Mike Duggan can't claim sole credit for Detroit's amazing recovery | Opinion

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan gave a masterful presentation Tuesday evening that I heard as much as an opening speech in his run for governor as his final State of the City address.

Speaking at the new Hudson’s Detroit building, Duggan touted the city’s fiscal stability during his three terms, the city’s new investment-grade credit rating, thousands of new housing units built and even a slight rise in Detroit’s population after decades of decline.

A lot to celebrate, for sure. And Duggan can justly claim credit for much of it.

But what Duggan and many others miss is how deep the roots of Detroit’s recovery go. Key building blocks of Detroit’s comeback were in place at least a decade before Duggan took office in 2014. And before his time in office recedes into the history books, it’s worth taking another look at exactly how this amazing city came back from the dead.

Money from heaven

Certainly, the city’s fiscal stability during Duggan’s term owes much to Detroit’s spin through Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy in 2013-14. The Grand Bargain ― a financial agreement between philanthropy, the state and the Detroit Institute of Arts to secure the museum's collection and protect retirees' pensions in the bankruptcy process ― wiped some $7 billion of debt off the city’s books, giving Detroit what former federal Judge Gerald Rosen, who served as mediator in the case, called the cleanest balance sheet of any city in America. Twelve years of balanced city budgets under Duggan flowed from that settlement.

Then, too, the role of philanthropic foundations that pumped more than $300 million into the Grand Bargain followed years of an activist approach by philanthropy to help revive Detroit. The Kresge Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, Hudson’s Webber and other philanthropies, flush with legacy wealth from Detroit’s glory years, were already bankrolling the RiverWalk, the revival of Eastern Market, and a host of other social, artistic and neighborhood programs before Detroiters elected Duggan.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that philanthropic dollars, which I sometimes think of as money from heaven, has underwritten a vast amount of Detroit’s revival.

And speaking of the RiverWalk and Eastern Market, those were just two municipal operations languishing under direct city control that were handed off during Detroit’s woeful pre-bankruptcy years to non-profit conservancies and public authorities. A city government too broken and dysfunctional to create the RiverWalk or revive the market spun those off to a whole series of newly created non-profit entities, where they thrived.

Nor were they alone. Campus Martius Park, the city’s convention center ― now called Huntington Place ― the city’s workforce development agency, the DIA and Detroit Historical Museum ― all these and others were spun off from direct city control into non-profit stand-alone entities that took them in many cases from mediocre to newfound success. Ditto the many improvements to Belle Isle Park, once the island was handed off to the state’s Department of Natural Resources, during the bankruptcy, after years of neglect.

And more: The long-term transition in the city’s economy from one based entirely on giant auto-related corporations to a more entrepreneurial model with hundreds of new startups ― all started in the decade before the mayor took office.

And of course Dan Gilbert moved his mortgage business from the suburbs to downtown in 2010, and had already begun his unprecedented work of revitalizing downtown’s derelict buildings and filling them with his workers by the time Duggan was sworn in.

A mosaic, not a silver bullet

Don’t get me wrong ― I believe Duggan will rank among Detroit’s greatest mayors. He ran a tight fiscal ship, won back the confidence of both residents and business leaders, restored the city’s parks, nurtured a revival in many Detroit neighborhoods and used the leeway given him by the bankruptcy and Gilbert’s efforts to keep moving confidently forward.

You might even say his record sets him up as a credible candidate to be Michigan’s next governor, as he hopes to be. But he didn’t do it alone, nor did the revival start with him.

One day, historians write the full history of Detroit’s amazing urban recovery. They’ll give Duggan his full share of credit. But they’ll note the recovery was a mosaic, not a silver bullet. Duggan is one in a vast cast of players who believed in the city and worked to make it better.

John Gallagher was a reporter and columnist for the Free Press for 32 years prior to his retirement in 2019. His book, Rust Belt Reporter: A Memoir, was published last year by Wayne State University Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.

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