Plan Detroit Policy Workshop — Neighborhoods and Housing, 4.12.2025

    2:56PM Apr 13, 2025

    Speakers:

    Keywords:

    Detroit policy workshop

    housing and neighborhoods

    master plan update

    community engagement

    vision and values

    housing quality

    vacancy rates

    energy efficiency

    aging in place

    land use strategy

    development challenges

    stakeholder feedback

    future development

    population change

    planning process.

    Ahead and get this started. So if we could just get everybody locked in. I know we have, you know, you all are kind of taking a couple of minutes to finish the boards. That's great, but we just want to go ahead and start the program. So thank you a lot. So just a couple of housekeeping items. When you first walk out to the door on the right hand side, you'll see restrooms for you all to you need to take a restroom break, like I said, there's some beverage and coffee services over there and again after the meeting. Or for some of us, I need to stretch because you get a little creaky. You can stretch over here because I know I have to stretch all the time. So that's that's a good place to stretch to off the way. So thank you all again for being here today. We do have the lights dimmed just for the presentation part, so that we are able to have a better visual of the spring. But once we are done with the presentation, we'll bring the house lights up for the working exercise, and we wanted to be able to conceal a little bit of the coolness as well with the lights off. So just as an FYI for those who have asked, we will turn the lights back on for the engagement conversation. So again, thank you all for joining us this morning. We go ahead and kick it off. And with that, I am going to introduce our fearless leader. Miss Alexa. Thank you.

    Thank you, summer. Good morning everyone. My name is Alexa bush. I am your new planning director for the city of Detroit. We are so thrilled to have you here this morning to kick off the first of many of our policy workshops. I'm going to keep it super short, just because we've got a great program to get through. But again, thank you for coming down this morning. Thank you for your time. Thanks for those of you who have been participating in this process to shape the vision for where we go in the city of Detroit, heading forward. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Dara to kick us off for our program this morning. Awesome.

    My name is Dara obern. I'm the Deputy Director for planning and development. Really excited to be here today. I'm going to give just kick it off with some overview of where we are and what we're doing today. So our session today, first of all, thank you for coming out on a Saturday.

    I'll a Saturday. Hello.

    Thank you for coming out on Saturday to spend some time with us to talk about the city of Detroit. So what we're going to be doing, we're going to have a presentation. We tried our best to keep it brief, but we want to make sure that everybody in the room is kind of up to speed on where we've been and where we're going. Then we're going to have breakout sessions at the tables focus on a possibilities discussion, and then a priority game, and then we're going to have an opportunity to report out so we can make sure that all the different tables can hear from each other. So the goals for today, as I mentioned, first, we really want to review where we are in the planning process and what we've learned so far. Then we want to discuss different policy approaches, and today we are focused on housing and neighborhoods. So this is the as Alexa mentioned. This is the first of a series of workshops we have one later today on open space and environment, on other topics. So today we're really focused on housing and neighborhoods. Then we want you to prioritize which approaches you think will work best for Detroit, and then we want you to share amongst yourselves. So just a level set for everybody. What is plan Detroit? Why are we all here? So plan Detroit is the city's master plan of policies update, and it's really a road map for future development and change in Detroit. So it looks at where we are now, kind of where we've been, and where we hope to be in the future. And we really think about, kind of 20 years into the future, is what we're really planning for. And we want to think about what we need to achieve to get to that future vision. So the last master plan of policies was adopted in 2009 but really a lot of the work that went into that plan is from 2002 So who thinks, who remembers what Detroit was like in 2002 and who thinks the city has changed since 2002 raise your hand if you think the city has changed since 2002 so this is the reason why we know that this policy document really needs to be updated, because there's been significant change. We know there's been population change. The population has continued to go down, which we see. E and has affected our neighborhoods in terms of vacancy and things like that. And then we've seen we're starting to increase again in population, so there's been changes, and we need to recognize that in our policies and how we make decisions. And then there's a little bit here about our planning process is enabled through state, state legislation. So how do we use a policy document like plan Detroit or the master plan of policies to guide future decision making? So the first thing we start with is data. So we need to look at, you know, what is actually happening throughout the city and compared to what was happening, so that we can really get a baseline so things like, you know what a population is, one of those data, vacancy, land use, how we're you know what is happening in our communities, but we really Need to combine that with your experiences, your lived experiences. So part of this process is combining our data analysis and then learning from you, and so that's what we're here today for. And then we're really going to make sure that, in addition to these workshops, that we're going to continue asking you questions and progressing the engagement as we go along. And with that, I'm going to pass it off to Julie to talk a little bit about where we've been and where we're going.

