As Detroit shrinks, a team of consultants and city officials are faced with the daunting task of reforming a city that is largely full of holes.
Among the difficulties officials are facing, how to consolidate city services and residents,
"How to reconfigure roads, bus lines, police districts? How to encourage people - there is no power of eminent domain to force them - to move out of the worst neighborhoods and into better ones?"
In the meantime, Deputy Director of Planning, Marja M. Winters along with her cohorts have been assessing surrounding neiborhoods and meeting with community groups to hear their concerns.
"And so, a contingent of private consultants and city officials like Ms. Winters have taken part in one of the deepest mile-by-mile analyses of Detroit in memory, tracking population densities, foreclosed homes, disease, parks, roads, water lines, sewer lines, bus routes, publicly owned lands, and on and on.
Among the dismal findings: more than 100,000 parcels, private and public, are vacant; and only 38 percent of Detroiters work in the city."
Thanks to Jason Van Patten
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research