Situated almost exactly in between Boston and New York, Hartford, Connecticut, is a classic mid-sized legacy city with great potential for reinvention. In this episode of the Land Matters podcast, planning commissioner Sara Bronin talks about the cutting-edge urban planning practices she hopes will put the city back on the map, after decades of decline.
“In light of the city’s structural challenges in terms of how it gets taxes and how it relates to the state, we’ve really felt within the city we have to take matters into our own hands,” Bronin says. Among the revitalization initiatives: a complete overhaul of an outdated zoning code, which has smoothed the way for lower-cost redevelopment of abandoned factories and other historic buildings now accommodating makers spaces and craft breweries.
An architect and law professor, Bronin helped kick off the Lincoln Institute’s recent scenario planning workshop in Hartford, put on in partnership with the Capitol Region Council of Governments. The metropolitan region is starting to use scenario planning to project multiple futures for the area, in housing, economic development, and transportation.
With a population of about 125,000 – nearly 1 million including the communities all around it—Hartford is the state capital and the fourth largest city in the state. Once a center of innovation and commerce—inventions include firearms, typewriters, tools, sewing machines, bicycles, and even one of the nation’s first electric cars, plus the beginnings of the modern-day insurance industry – Hartford endured population and manufacturing loss, a decline in property tax revenue, crime and high unemployment dating back at least to the 1960s.
Adding to the challenges, a portion of Interstate 84 through downtown has reached the end of its lifespan, and needs to be rebuilt or reconfigured. Possible solutions include replacing sections with surface boulevards, lowering portions of the freeway, or building extensive tunnels for both vehicular traffic and high-speed rail.
That last proposal suggests a path to renewal through some big-picture thinking. Under the Rebooting New England initiative, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela route would go through Hartford between New York and Boston, placing the city at the center of a new Northeast megaregion – and instantly opening up housing and labor markets through faster connections among all the cities of southern New England. The proposal was inspired by the UK’s Northern Powerhouse effort linking older industrial cities north of London.
Zoning reform, scenario planning, major infrastructure investments, and megaregions are all in the mix, and get thorough consideration in this wide-ranging conversation.
Anthony Flint is senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Photograph: Sara Bronin speaks at the third annual Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, which took place in November in Hartford, Connecticut. Credit: Diego Lomelli Trejo.
The Unmalling of America
How Municipalities Are Navigating the Changing Retail Landscape
By Gregory Scruggs, Diciembre 16, 2019
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The struggling Bangor Mall is a national parable of changing retail habits. Built on a former dairy farm in Maine, the mall threw open its doors in October 1978, growing to serve up to two-thirds of the state’s population with a plum location off a main thoroughfare, Interstate 95, in the middle of the state. For decades, the mall contributed handsomely to the local tax base, to the tune of $1.2 million per year. In recent years, however, the cream-colored structure with blue trim that once anchored Maine’s third-largest city has gone through the same hard times affecting shopping malls across the country.
Over the past two decades, consumers nationwide have made significant shifts in their shopping habits, migrating to online retail and returning to traditional commercial corridors and shopping districts in economically strong metro areas. Meanwhile, Walmart has consolidated its position as the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, with a strong clientele of rural, exurban, and small-town customers. As a result, once-venerable retail brands like Sears and Toys ’R’ Us have faced bankruptcy.
This disruption has created a checkerboard of vacancies nationwide, including on the expansive 88 acres of the Bangor Mall, which is now anchored by Dick’s Sporting Goods and Furniture Mattresses & More. Other longtime retailers in the space, like department store JCPenney, have signed lease extensions, though the mall’s very future remains wobbly as out-of-state owners grapple with retail headwinds. In 2017, then-owner Simon Property Group of Indianapolis—which owns retail properties in 37 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, as well as in Europe and Asia—defaulted on an $80 million loan that had used the mall as collateral. The property was sold at auction to a New York-based investor trio in February 2019 for $12.6 million, less than half of its assessed value.