    All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm Julie conecki. I am the project manager within the planning and development department for this mandatory update. So just going to walk you through a little bit of information about our timeline and then some of our engagement to date. So this process has three phases. Phase one kicked off early last year, our analysis envisioning. Phase that's combining that data collection that Dora was just talking about with also some engagement opportunities to hear from you about your current attitudes about the city and future aspirations, and you'll see the summary of a lot of that work on these words along the wall that we'll go through a little bit more detail later. We're now in phase two draft policies. This is the very early part of this phase, we wanted to make sure we were inviting residents and other stakeholders into the discussion about what's possible with the master plan early on, so we weren't too far down the line with those ideas before bringing them out to you. There'll be a lot more engagement as we go through this draft policies phase. This is our first of a couple of rounds of engagement, and then later this year, we'll start bringing all of this work together as we draft the final master plan, and we are expected to wrap up this work next year in 2026 so everything that we've done up to this point, whether it's more technical in nature or community engagement, is all building on itself and becoming a foundation for this policy discussion, but also what the master plan is going to be. So today is about adding this goals and potential solution piece to the puzzle of some of this other work that we've already done. This is one of five workshops happening if you want to join us for one of these other sessions, including our open space and environment this afternoon, please come back out to the registration table. Let us know we can help get you registered for these upcoming sessions. Each one of these is going to focus on issues that are relevant to your neighborhood. Just because it doesn't say neighborhood in the name, we know it's always going to be relevant. So if any of these other topics are of interest to you, please check them out, sign up and come back and have another conversation with us so quickly. What we learned from you through our community engagement process we had, we started this process with a visioning survey, and then we had 60 different pop ups across the city last summer and fall, which we called our city voices tour, to kind of catch you where you already are going, whether that's a rec center or the grocery store, to talk to you about your vision for the future of Detroit. So we asked over 3000 almost 4000 actually, Detroiters, to fill in the blank for this statement. In 20 years, Detroit will be what we wanted to know your vision for the future. So for our city voices tour, we did this as a fun Jenga exercise. Hopefully some of you recognize this and participated. If not, there's still an opportunity to provide your feedback here today on these boards, our vision and value boards that you see out here or out in the hallway. So this is some of the responses that we heard from this community engagement exercise that you should see reflected in our vision and values statements, things like, we want Detroit to be prosperous, but also equitable and inclusive. We want to be community driven. We want. Have a spirit of collective action, unity and community. We wanted to be vibrant. We wanted to be safe. We also heard, though, that, hey, Detroit's got a lot of great things going forward already. We don't want the vision statement to ignore that, so we really tried to listen to that feedback as well and incorporate all of this into that vision statement. We also asked we had a card voting exercise, and we had an early version of this for our visioning survey as well about your priorities. What are the issues that are most pressing for you and your daily life that you think are the highest priorities for this plan? And we gave you some ideas to get started. We pulled these from about 35 different city plans that have been completed since the Master Plan was last updated. So that's the context. We didn't just come up with these out of nowhere. They came from past conversations with folks like yourself, and we lift them up in this round. Relevant to this session, housing and neighborhoods was far and away the most important policy topic area for folks, which is why we have a dedicated policy workshop here today with quality and affordability of housing right at the top of those issues. So we're going to get into that with the card discussion in just a little bit. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of a primer on our vision and values statements like I said, you can read in much more detail about each of these statements. Vision is, what do we want Detroit to become? What is our big aspiration? And out of all that feedback, we came up with, Detroit will be a city of choice and opportunity. This means, even though we know that might not be the case yet, there's incredible potential that we want to build on over the next 20 years to really make Detroit a place people choose to live because it has a high quality of life, both for residents that are here today and those who may choose to call Detroit home in the future. And we also want to make sure we're delivering greater prosperity for folks as well. Within that vision, we also came up with five value statements. So here are the values. These are guiding principles. Keep these in mind as you review policy cards in front of you here today. Vision, what are we trying to achieve? Values? What do we stand for? What should the policies reflect? And those values were resilience, or if you want to call it great, you can equity, innovation, solidarity and legacy. And like I said, much more information on the boards. Please check them out and give us feedback on those. We will continue to refine them over the next phase of the project, and with that, I'm going to turn it over to Bethany from our consultant team to give you a little bit of a technical background before we hop into the exercise.

