to the region in 2005-06 and to Detroit in 2012.

“But Detroit is and always will be home. I want that for my kids,” she said. “I want them to feel like they belong somewhere.”

“So many times, people growing up in Detroit, as soon as they start doing well for themselves, they move away,” said Steven Clarke, who works remotely as an account manager for IBM, managing the JPMorgan Chase & Co. data centers.

“I wanted my dollars to go back into the city where I grew up to help make a di erence.” e couple sent their two young daughters to a free Montessori school in Madison Heights because there wasn’t one at the time in Detroit. ey shifted to an online charter school for the past few years during COVID. e girls, now 13 and 10, will return to in-person schooling this fall. eir parents plan to send them to a charter school in the neighborhood.

“I wanted to see what schools are by us … so we looked in our neighborhood,” Marzina Clarke said. “Lo and behold, here’s this charter school and they’re doing good things.”

After growing up in Detroit, Steven Clarke had reservations about the schools. ere were a lot of disadvantages at the time, like used textbooks and fewer resources than suburban schools. “As a parent, you want to give your kids better opportunities than (you) had growing up,” he said.

“ e charter schools have completely blown me away.” e city, as a whole, has come a very long way in cleaning up blight, attracting nice restaurants, the Avenue of Fashion, ice skating and shops downtown, he said.

“And there are lots of parks where we live — nice, clean, well-maintained parks we can take our kids to,” Marzina Clarke said.

Still, she is bothered by litter and trash. And they encourage their kids to play in the backyard, not the front, for safety reasons, her husband said.

“ e more people who come back to the city, the neighborhoods will look better because people are investing in their homes, xing them up, taking pride in their homes,” Steven Clarke said. “Now people are going to take pride in their neighborhood.

“If you’re skeptical about Detroit and you give it a try and start to live here, it’s just going to be a trickle e ect. You attend these schools, you x up your home. e more people who do that, that’s what turns the city around.” early March, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced plans to invest $10 million over the next two years in e orts to reduce neighborhood crime. e program will give neighborhood groups up to $700,000 a year to create and fund programs to reduce violence. If the programs are successful, they could be extended.

It builds on earlier e orts like Detroit Cease re, a collaboration between local neighborhoods and local police to prevent gang violence.

Families want walkable neighborhoods, diverse housing options, quality schools, good grocery stores and safe parks and other community gathering spaces. ey want they want to be able to let their kids walk, run and play without any problems, said Goss, who lives in the Villages on Detroit’s east side. at’s a big lift, given that many of the suburban amenities they want

Voices Of Detroiters

Steve Henry, a single father of four, plans to leave the city with his two youngest later this year to pursue job opportunities he can’t nd in Detroit. He left his native city just long enough to earn a bachelor’s degree in family and youth studies at Central Michigan University. After coming back home, he went on to earn his master’s in social justice at Marygrove College.

Henry, 40, currently works as a contracted community ambassador manager to United Way for Southeastern Michigan for the digital connectivity e ort Connect 313. On the side, he’s helping people who now have digital access connect to their doctors’ o ces so they can manage their health.

are missing in Detroit’s neighborhoods, she said.

“People don’t want to be locked into neighborhoods that aren’t improving, where everyone is poor and the neighborhood looks really bad,” she said.

“ e neighborhoods that don’t look like that ... you can’t a ord them unless you’re really well, well above what we think of as the middle class.” e higher cost of city taxes also means a $60,000 annual salary doesn’t go as far toward purchasing a higher quality of life in Detroit versus Eastpointe or South eld, Goss said. e city administration and others such as the Kresge Foundation and Live6 Alliance, in northwest Detroit, and Rocket Community Fund and the Gilbert Family Foundation more broadly are working to, among other things, improve neighborhoods.

Early education plays important role

Good schools are also part of the picture.

With the Black middle class in mind, Detroit Public Schools Community District has been making investments for the past ve years in its specialty, application schools (focused on areas like foreign languages, aviation, science and medicine, and ne and performing arts) and examination schools, which require prospective students to take an exam to be considered for admission and provide rigorous collegeand career-prep education, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an emailed statement.

It has earmarked funding to rebuild Cody and Pershing high schools, opened two Montessori programs, he said, and restored Martin Luther King Jr. High as an examination high school, where students must take an exam to be considered for admission and then receive rigorous college and career preparation, among other programs.

e district’s partnership in the cradle-to-career educational programs on the former Marygrove College campus is also attracting Black middle-class families back to traditional public education, as is the Detroit School of the Arts, Vitti said.

“Lastly, we believe that our expansion of Pre-K with certi ed

As a single father, he’s had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet in Detroit.

“I love Detroit; there’s a lot of great things here ... but now I’m at the point where I can use my skills and abilities to get paid more elsewhere,” he said.

Henry is exploring jobs in the health equity space in Dallas, Orlando and Atlanta. Detroit has similar opportunities, he said. But there’s an opportunity to earn more in other states.

Detroit has come a long way in the digital equity space in the last few years, Henry said. Other states don’t have what we have, he said: “I have the tools and ability to bring them up to what they need.” teachers will also attract middle-class families to DPSCD where families can avoid tuition at private schools and still receive a high-quality early learning experience.

“We know that the expansion of all of these programs has led DPSCD’s Detroit market share of school-aged children to increase versus the decline of city charter schools since the pandemic.”

Putting it all together

It’s been a real community e ort to address the issues Detroit Future City has raised, said Laura Grannemann, executive director of the Rock Community Fund and Gilbert Family Foundation. Community development organizations, nonpro ts, the Kresge Foundation, JPMorgan Chase and many others have been working, in consultation with Detroit Future City, to address the issues that have been raised as critical to growing the city’s Black middle class.

“It certainly has to be the work of the community. It can’t just be one organization,” she said.

For their part, in March 2021, the Rocket Community Fund and Gilbert Family Foundation announced a 10-year, $500 million philanthropic investment to build economic opportunity in Detroit neighborhoods, with a focus on stabilizing the housing of low-income Detroit families at risk of displacement, then following up with targeted investments focused on public life and economic mobility.

e two funders are doing that by providing funding to prevent tenant evictions and tax foreclosures and providing wealth-building opportunities through homeownership and assistance for home repair investments to ensure people want to stay in their homes, she said.

in the city, Grannemann said.

“And then, of course, one thing that unfortunately too often gets overlooked is creating those strong social bonds and connections to the neighborhoods through things like public space opportunities and connection to arts and culture,” she said.

e $500,000 riving Neighborhoods Fund is providing support for about 20 grassroots organizations across the city that are activating public spaces and bringing programming to their neighborhoods. In some cases, it is an investment in something like markets in public spaces around the city.

“We’ve also invested in parks around the city,” like Curtis Jones Park, in collaboration with Northwest Goldberg Cares, Grannemann said.

“ ere is a fantastic and thriving neighborhood, but they just did not have a space where they could go to be super active to have kids ... play basketball and go ice skating and interact with local entrepreneurs.” e city of Detroit has a long history of Black homeownership and of diverse communities that are led by Black leaders, Grannemann said.

Now, they do.

“Unfortunately, we started to see that slip away just a little bit with the announcement a couple of years ago, where it was going from a majority homeowner (city) to a majority renter city.”