Those assessments have fallen precipitously in recent years due to the decrease in estimated net operating income and increase in vacancy, according to Bangor City Assessor Philip Drew. The mall has seen consecutive year-over-year reductions of roughly 25 percent, from $60.9 million in 2017 to $46.3 million in 2018 to $34.6 million in 2019. In both 2017 and 2018, years that saw the departures of flagship tenants Macy’s and Sears, respectively, the mall’s owner paid its taxes, but appealed for reductions in its assessment given the precarious situation at the property. Drew denied the requests, and his decisions have been appealed to the State of Maine Board of Property Tax Review.
In the meantime, the Bangor Mall’s tax bill has dropped below $1 million for the first time in two decades. Such an outcome may sound like a major hit to Bangor’s budget, but the blow turned out to be manageable, Drew says. The mall accounts for 1.31 percent of the city’s total taxable valuation. But the shifts at the mall aren’t the only changes afoot: overall, Bangor collected more property tax revenue this year than last. “The city’s taxable valuation growth has recently occurred in the downtown district, with a new bank campus owned by Bangor Savings Bank valued at $22 million and the remodel of downtown structures to satisfy the demand for downtown apartments,” Drew says.
In other words, while a mall on the edge of town sputters, Bangor’s downtown is thriving, and the loss of property and sales tax from one was compensated for by the other. It’s the result of a downtown revitalization plan Bangor started in the 1990s. It’s also part of a growing counternarrative to the dominant media story of the past decade, which predicted that the surge in online shopping would spell the end for brick-and-mortar retail, potentially damaging municipal fiscal health along the way.
As this shift plays out in communities large and small across the United States, the facts are more complicated than those media accounts would suggest—and the outlook is more optimistic than the headlines portend. By implementing proactive measures from investing in downtowns to rethinking the use of the valuable acreage occupied by malls, Bangor and other jurisdictions are demonstrating how to navigate the changing retail tides.
Why Retail Matters to Municipalities
That local governments fund their operations in large part on property taxes is no secret (see Figure 1). The revenue source accounts for 72 percent of the total local taxes collected in 2015. While the ratio of residential to commercial properties varies from community to community, as do the respective tax rates placed upon those properties, retail typically accounts for approximately one-quarter of all commercial property value. Whether retail is make or break for a municipal budget, however, varies widely.
“In some communities dependent on malls, they can make up 20 to 30 percent of their tax base and other taxpayers may have been paying relatively less,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Fellow Ron Rakow, former assessor for the City of Boston. Rakow has conducted research on the tax implications of the changing retail environment (Rakow 2018). “If the mall isn’t doing as well, the community is either going to have to reduce services or increase taxes for others.”
Onondoga County, which surrounds Syracuse, New York, is among those communities facing such tough choices. ShoppingTown Mall opened in 1954, placing it among the earliest U.S. shopping malls. A succession of major tenants, including Macy’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods, JCPenney, and Sears, has closed since 2015. The mall’s assessment has dropped precipitously as well, from $53 million in 2008 to $36 million in 2014. Meanwhile, the mall’s owner, Moonbeam LLC, has resisted paying its tax bill to Onondoga County. In June 2019, the company missed a deadline to pay $9.7 million in back taxes dating to 2015. The county is trying to foreclose on the mall in order to redevelop the site, but in August 2019 the company announced its intention to head to bankruptcy court to avoid losing the property.
It’s not just property taxes that are a factor, of course. “Retail is huge, not only from a property tax standpoint, but also [in terms of] sales tax,” says Marc Moffitt, senior research analyst at the Denton (Texas) Central Appraisal District and an adjunct faculty member at the University of North Texas. Sales and other non-property taxes account for about 12 percent of municipal tax revenue. So far, that revenue stream appears to be holding steady nationwide. In the Rockefeller Institute’s most recent state revenue report, covering the fourth quarter of 2017, sales tax collection increased 4.8 percent, doubling the typical quarterly average (Dadayan 2018). The combination of property and sales tax that retailers provide makes for a potent one-two punch. “There are Texas towns that are 80 percent residential, but the 20 percent that is commercial makes up the tax base,” Moffitt says.