    All right, everybody still doing? Okay. My name is Bethany. I work for Smith group as an urban designer and Community Engagement Specialist, so I've had the honor of working closely with summer to help coordinate the activities today. But like Julie mentioned, I'm going to give a brief overview of the data side to the research. So we've taken all of the feedback that we've received to date that Julie highlighted, and we're also pairing that with data sources and research that help validate those experiences, that help explain specific points that we should be digging into, and so a little bit about that something that many of you are probably familiar with. Our homes in Detroit are aging. Over 80% of homes in the city are over 65 years old. And so what this means is that maintenance costs are higher, energy bills are higher. And so automatically, because our homes are older, because they're harder to maintain, it also means they're more expensive to the families who are living here in the city, which leads me to that housing cost is a burden. Nearly 40% of Detroit families are experiencing cost burden. And so when we say cost burden, what we mean is that 30% of your income is going towards paying for your housing. So that means that that's a significant portion of your income that could be going towards programs for your kiddos, groceries, to put on the table, all sorts of other things. But you have this significant burden with cost of housing. In addition to that, for our low income residents, specifically, they're paying nearly a third of their income just on energy bills, which is crazy. We've got a chart that kind of explains some of that, in comparison to some of the cities in our region. But all of this also plays into how housing quality becomes a concern. So Detroit is filled with incredibly beautiful homes, but oftentimes are experiencing problems like electrical issues and heating problems and plumbing failures and again, all of this is kind of compounding itself into that housing burden. Vacancy also continues to remain high. About 23% of Detroit homes are currently sitting vacant. But we understand that across the city that vacancy is happening at different rates. So some neighborhoods might be really dense and have houses lining down the streets, and in other neighborhoods you might see a lot of vacancy, a lot of scattered, empty lots that haven't been revitalized into something else. And as a result of the fact that that pattern of vacancy is really scattered. It can oftentimes mean that neighborhood revitalization can become really challenging, because it feels like a really big problem to tackle. But Detroiters housing needs are also changing. So we've got a lot of Detroit households that are getting smaller. We've also got women leaving nearly half of our Detroit households, they're also led by single women, which means that they don't have a spouse or a partner present in that family. The city is getting older, so a good chunk of households do have someone in them that is over 65 years old, or also, we've got about 13,000 seniors who are living alone in the city, and then again, your household is also having children, so demographics of those houses are changing, which means that what the houses look like may not support what those families need. All right. So what all this means is that we're experiencing what we would call a housing mismatch. Okay, so, like I said, houses are predominantly older, and what we need is to upgrade those homes so that they're able to function efficiently, but also preserve them so that their historic, historic significance can remain for generations to come. Our larger households households or houses are designed for traditional families or bigger households. And so we're needing to find ways where we can also infuse into our neighborhood smaller units, whether they're owner or rental, for our smaller families and single households. We've got limited accessibility that isn't helping our aging population. We've got to present those high energy costs, and so finding ways that we can lower that burden on families. Provide energy efficiency in our housing units, so cost burden is reduced. And lastly, lastly, we see that lack of density when you experience so much vacancy. What that means also outside the housing neighborhoods conversation is that the businesses can't be as supported. All of the services can feel a bit disconnected because they were meant for much larger populations. And so finding a way that, if we concentrate how we do things, infuse more people into our neighborhoods, that that means we can also get the support for some of those amenities and resources that people across the city are asking for that was a lot to throw at you. We also, in addition to the boards along the wall that have the vision and value statements in this corner back here and also out in the hallway, we've got all of this information summarized there as well for you to read through. And let us know if these are challenges that you're experiencing or if there are challenges that maybe aren't reflected in this please let us know. We've also