Cutting off brownfield and historic preservation tax incentives could halt development progress

Gov. Snyder's proposed state budget ruthlessly eliminates state tax incentives for a number of industries and projects in favor of lower overall business taxes. While the incentives for filmmaking have gotten the most attention, the elimination of state tax incentives for the redevelopment of brownfield sites and historic preservation may be the most crucial issue for Detroit.

The brownfield credits apply to "brownfield sites," which the Michigan Economic Development Corp. loosely defines as "properties that are either contaminated, blighted or functionally obsolete." These incentives, along with others for the preservation of historic properties, have been responsible for many high-profile redevelopment projects, including the Book-Cadillac and Fort Shelby. As I wrote earlier in a post about redevelopment around Grand Circus Park, the redevelopment of the Broderick Tower was literally made possible by state tax credits.

I understand the need for a balanced budget, but it seems that many of Snyder's proposals would set Detroit and Michigan backwards, leaving us to rely entirely on the hope that his "good climate for business" idea is going to pan out. Nancy Kaffer and Daniel Duggan of Crain's Detroit write that the elimination of these tax credits "could slow or stop the flow of redevelopment projects in Detroit," and the article quotes the vice president of board administration of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., who says that "it's hard to think of a big project that hasn't used the credits."

With all the progress that's been made recently on these projects, the idea of cutting off the state tax incentives seems very misguided.

The Silent Impact of Robocop

The Robocop statue has been a pretty divisive topic. I'm not really sure how I feel about the symbolism of Robocop, or that so many people outside Detroit donated money, or that a group of people who have been in Corktown for only a few years are building a seven foot statue in their backyard.

Either way, while you might think it’s stupid, the Robocop statue fundraiser has accomplished what you had probably not even thought of attempting: raised thousands and thousands of dollars for a Detroit project. I certainly did not think $50,000 would be donated to the construction of a Robocop statue, especially in less than a week. Some people claim that this is not impressive because one businessman in California donated half of the money. In response, I would say that it's almost equally amazing to raise $25,000 in less than a week. So, it seems like this is a challenge. If you think you could spend that money on something better or more creative, start your own fundraiser or present your own plan, because the possibility is clearly out there.

A Hamtramck artist may have just proven this point without even realizing it. The Detroit News writes that “Marianne Burrows was irritated with the recent online fundraising campaign to create a statue of the sci-fi movie icon and launched her own $50,000 drive for something she thinks is more useful: an art park.” The goal is to provide $2,000 and some empty land to 25 artists.

The irony is that Burrows apparently would not have come up with the idea of raising money for this project if she had not been pissed off about the Robocop statue.

And, in defense of Robocop, when I was thinking of ways this $50,000 could be better spent in Detroit, I was thinking of maybe feeding malnourished children or buying new textbooks and supplies for DPS students. But again, I’m not personally making the effort to raise money, so more power to Marianne Burrows for pursuing her own idea.

I don't think the Robocop statue will make or break Corktown, and if it ends up convincing a lot of people to visit Detroit for the first time so that they can discover that it's much more than a place with a Robocop statue, I think that's a good thing.

It is definitely possible that this only happened because the idea of a Robocop statue is kind of stupid and therefore spread quickly on the internet. In the end, if it turns out that people are more willing to donate money to a statue of Robocop than to more useful things, I think that says more about humanity than about this statue.

Mick Vranich, "Radnik Pisar"

Last year, I was at a used book sale in Livonia and came across a copy of Radnik Pisar by Mick Vranich. Although I was not familiar with Vranich, I was in the middle of a poetry/small press phase (it happens), so I was pretty excited to find a book by a Detroit poet.

The book was published in 1983 by 2x4 Press in Detroit. The author bio on the last page reads, "Mick Vranich was born in 1946 downriver from Detroit. At eighteen, he was a general laborer at Zug Island; at twenty, a scrapballer and hooker at Great Lakes Steel; later, a squaring shear operator at Ford Stamping Plant. Other jobs include driving 130,000 miles delivering car parts in San Francisco, where he wore out three trucks. His first book, Salad Surreal: Discernible by Distortion, appeared in 1971. Vranich presently lives in Detroit and makes his living as a carpenter."

A note on the first page says that "Radnik Pisar" is Serbian for "Worker Writer," and Vranich definitely seems to embody the persona of the introspective laborer, alone with his thoughts. In "Scrapballer," he describes the beginning of the night shift at the steel mill, when he cleared his mind of thoughts of home and "poured a cup of coffee from my thermos and lit a cigarette and watched the steel spooling."