Reinvesting in Downtowns
There are 8.5 billion square feet of retail space in the United States, which equates to 24.5 square feet of retail space per capita, or five times Europe’s average of 4.5 square feet per capita. Moffitt looks to the 13 regional malls sprawled across the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area where he lives as a classic example of the overbuilt mall environment. “How many regional malls can you have in one region?” he asks.
Local governments have seen the mall contraction coming. Most malls have been struggling to maintain close to full occupancy for at least a decade, sometimes up to two decades. “The general trends support the fact that increasing vacancy rates are likely for some regional malls,” Bangor assessor Drew says.
Moffitt predicts that such vacancies will increase 20 percent over the next five years. That makes the forthcoming decade a crucial transition period as consumers vote with their feet and their wallets, staking out a preference for denser, walkable urban environments over big-box stores and shopping malls. In 2019, a report from the George Washington University School of Business and Smart Growth America claimed that “walkable urban places,” which meet a certain threshold of real estate, walkability, and human interaction density, were gaining market share faster than their suburban counterparts in the country’s 30 largest metro areas (Loh 2019).
This trend includes both infill in central cities and the urban redevelopment of traditionally car-oriented outer areas. While booming metropolitan economies are driving this increasingly urban pattern in the built environment—New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, Boston, the San Francisco Bay area, and Seattle top the list—smaller communities are catching on.
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan, is seeing the fruits of decades of work to revitalize its downtown. The construction of two malls in the area in the early 1970s “essentially sapped the economic life out of the downtown,” according to Downtowns: Revitalizing the Centers of Small Urban Communities (Buriyidi 2001). The city began to explore strategies for bringing residents and shoppers back downtown as early as the 1980s, creating a retail-focused Business Improvement District in the 1990s, but the local shopping hub, Memorial Mall, remained a significant player in the financial mix. A decade ago, the city lost $1.3 million in annual tax revenue when Memorial Mall, which eventually closed in 2017, challenged its tax assessment.
The mall wasn’t the only commercial taxpayer to take issue with its bill; Walmart is now seeking tax reductions of $90,000 and $180,000 for 2017 and 2018. The effort by Walmart is one of many initiated by the retailer in municipalities across the country, and is part of an ongoing conflict between big-box retailers and municipalities regarding the fairness of property tax assessments. The tension has led to legal appeals in at least 21 states over the past 10 years, according to a survey of the International Association of Assessing Officers conducted by CityLab in 2018, and has led at least four states to consider legislation that would regulate assessments for big-box properties.
Despite these losses, Sheboygan has managed to maintain its existing city services without increasing residential property taxes. How? Parallel with Memorial Mall’s demise, Acuity Insurance has bet big on the 50,000-person beach town 60 miles north of Milwaukee. The mid-sized insurance company, founded in 1925 and active in 27 states, has made major investments in its corporate headquarters in Sheboygan, expanding the building and hiring hundreds of people. Although the headquarters itself is located outside of downtown, new downtown apartments have sprung up to house its growing staff, contributing to the ongoing revitalization effort there. Sheboygan is also investing in a downtown innovation district and launching a pop-up retail program that offers short-term leases to small business owners. As in Bangor, these downtown development efforts have helped Sheboygan absorb the loss of a mall that was once a major contributor to its tax base. This kind of rebound isn’t feasible everywhere, Rakow points out: “If a community’s economy and population is not growing and healthy, it will be difficult for [businesses] to thrive, whether in a mall or downtown.” But in Sheboygan, officials are demonstrating that there can be life after the mall.
“While in the past it was one of the higher valued properties, the loss of value affects the mindset more than the pocketbook,” says Sheboygan City Assessor Mike Grota.
Ripe for Redevelopment
Today’s malls, some say, are the wrong use for the right site. That is to say, they generally have good locations near major roadways and in some cases public transit, and the large parcel of land they occupy is already serviced with water, sewer, and electricity. “Malls as a property type are dead,” says Moffitt. “It is not if, it’s when they go under and are ready for redevelopment.”