highlighted how these challenges intersect with some of our other conversations. So we recognize that today we're here to talk about housing and neighborhoods, but that we have conversations happening for jobs and economy and open space and environment, and none of the challenges are exclusive to their topic, but instead are crossing all of these things. So feel free to step over there also to see the illustration of how those two things come together. So what did all of this mean in the context for why all of you are in the room today, we've just highlighted a series of challenges that we've looked at, whether you voice them in engagement, or whether it's something that we've uncovered through research. We know what some of the opportunities are to begin to look at, how do we create sustainable development, recognizing their market struggles to make that happen. How do we repopulate some of our neighborhoods to get support back into our businesses and get families into much needed affordable housing? And so our mission, specifically when it comes to housing neighborhoods in this process is to co create this land use strategy with all of us in the room and for people who are going to participate in later sessions to really begin to identify different goals and strategies that can start to tackle, how do we stabilize our neighborhoods? How do we make them more affordable and livable, to the residents who are there now and also the residents who may come in the future. And how do we make sure that we're enhancing our neighborhood qualities in everything that we do? There's so much to celebrate in the city. We want to just continue to elevate those things. And so what that means for today, you all are experts on your neighborhood. You're experts on your daily experiences, whether it's working for a nonprofit in the city, whether it's your lived experience living in one of Detroit's neighborhoods, you all are the experts, and so we need your help identifying what the future policies and goals should be that begin to support all of your visions and aspirations. And so we've got a handful of possibilities here today. A but we want to understand, are these the tools that plan Detroit needs to use in order to meet your needs? Are there other tools that we can consider? How might this work in one neighborhood versus another? Where should we be prioritizing things so that what we get started on with day one of plan Detroit is this, but we might wait a couple of years to do the next thing and then identifying what needs to happen for all of this to work well. So ultimately, when this process is complete, we are not just writing a bunch of words in a document. It's going to sit on a shelf somewhere, but we actually want to get strategies and actions that the city can use to move forward with all of these visions and ideas, and so this is where we're going to move into the discussion piece of this section. We've got about an hour and 10 minutes, so take as much time as you all need to work through the content on the table. You'll notice there's a series of possibility parts these guys, they might look a little bit like the note taking sheet that you used in school to help if you had an open book test, we understand there's a lot of information on these. You got a stack of them at your table, your facilitator will help walk you through these. These are just a starting point. These are just ideas for today. They're conversation starters. We have not written plan Detroit. I want to make that very clear. We have not written as planned. Through all of our research and all of our engagement, so far, we've come up with some potentials that are here to help us have the conversation today, that are tested and tried, approaches that have worked in other places. But if these are not things that support what your needs are for your neighborhood, you also have a series of blank cards on your table that you can use to help illustrate. Did we miss something? Are there pieces that we need to add in that aren't reflected on these cards? You do only have a few minutes to talk about each of these things, so it feels like a lot of information. There's also an overview sheet on your table for each of you that you can use to help read through some of that content as well. It matches. Thank you. Everything on card. Okay, so we've got two activities for this, the first part of it, the first 50 minutes. So we've got almost an hour to work through all of the possibility cards, have a discussion, let us know, are these things working? Would they work in your neighborhood? Do you have concerns about some of the approaches that are sitting on the table? And then again, share your own ideas if you think there's something missing from what's been put forward today. And then after that, we're going to get into an exercise, and we're going to vote on prioritization. So what are the things that we really love, and what do we think would work in some neighborhoods, but maybe not all of them? What are things that just wouldn't work in Detroit at all that we can set aside? And then what are the new ideas that you would like to add?