Vranich's writing style is some mixture of vague abstraction and the intense straightforwardness of Charles Bukowski, and it's usually very visual and chaotic. I don't want to try to speak for Vranich or make some grand statement about what he's trying to communicate, but I can say that the world often seems very hostile, lonely, and paranoid in these poems. Some take place from inside the home, sensing an unwelcoming world outside, and in others, the conflict and confusion seems to come from inside the poet's own head. That working class Detroit imagery permeates many of them, as in "Invade the Will," when Vranich is "walking on ice to the beer store / with a bag full of cans."

My favorite is a very brief poem called "Saxaphones in the Sunlight" --

"i think i'll take a walk
it's very bright outside
i know i have the ability
to walk in the streets
i have seen me there
i hear saxaphones in the sunlight
i hear warnings outside the door."

***

Vranich worked as a carpenter until February 2010, when he was seriously injured in a fall at a construction site. He died on March 29. Photos from the April 4 memorial can be seen at Tribes of the Cass Corridor, and the Metro Times printed some remembrances on March 30.

Streetlight Giraffe

2nd Ave and Canfield

Grand Circus Park Revival

Grand Circus Park is experiencing a bit of a rebirth with news over the last couple months that three buildings on its south end are undergoing major redevelopment.




2007 photo of Grand Circus Park. The Broderick Tower is the taller building with the Verizon ad, which covers up the much more visually pleasing whale mural. To the immediate right is the David Whitney Building, and to its left is the Madison Building. Photo by Mike Russell, available under a Creative Commons license.


1. The Broderick Tower is being renovated by Motown Construction Partners and will have 127 apartments with a restaurant and lounge on the first few floors. Construction is expected to be done by September 2012. Although there have been attempts to rehab the Broderick in the past, this time the developers have more solid funding sources, including historic tax credits, according to Buildings of Detroit.

2. Across the street, the David Whitney Building is being purchased by a group of investors called the Whitney Partners on a loan from the Detroit Development Authority. There will be retail space on the first few floors along with some mixture of commercial and residential units. The building was constructed in 1915 and designed by Daniel Burnham, the architect/urban planner who did such minor things as creating the master plan for Chicago. According to the Free Press, "plans include restoring the Whitney's original classical architectural ornament that was stripped away a half-century ago." (Detroit Free Press)

3. The Madison Building was purchased by Quicken Loans, who will "rehab its upper floors into a hub for high-tech start-ups" (Model D Media). Quicken Loans has been pushing for development in Detroit for a while and moved its headquarters downtown last year.

Woodward Light Rail construction could begin by the end of the year

The Draft Environmental Impact Study for the Woodward Light Rail project was just released and can be downloaded at the project's website. This is the first draft of the federal environmental impact study, which needs to be completed before federal funds can be used for the project. The report is broken up into several sections and provides an extremely detailed analysis of the possible impact of a list of factors, such as noise and vibrations, on buildings and neighborhoods along the route. Also, if you go to the "Public Documents" section of the website, you can download maps of the proposed route, including three potential Downtown routes for the south end of the track.

According to Model D, the final version of the report is expected to be submitted in May after the public presentation and review of the first draft. Hopefully, construction will begin at the end of 2011. The public comment period goes until March 14, according to the project website, and formal presentations are being given on February 12 at 11am and 4pm at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.

Like I said, this is actually happening.

Robocop at the Imagination Station

A few days ago, someone in Massachusetts sent a Twitter message to Mayor Bing suggesting that Detroit build a Robocop statue. Bing responded with a polite "no, thank you." Amazingly, a debate is now raging over the merits of a Robocop statue, and it kind of seems like this is actually going to happen. Some people have taken up the cause and are attempting to raise money and find a suitable location for the proposed seven-foot monument. The project's website is http://detroitneedsrobocop.com/, and as I write this, over $5,200 has been donated, which is 10% of the goal amount.

At the moment, the Imagination Station has offered a piece of their property as a home for the statue. The Imagination Station is a non-profit that recently purchased two abandoned homes and some other land on the edge of Roosevelt Park in Corktown. The group's mission is to renovate these two structures and eventually turn the property into a combination public art space/media center/artist residency program.




One of two abandoned homes being re-purposed by the Imagination Station. Photo by Margaret O'Leary.





Looking down 14th Street towards Michigan Avenue. The photocopies on the facade of the abandoned Roosevelt Hotel, which stands on the lot next to the Imagination Station, spell out "Face the Station." This block has been seeing a lot of activity in the past several months. Photo by Margaret O'Leary.