“What malls are worth right now is their dirt. Their structures have little to no value,” Moffitt adds. “Investors view malls as mixed-use redevelopment opportunities better able to serve the community, and they are going to provide a much more robust sales and property tax base.”
Stories of successful mall transformations are emerging. “Mall properties may no longer be exclusively retail on a forward-going basis,” says Rakow. “To keep them economically viable and maintain the foot traffic that smaller retailers are so dependent on, other uses like museums, health clubs, and specialty food stores are coming into malls.”
Such a radical change from the mall as an exclusively retail environment may conflict with land use policy. Instead of serving as an obstacle to this transition, local government can seize the reins to help secure an economically vibrant future. “There is a whole new notion of communities working with mall owners if there are zoning or land use issues,” says Rakow.
Such is the case with University Place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 2016, it was among the college town’s top 10 taxpayers. The next year, it fell off that perch. “The square footage of the center represents a significant retail presence in our market,” Chapel Hill Economic Development Officer Dwight Bassett says. “We would like to see new investment create new value and become a top taxpayer again.” For over a decade since Washington, DC–based Madison Marquette purchased the faltering mall, Chapel Hill has accommodated changes to the site from a traditional internal mall to one more externally facing. Now the mall is home to a children’s museum, health club, and CrossFit studio. One large retail space was converted to Southern Season, a specialty food store that offers a wine- and beer-tasting bar, cooking classes, and a full-service restaurant.
“We allowed a new entrance on a major road, changed our sign ordinance and temporarily had our library located at the mall while we rebuilt our library,” Bassett says. “I think that being a partner and constantly asking how we can help facilitate moving the center to a different market destination has been a key piece of the role we have played to date.”
But not every mall transformation works out successfully. The Hickory Hollow Mall in the Antioch neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, lost the last of its two remaining department stores in 2011 and ultimately closed its doors. The mall’s owners repositioned the property with a new name—Global Mall at the Crossings—and added a new community center, a community college satellite campus, a library, and a recreation center. As a potential anchor, the mall also hosts a practice rink for Nashville’s NHL franchise. However, even after pumping in over $50 million, the mall continues to struggle. In November 2019, a plan to transform the mall into Nashville’s first “innovation district” collapsed when a local developer backed out of the deal. Many of Hickory Hollow’s storefronts continue to sit vacant. Without money coming in, the structure has fallen into disrepair.
Another path for malls is linked to the success of e-commerce: their location has proven appealing to Amazon for its distribution centers. While communities were initially eager to offer tax breaks to the online retail giant—especially in the course of its search for a second headquarters—that has begun to shift, according to Rakow. “Communities have caught on to Amazon,” says Rakow. “Since Amazon really needs to have these distribution centers strategically placed, communities aren’t so quick to give tax incentives and breaks to host those facilities. Amazon should be paying its fair share just like any brick and mortar store. The notion of giving incentives doesn’t seem like it’s a wise fiscal practice.”
Moffitt argues there are catalyzing moments when a small investment by the public sector, such as forgoing some property tax revenue, can pay a huge dividend. He points to Colin Creek Mall in Plano, Texas. A developer bought the dying mall, valued at just $10 million, with the benefit of a local property tax incentive and will recast the site with $1 billion in commercial development. “They are going to have 15 to 20 restaurants that spin off a ton of sales and liquor tax,” Moffitt says. “It’s a total game changer when it comes to the tax base.”
Cultivating Offline Commerce
Four in every five U.S. consumers makes online purchases (Pew 2016), and nearly 40 percent of those online shoppers buy something on Amazon at least once a month (Marist 2018). That tendency impacts the built environment, but perhaps not as severely as often thought. “The internet shopping trend has magnified what I believe is a market oversaturation with retail space,” Moffitt says. In other words, a trend that was already underway has been exacerbated. Moffitt breaks it down to simple supply and demand. “In a given 10-mile radius, there are only so many discretionary dollars available to spend,” he says. “Those dollars either go to brick and mortar or go online. If some of those are going online out of convenience, what’s going to happen is those online sales are going to cannibalize a local brick and mortar store [selling the same types of products].”