    So with that, I'm going to bring summer back to do a little bit of a pulse check with the room, and also to get us kicked off into this activity.

    Alright? Thank you. So I know there was a lot of information that was presented, and it might be here, is, everybody is a baseline today. We know we're talking about housing in neighborhoods. Is everybody knows a baseline. We got them. We thumbs up. Anybody comes like, I don't have a clue. I just okay. All right. Who feels they know I essentially master plan. Just what a master plan is. Gotta get some thumbs up. I see a couple of maybe who's still kind of like, give me a like, Ah, okay. So we feel okay, alright. So what we want to do now, we have a couple of tables that are not full, that we do want to consolidate and have a couple of people to join in with another table. And I know there's a couple of us there, may there should be a facilitator and every tape so I could have the facilitators, please raise their hand, just so I can see, okay, so we have one, so there's not a facilitator at this you all don't have a facilitator at your table. Okay, y'all don't have the facilitator at that table three. So we got three. Okay, so I know I see Daniel. There's a couple people, those people that don't have, okay. Thank you facilitators. Those that don't have the facilitator table, you can please raise your hand for me, please. Okay, so those three, yep, so we can send somebody over there, sir, if I could just have you move to this table here so that we because we actually don't have Yep, and if you actually Imma have you, you all move to the table right next to you. Yeah. Okay, let's see. So is any if there's anybody that's just imma go back to the church, like in the Usher, Anybody got a table a seat next to you? We got an open seat. All right, so we have no question. Okay, she's gonna move next to you. Victoria behind you. She can go to that table there. Okay, great. I think everyone should be we have two. Okay, so I think we're good. So where you are now, so there's nobody who's by themselves, don't date in the facility. Here, at that table here, yep, they need Yep, and we need two more facilitators on this side. And then Yep, you're gonna move. Okay, so, so this is what's gonna happen. Um, drink I'm gonna have, you know, one second. Um, this is what's gonna happen. I want to make sure that we have, we may have a couple of facilitators. If you're supporting, you can write some notes so drama. Have you go here with Sophia? This table right here, and you can just right here, behind for 211 No, yep, and just take some notes for Sophia, for please. Okay, so does everybody have their facilitator? Everybody's entertainment. Okay, cool. So I'm going to kind of keep us on track in terms of timing for us to be able to go through each one of the cards, as much as you know is possible. Again, these, as Bethany made reference to, these are possibility cards, right? So this, you these. This is a baseline based off of some information that has come in. But if there's something that you don't see on it that doesn't make sense, or you say, Hey, here's another idea, then please, you know, offer that up is content and information as well for us. Okay, so we want you to try and write on the cards, or, you know, write on your there's you can write notes. You have a long sheet here that has some notes that all of these notes will be set aside. They will be downloading. We will take this and take this into consideration with the report. So individually, please write notes on here. There's things are not reflected, even though you're talking as a unit. If you have something individually, please feel free to use the sheets. And then, to Bethany's point, there is a stack of information that you can have just as an FYI. But we really want you all to use this time to talk together. All right, so we're going to kick it off, and you're going to have about six minutes for each one of these conversations or so and keep you all on track. So we have our first card, then we're talking about more housing choices. What would need to be in place for this to work? This is for all of our questions. And then what are some solutions? So our goal is, is also trying to find solutions. We know that there are going to be some challenges and things we want to highlight those challenges. We also want to come with some solutions, maybe things you see in other neighborhoods, in your neighborhoods, use it as a baseline as you're having a conversation. Alright? So let's go ahead and we'll kick off this first card now. Thank you, space. Love the universal design. A lot of times people don't take it into consideration until they're down right, like so a lot of times we don't always a microphone. Is a good example. I use all the time. You know, some people say I don't need a microphone. I'm good. I'm a coach. I talk loud. We don't know people's hearing abilities, right? So we want to be mindful. It's the small things that make you but that is a major thing on universal design, for sure. So I know this. This table was over here with Aaron. Y'all were pretty lively and engaged. I saw y'all standing up a little turning conversation. Who would like to present just a feedback of an idea for an innovative solution or a solution that you think is imperative to implement? Hey, how are you?

    Hello. Room. My name is Hank, and I'm sitting at this lovely table. On the most part. We liked all of the ideas. Very curious to see how they bear out into actual regulations along the line and zoning, etc. Many of them we'd like to see right away. Too bad we have to wait. A couple of things in particular that we thought we put a question mark by that we weren't sure would be. Weren't sure how that would work. We saw something about green zones, ecological zones or something. We'd like to see energy efficiency available throughout the city, incentivized generally, not just in specific areas. Another thing that was mentioned for housing your transit routes was stations or centers, but data doesn't have too many transit centers. We'd rather see focus on intersection of routes and transit supportive density benchmarking to determine what would be the right amount of people to even support a bus route, because bus routes need a certain concentration of people to be successful. Had some discussion about the land bank. We and just support for more multi family housing.

    Thank you, Hank so we have one more table. I'm gonna get some feedback from um. Um, oh, she, oh, she, oh, okay, she's got all right. So you all just give us a give us one of your solutions.