This whole Robocop statue idea is very surreal. Honestly, I'm having a hard time deciding whether it's a good idea or not. It's hard to tell whether a statue of Robocop would be a quirky addition to Corktown or just a joke that's been allowed to go way too far. Still, I think this is a testament to Detroit's uniqueness and endless possibilities at this point in time. I can't think of another city in which you can say, "You need a spot to build your Robocop statue? How about you put it in front of the two houses I'm converting into a community media and art center?"

Boston-Edison and EEV get a housing incentive program of their own

Continuing with the trend of housing incentives, the city plans to use federal stimulus money to move Detroit police officers into inexpensive houses within the city limits (Detroit Free Press). The funds will cover basic renovations, and the houses will cost between $500 and $1,000 a month with a $1,000 down payment. A test version of the program is going to start in two fairly stable neighborhoods, Boston-Edison and East English Village.

When my family lived in East English Village twenty years ago, police officers were required to live in the city, and quite a few lived in our neighborhood. In 1999, the residency requirement was dropped by the state, and at least half of Detroit's police officers and firefighters now live in the suburbs. East English Village is still a strong neighborhood with few vacant properties, which is why it could be one good starting point for getting people to move back to Detroit. I think providing these incentives for officers to live in the city can have a number of really positive effects - it would ideally improve relationships between officers and residents of Detroit and will cause officers to become more invested in the neighborhoods they serve. And, outside of police-citizen relations, it can help the city as it continues to try to fill in gaps in these relatively stable areas.

We are definitely seeing a trend in both the city and employers attempting to entice people to move back into the city or to move into the city for the first time. The hope is that once these core neighborhoods start to fill in, the progress will be exponential as an increasing number of people become personally interested in the city's well-being.

The Midtown media blitz continues

An article in today's Free Press profiled Susan Mosey, the President of the University Cultural Center Association and a multitasking advocate for Midtown over the last few decades who has been involved in everything from beautification to building preservation to fund-raising for development projects. Scott Lowell, the co-owner of Traffic Jam & Snug, says she is "probably five-eighths of the reason the neighborhood looks the way it does." Mosey is also involved in the Live Midtown program.

Something else I learned -- Apparently the coordination between WSU, Henry Ford Health System, and the DMC on the Live Midtown program is part of a larger project called the Midtown Partnership. The goal is to get 15,000 people to move downtown or downtown-adjacent (Corktown, Midtown, Woodbridge, etc.) by 2015, a plan which is appropriately named the "15 by 15 initiative" (Crain's Detroit).

Woodward Train Revisited

The Woodward Light Rail project is, by most accounts, actually going to happen. After an environmental impact study is complete, construction will begin on the first half of the line, which will extend from the river to West Grand Boulevard. The project is funded through a combination of public and private money, and Dave Bing is adamant that it's going to get done (literally, he said, "It's going to happen").

When people first hear that a light rail line is going to be built on Woodward, they are generally pretty skeptical. Detroit is promised a lot of things that never come to fruition, such as the constant succession of planned renovation projects for abandoned buildings. And, of course, it's easy to look at the People Mover and conclude that Detroit is not serious about mass transit. It would be great if we could build a world-class train system to carry passengers and spur development up and down Detroit's major avenues, but it can seem more like an urban planner's dream scenario than a potential reality for city at the brink of total collapse.

But I urge you not to be so pessimistic about mass transit in Detroit. The People Mover is far from the height of the city's transit planning. Detroit's streetcar system, which obviously included a Woodward line, operated nineteen routes at its peak in the middle of the twentieth century. So, remember that the proposed Woodward Avenue Light Rail would not be the first train to travel up and down the center of Woodward. If you need to see it with your own eyes, I will direct you to these two photographs, taken by Arthur Siegel in July, 1942:

Woodward looking south towards downtown from the Maccabees Building at Warren Ave. (Image from the Library of Congress)

Woodward looking north from the Maccabees Building. (Image from the Library of Congress)

On April 8, 1956, the Woodward line was the last piece of the system to be dismantled. The city's rail system was taken down in the 1950s as a result of the introduction of buses, which were considered more flexible and safer for riders, as they could be boarded from the curb as opposed to the middle of the street. Citizens of Detroit, however, mostly opposed the removal of the streetcars (Detroit Transit History).

We often hear that public transportation in Detroit was doomed by the city's obsession with automobiles. While this is true to some degree, keep in mind that Detroit's transit system was not always as embarrassing as you might think. The idea of a train traveling down Woodward or any of Detroit's avenues is not totally outrageous. Think of it this way: Detroit is not really building a train system, it's beginning to re-build it. And if you simply don't think cities need efficient mass transit or that it's a waste of money, I can only suggest that you join the rest of us in the twenty-first century.

Note: Arthur Siegel also took this photograph, which I posted earlier. These two are from the same collection of photos taken for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.