In hunt for jobs, Detroit welcomed heavy industry to neighborhoods. Residents are ghting back

For 15 years, Vanessa Butterworth has battled environmental injustice for Greenpeace and elsewhere. So when she learned a concrete crushing facility had been proposed for her Core City neighborhood, she knew just what to do to ght back. at didn’t make it any easier.

She organized neighbors, communicated with o cials, planned press conferences and researched the property’s owner, spending an estimated 10 hours a week on her effort to rebu the operation. But still, the ght is ongoing. ere are appeals to wait out and cleanup to advocate for.

“I feel like I’m losing years of my life,” Butterworth said. “Our communities have to spend their time ghting draconian, egregious proposals. ... It’s horrible what’s happening to people, it’s absolutely horrible, and the city knows it.”

Butterworth’s success marked a rare but increasingly common victory against the overlap of homes and industry for residents in a city where development long predates zoning laws and disruptive uses frequently abut homes. Concrete crushing, asphalt mixing and automotive manufacturing are among the many operations that put business owners in con ict with residents in their own backyards. e city of Detroit has long worked to lure much-needed jobs to the city, but has also gone to bat for residents a ected by industrial operations. And the con ict between industry and neighborhood is taking on increased importance as the city works on a new master plan.

In a blight-related lawsuit last month against the concrete crushing plant — and in a letter from Mayor Mike Duggan to the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals — the city has supported the neighborhood’s e orts. But for Butterworth and other neighbors, there are still possible appeals, and there’s the matter of the property itself, which “is covered with large mounds of dirt, concrete debris, and other solid waste,” according to the lawsuit.

Butterworth wants it cleaned up; she said dust is blowing all over the neighborhood causing health issues and discomfort.

Murray Wikol, a member of landowner Can-Am International Trade Crossing who was sued by the city for blight on the property, said the proposed concrete crushing facility would be small, contained and have high-tech air monitoring systems. He doesn’t understand why residents are so concerned.

“ ere are hazards way worse than this,” Wikol said. “We have guns, we have meth, we have robbery.”

City planners said about 16% of the total land in Detroit is zoned for industry. For eresa Landrum, a Southwest Detroit community advocate, that means there are plenty of other places Wikol’s concrete crusher could go. She said the Core City property is prime space for development that would o er amenities for residents.

“ ey want to create a neighborhood again,” she said. “Why would you want something like that in the middle?”

A balancing act

Wikol said he cares about the city and its future, but that his property has been zoned for industrial use for decades. If residents win, he said, it’s possible that there would never be any new industry in the city of Detroit.

“I cannot see how that is sustainable economically,” he said.

Instead, Wikol says, if Detroit wants to get industrial zoning out of neighborhoods, it should work with landowners — like himself — to look for other places to put them.

“People who are residents should be safe and secure and have a vibrant community,” he said, “but to do that, in my opinion, you need jobs.”

Heavy industry does bring jobs to a city that has long had high unemployment: Even outside of auto manufacturing, it accounts for more than 9,000 jobs in the city of Detroit in 2022, according to data from the Workforce Intelligence Network.

Duggan has made job creation a top priority for the city since he was rst elected nearly a decade ago. At Detroit Homecoming in 2019, he touted e orts to bring two plants from Fiat Chrysler (now Stellantis) to the city and pushed for more clearing of land to make way for job-creating industry.

“We know that if we can deliver quickly, cut through the bureaucracy, get the permits done quickly that we’ve got the workforce here that wants to work hard and be trained — and we think that’s the formula,” Duggan told attendees at the time. “And now I just have to assemble some more land. We gotta clear it.”

Critics say it’s that lure of jobs that has long led Detroit o cials to support land uses that aren’t compatible with healthy neighborhoods.

Wendy Caldwell-Liddell, a community organizer who’s the planning and development manager at advo- cacy organization Detroit People’s Platform, said there are some days she loses sleep over ghts to protect residents’ health from industrial pollution.

“We are so development-thirsty here, we don’t take a moment to consider the e ects. What you’re telling me is their pro ts matter more than my health,” she said. “It makes me feel like residents just get thrown in the trash.”

Caldwell-Liddell said she wishes government leaders would take more initiative to reduce the amount of industrial land in the city. She said the fact they haven’t is a re ection of their priorities.

“I always thought our community would be more creative with what they did with those industrial areas,” she said. “I would think they would rezone, remediate the site, generate real value.”

Detroit didn’t have its rst zoning laws until the 1940s, said Rory Bolger, a city planner/zoning specialist with the city planning commission in the legislative policy division — long after the city had already been built up. By then, residents were used to living near auto plants and other industry, though their acceptance of such closeness has changed over the years.

Now, city planners have begun to down-zone some properties ahead of a new master plan for the city, the rst since 2009. And some members of City Council said they think it’s high time for Detroit to take more action to further separate residents from the noise, scents and pollution that come with heavy industry.

Detroit City Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero said she’s asking for more vegetation and distance requirements between industry and residences. She also said the city can sometimes be too lax in what it allows, and she supported revoking business licenses for existing compa- nies that out the rules — including those with unpaid tickets and nes. When industry is too close to where people live, she said, it takes away opportunities for the things people want to see in their neighborhoods. It also has other costs, including those to mental health.

