Edward
Senior Member
There's more going on outside his office window than in all of Detroit and he can say this? Idiot!
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/813861--olive-what-detroit-s-comeback-bid-means-to-toronto/
Olive: What Detroit’s comeback bid means to Toronto
DETROIT – The cure for regarding Detroit as a lost cause is to go and look at it. Still America’s 11th-largest city, this metaphor for failed cities everywhere is finally on the mend.
There are three stately boulevards here to our one (University Avenue). Principal streets like Woodward and Michigan Avenues that I once found dangerous are safe, their abandoned storefronts and other eyesores having been replaced by well-tended lawns. The previous no-go zone between a decaying financial district and the new steel and glass silos of the Renaissance Center has at last filled in.
Detroit still has more than its share of no-go districts. But the downtown, studded with Art Deco and modern-architectural treasures, can now boast a people-watching scene as busy as King and Bay Streets. The ethnic landscape is familiar to a Torontonian, with South Asian immigrants now a big part of the mix. The new Comerica Park and Ford Field are downtown, where sports venues belong.
The city has completed the destruction of abandoned storefronts and other eyesores on Woodward and Michigan Avenues, before embarking recently on a tear-down of the first few thousand of the 80,000 or so deserted houses in the inner city.
Toronto today is Canada’s principal city, a status it wrested from Montreal not that long ago. That’s lesson enough, one with think, about the need for vigilance in continually raising one’s game.
Yet Toronto has been on auto-pilot these past two decades, afflicted by the same complacency that began to jeopardize Detroit in the 1960s. Detroit was then America’s 5th-largest city and controlled more than 80 per cent of the U.S. auto market. There seemed no compelling reason then for Detroit to prepare for a 21st-century “knowledge economy.†One not geared to workers unskilled in engineering, product design and efficient manufacturing methods on which the old Detroit economy was based.
But in a recent report on older industrial cities for the Brookings Institution and the London School of Economics, researchers Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley describe a new spirit of rebirth in Detroit.
“The city is attracting social entrepreneurs who are excited by the challenge of fundamentally remaking a city,†the co-authors write. “Philanthropies are pouring in money and imagination – the rail system on the Woodward Corridor is partially funded by tens of millions of dollars from two major foundations, and other philanthropies are trying to develop a comprehensive educational plan.â€
There’s a saying that urban planners have for comeback towns: “The industry might leave, but the talent doesn’t.†Detroit is the oldest of the world’s mass-production vehicle-making centres. Detroit’s tycoon philanthropists left a legacy of world-class colleges and medical institutions, and an art gallery and symphony ranked among the nation’s best. And Detroit is still home to three Fortune 500 manufacturing enterprises. (Philadelphia has none.)
The obstacles to rebirth are plain enough. They include turf wars among city, suburban and county governments. Chronically high unemployment rates saw the median Detroit house price fall to just $6.000 (U.S.) by June 2009. A city now less than half its peak size of two million is encumbered with more schools than it can afford to maintain, and tens of thousands of abandoned or derelict inner-city houses.
The schools and neighbourhoods must be consolidated. But the effort brings cries of outrage from those losing a local school, no matter its state of disrepair. Some anti-poverty groups have denounced Mayor Dave Bing, a former all-star Detroit Piston, for committing “ethnic cleansing†by encouraging residents of desolate inner-city districts to relocate to more viable ones.
Yet the rebirth proceeds. Detroit is downsizing its municipal infrastructure to serve a smaller, post-manufacturing community. Business-development efforts are aimed at exploiting human capital in biomedicine, infotech, advanced healthcare management and R&D in fuel-efficient vehicles.
Detroit has a new “land bank†empowered to seize and destroy abandoned buildings. The plan is to use the freed-up land for innovative inner-city farms, recreation areas and industrial campuses.
Required to start over, Detroit is embracing change that Toronto still resists for lack of urgency. Like Turin, another reborn old-industry metropolis, Detroit has knocked down obstructions separating the city from its waterfront. Restoration of the Detroit River shoreline has been largely funded by business leaders and philanthropic foundations. Their absence in planning Toronto’s future remains conspicuous.
Urban rebirth will be one of the defining stories of this new century. The cities the world looks to and learns from will be those that reinvent themselves, as Detroit is attempting to do. And those that make the leap from good to great, as this lifelong Torontonian hopes we do. In that regard, I despair that Detroit is a more happening place than Toronto.