    We Well, one that's different is holding developers accounted accountable for what they promised it could be. So how do you use this? I think the thing that came up is that oftentimes we give all these tax credits and things to different developers, and then they never build what they say, and then City Council allows them to have another project, and then they say, okay, you can finish it in four more years. And this woman here has been waiting like 15 years for what was promised for the 15 years before. So City Council has to actually think about the community, not just the developer. And then transitioning in place was a big piece. And also the idea was we had the project where you could have a like white picket fence program, where you could buy your next the lot next door to you. Some cases, now is the time for people that they can actually build on those lots. And maybe that's a way for them to transition in place, and the city won't allow them to build on those lots. So maybe, if there's a way to apply for that or something,

    oh, okay, she Oh, she gotta

    also promote housing after that, allow aging in place as like she was saying he was talking about the same thing. Yeah.

    Alright. So we really think we appreciate everyone's time. There's a couple of things I have just just wanted to see if y'all were listening. So we do have a gift card to see who is listening. I have a question, so I'm going to have to see who's hand. So when was the Okay, let me just put an exemption. If you're if you're a planner, you can't answer this question. If you want to Advisory Council, y'all ain't slick either. What year was the last master plan completed? Oh, your hand went up fast. You was only Chris. What you got? Come on, 2009 Yup, you listen to Rick. So I got your gift card out, and then the last question, Imma come up this way. Then the last question is or the next question. And the last question, what is the definition of a master plan? No, you mean it could be your interpretation. How do you interpret your interpretation of a master plan, I see a hand that's over here. Okay, I'm coming that way. What

    do you mean? Alright,

    Master Plan is like an overarching plan for the city that kind of aligns development and visions and goals to a good position.

    Listen, because I work with young people every day, that works, alright? No, no, seriously, that is a good interpretation. So thank you for your times. We have 220 $5 gift cards for y'all,

    okay? So just a couple of other just wrap up notes so we can make sure that we're timely, because I know we're a little bit over time for you all, okay, if you have comments, we'll be able to, you know, at the table as well as PDD. So we want to be mindful, because again, we're about 20 minutes over our table. Everybody

    should know this comment, you shouldn't be doing any development without asking the people who live right there. You shouldn't be changing zoning or anything of people who live right there without checking with them. And that's what you did in our neighborhood, and it's created a bunch of tension and a lack of trust.

    And so when you do that to people, it creates tremendous distrust. And I'm sure we want some certain things, but if you don't check with the people first, don't go right around the people, 10 blocks away and say that's what they want and ignore the people

    who live right there. Okay, thank you for your time. Clarify the difference

    between an actual

    master plan versus master

    plan, yep. So the question is, as it relates to master plan, so the question is, it really, because I want to again, we want to be mindful. There's a couple things I just want to recap. So her comment is, you know, versus developers coming in, speaking directly in the neighborhood that is impacting and not going 10 blocks out, but who was right there on their block, and there was concerns of transparency with government. So she expressed that there was another question, asking about the difference between in terms of master. Plan and the master plan policy. If you have a specific we will. We have Dara and Julie here that can address that question directly. Again, we are about 24 minutes over, so we do want to be mindful of our time. And so here's a couple of things. There are going to be future meetings that are taking place. So there's for each of these different categories that are coming up. And so for those that have signed up for other workshops today, we're talking about open space. We have conversation on Monday, I think it's my shoe right in front of me. Oh, here we go. Yep, arts and culture on Monday, mobility on Tuesday, in jobs and economy. So those sessions Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are after work, 530 to 730 and then the open space and environment is today, 130 to 330 and all of the meetings are here. So for those that are interested, that information in terms of registered is online, so if you wanted to be able to do that, so again, Darren and Judy have your purse on. You can ask questions on the way out. There is also a map board so we understand where everybody is coming from geographically. If you can just stop by that table to do that on the exit, as you all are exiting, that'll be awesome. And then also, don't forget, I see there is some comments and some post its and some thoughts, and we appreciate you all over here. But as it relates to the visioning statements and making sure that we're aligned on these, on this, this output from the community as well. So again, thank you all for your time. Sorry we went over a little bit, but hopefully you were able to gain and there will be staff here from planning and development to answer those questions. Thanks. Okay,

    alright. Thank you.