“Constantly having to be on the defense, it leads to constant stress and fear, which leads to anxiety,” Santiago-Romero said. “ at’s a true cost.”

What is fair?

Sen. Stephanie Chang, D-Detroit, said she has proposed legislation in the past that would require a certain bu er between industry and homes. Buyouts, like those that are occurring near the under-construction Gordie Howe Bridge and have been proposed by City Council near Stellantis, should also be on the table, she said. But Chang said zoning happens at a local level.

Bu er discussions are often about how many hundreds of feet away from industry people should live. But for Landrum, even that’s too close. She said she’d like two or three miles of open space between residents and industry. It would help o set the noise pollution, as well, she said.

“How do we coexist in a safe, clean environment with industry?” she asked. “You put homes further away. You cannot put industry in the middle of the city like that.”

Sometimes, though, even miles feel insu cient.

Marsha Bruhn lives four miles away from what was a proposed asphalt plant, but she’s one of the leaders of the successful ght to stop it.

Bruhn, a past president of the North Rosedale Civic Association and the former director of the city planning commission, said she heard about the proposal only because a neighbor who works for Wayne County learned about it. e proposed asphalt mixing facility, at the South eld Service Drive site of the former Farmer Jack headquarters, was rejected by the city of Detroit in late 2021 after a ood of opposition. While Asphalt Specialists Inc. was only required to notify people within 300 feet of the facility, Bruhn based her opposition to its approval on the fact that wind patterns were likely to blow the odor into the Grandmont-Rosedale neighborhood.

“All the opposition came from neighbors to the north,” Bruhn said. “You have to always be vigilant. ... I think it’s a continuous challenge to be informed.”

No one from Asphalt Specialists returned messages seeking comment about the proposal.

Pam Weinstein, the coordinator of the Rosedale Park block captains and the past president of the Rosedale Park Improvement Association, said the city’s rules for industrial land use are outdated.

“One hundred years ago, it was completely routine for people’s homes to be cheek-to-jowl with a factory, with a mill,” Weinstein said. “ is proposal, these are ideas that are about 100 years old.”

One advantage of continued ghts, she said, is that communities are beginning to work together to o er help and hard-gained knowledge about how to oppose such proposals.

Grandmont-Rosedale has had neighborhood civic associations for a century, Weinstein said, giving them a solid framework to organize residents. ey also have Bruhn’s expertise, as well as others’ in the community.

“We had so many advantages,” Weinstein said.

Other communities do not.

Simone Sagovac, the director of the Southwest Detroit Community Benets Coalition, said there aren’t many legal protections for residents near the under-construction Gordie Howe Bridge. Community bene ts agreements, instead of securing additional amenities for residents, have had to focus on mitigating the impacts of industry, she said.

“ e burdens we are laying on people for the bene t of so many — the cost to public health, the quality of life — don’t get factored in,” Sagovac said. “We need processes that are more empathetic. ... It’s so bad and the anguish is so extreme, what we’re putting people through.”

But Wikol said if Detroit is worried about the e ects of industry, the whole city is in trouble. Where his facility is proposed near I-96 and Warren Avenue there are already multiple highways bringing truck tra c that causes pollution, he said.

“If we’re against that, we should shut down all the roads, all the bridges,” Wikol said.

‘A sacri ce zone’

Even with improved networks, neighbors have to fend for themselves, said Raquel Garcia, executive director of Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision. ere’s no organized city apparatus to help protect residential areas, she said.

“ e city should be leading on this,” she said. “Residents have been talking about this for more than 30 years.”

Communities of color are particularly a ected by the “environmental racism” of industrial development, activists like Laprisha Berry Daniels said. Daniels, the executive director of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, said communities with fewer nancial resources tend to be targeted most often.

“Detroit’s being treated as a sacri ce zone, Detroiters are being treated as sacri ce people,” she said. “ ere’s an assumption that business will have its way. I would like for it to change.”

She said grassroots e orts are starting to make a di erence.

“I think we’re winning more ghts,” Daniels said. “We’re more aware of the ghts we need to be engaged in.”

Duggan, in his February letter to the Board of Zoning Appeals regarding Wikol’s property, wrote that he was opposed to the “very high-impact concrete crushing facility.”

“ ere is no doubt that the proposed use would pose an adverse public health, noise, and safety hazard for local residents,” he wrote.

He added that it would aggravate residents’ pre-existing conditions, expose them to harmful emissions and that the proposal lacked the proper screening to protect residents. While the land is zoned for industry, the concrete crushing operation would need a special permit to move forward, because of the impact it would have.

While Wikol said he thought there should be more opportunities for residents and businesses to work together on proposals such as his, Butterworth called it one of the most egregious proposals she’s ever seen.

“I don’t think it would have been rejected if we didn’t mount this ght,” she said. “We have to stay vigilant all the time.”

Contact: arielle.kass@crain.com; (313) 446-6774; @ArielleKassCDB