It makes me mad just to read the thing.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/813861--olive-what-detroit-s-comeback-bid-means-to-toronto/
Olive: What Detroit’s comeback bid means to Toronto
DETROIT – The cure for regarding Detroit as a lost cause is to go and look at it. Still America’s 11th-largest city, this metaphor for failed cities everywhere is finally on the mend.
There are three stately boulevards here to our one (University Avenue). Principal streets like Woodward and Michigan Avenues that I once found dangerous are safe, their abandoned storefronts and other eyesores having been replaced by well-tended lawns. The previous no-go zone between a decaying financial district and the new steel and glass silos of the Renaissance Center has at last filled in.
Detroit still has more than its share of no-go districts. But the downtown, studded with Art Deco and modern-architectural treasures, can now boast a people-watching scene as busy as King and Bay Streets. The ethnic landscape is familiar to a Torontonian, with South Asian immigrants now a big part of the mix. The new Comerica Park and Ford Field are downtown, where sports venues belong.
The city has completed the destruction of abandoned storefronts and other eyesores on Woodward and Michigan Avenues, before embarking recently on a tear-down of the first few thousand of the 80,000 or so deserted houses in the inner city.
Toronto today is Canada’s principal city, a status it wrested from Montreal not that long ago. That’s lesson enough, one with think, about the need for vigilance in continually raising one’s game.
Yet Toronto has been on auto-pilot these past two decades, afflicted by the same complacency that began to jeopardize Detroit in the 1960s. Detroit was then America’s 5th-largest city and controlled more than 80 per cent of the U.S. auto market. There seemed no compelling reason then for Detroit to prepare for a 21st-century “knowledge economy.†One not geared to workers unskilled in engineering, product design and efficient manufacturing methods on which the old Detroit economy was based.
But in a recent report on older industrial cities for the Brookings Institution and the London School of Economics, researchers Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley describe a new spirit of rebirth in Detroit.
“The city is attracting social entrepreneurs who are excited by the challenge of fundamentally remaking a city,†the co-authors write. “Philanthropies are pouring in money and imagination – the rail system on the Woodward Corridor is partially funded by tens of millions of dollars from two major foundations, and other philanthropies are trying to develop a comprehensive educational plan.â€
There’s a saying that urban planners have for comeback towns: “The industry might leave, but the talent doesn’t.†Detroit is the oldest of the world’s mass-production vehicle-making centres. Detroit’s tycoon philanthropists left a legacy of world-class colleges and medical institutions, and an art gallery and symphony ranked among the nation’s best. And Detroit is still home to three Fortune 500 manufacturing enterprises. (Philadelphia has none.)
The obstacles to rebirth are plain enough. They include turf wars among city, suburban and county governments. Chronically high unemployment rates saw the median Detroit house price fall to just $6.000 (U.S.) by June 2009. A city now less than half its peak size of two million is encumbered with more schools than it can afford to maintain, and tens of thousands of abandoned or derelict inner-city houses.
The schools and neighbourhoods must be consolidated. But the effort brings cries of outrage from those losing a local school, no matter its state of disrepair. Some anti-poverty groups have denounced Mayor Dave Bing, a former all-star Detroit Piston, for committing “ethnic cleansing†by encouraging residents of desolate inner-city districts to relocate to more viable ones.
Yet the rebirth proceeds. Detroit is downsizing its municipal infrastructure to serve a smaller, post-manufacturing community. Business-development efforts are aimed at exploiting human capital in biomedicine, infotech, advanced healthcare management and R&D in fuel-efficient vehicles.
Detroit has a new “land bank†empowered to seize and destroy abandoned buildings. The plan is to use the freed-up land for innovative inner-city farms, recreation areas and industrial campuses.
Required to start over, Detroit is embracing change that Toronto still resists for lack of urgency. Like Turin, another reborn old-industry metropolis, Detroit has knocked down obstructions separating the city from its waterfront. Restoration of the Detroit River shoreline has been largely funded by business leaders and philanthropic foundations. Their absence in planning Toronto’s future remains conspicuous.
Urban rebirth will be one of the defining stories of this new century. The cities the world looks to and learns from will be those that reinvent themselves, as Detroit is attempting to do. And those that make the leap from good to great, as this lifelong Torontonian hopes we do. In that regard, I despair that Detroit is a more happening place than Toronto.
It makes me mad just to read the thing.