But Moffitt says retail is far from dead. He points out that U.S. retail real estate currently sits at over 95 percent occupancy, which is even higher than at the 2007 peak before the Great Recession. New retail space continues to be built out and leased. And the future eaters and drinkers at Colin Creek Mall represent another truism about the changing retail landscape, per Moffitt: “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t buy on Amazon.” Bars, restaurants, hair salons, barbershops, gyms, pet daycare, and yoga studios are all types of retail businesses based on experiences or consumption rather than on goods. They are much better positioned to thrive in the new retail era.
For example, London School of Economics professor Lindsay Relihan has studied early adopters of online grocery platforms. In the first two years since switching to some measure of online grocery shopping, those consumers reduce their spending at grocery stores by 4.5 percent but increase their spending at coffee shops by 7.6 percent (Relihan 2017). “Policies that support a transition to service-oriented retail, and the density and accessibility of that retail, are likely to be key to local retail health,” she says. “Transitions are very disruptive in the short run, but I don’t see any reason why fiscal health should necessarily decline in the long run.” Such service-oriented businesses, which rely heavily on foot traffic, tend to be located on main streets and traditional commercial corridors.
Those locations are now “the most desirable from a retail real estate perspective,” Rakow says. “They command fairly high rents and have lower vacancy.” This trend bodes well for urban locations and less so for postwar suburban areas that lack the dense fabric of a main street or commercial corridor.
At the end of the day, Amazon and the acceleration of e-commerce still account for only about 10 to 11 percent of retail sales (USDC 2019). CBRE expects that market share to grow to just over 15 percent by 2022 (CBRE 2019). Meanwhile, Walmart’s big-box stores on the urban fringe continue to thrive, even as cities reinvest in their downtowns. As customer proclivities and technologies evolve, few can predict what the retail landscape might look like 10 or 20 years from now. But one thing is certain, as municipal leaders in Bangor, Sheboygan, Chapel Hill, and many other communities are discovering: Keeping up with changing retail habits and their impact on fiscal health requires flexibility, creativity, and foresight.
Gregory Scruggs is a journalist who writes about built and natural environments. A member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, he is based in Seattle.
Photographs in order of appearance:
Aerial view of the Bangor Mall in Bangor, Maine. Credit: Ten-X Commercial.
Some experiences simply cannot be replicated online. Communities are counting on that fact to help coffee shops and other local businesses stay afloat. Credit: Brewbooks/Flickr CC BY 2.0.
Loh, Tracey Hadden, Christopher Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz. 2019. “Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros.” Washington, DC: Washington University School of Business and Smart Growth America (June). https://smartgrowthamerica.org/resources/foot-traffic-ahead-2019/.
Rakow, Ron. Forthcoming. “The Impact of an Evolving Real Estate Environment on Property Tax Revenue.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Relihan, Lindsay. 2017. “Is Online Retail Killing Coffee Shops? Estimating the Winners and Losers of Online Retail Using Customer Transaction Microdata.” Working paper. Philadelphia, PA: Wharton School. https://www.lindsayrelihan.com/research/.
Un experimento sobre el redesarrollo comunitario echa raíces en una universidad cerrada de Detroit
Por Anna Clark, Noviembre 21, 2019
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Una mañana nublada de domingo, en el noroeste de Detroit, el campus de Marygrove College estaba atestado. Una multitud de adultos y niños con camisas color azul brillante llenó los parques verdes, rodeada de carpas y globos. Pronto estuvieron listos para la ceremonia de apertura de la caminata por el cáncer Relay for Life (Relevos por la Vida). Un DJ pasaba música animada a todo volumen para mantener altos los niveles de energía. En otra parte, en uno de los edificios de estilo gótico inglés de Marygrove, la Cumbre de Vecindarios de Detroit ofrecía almuerzo gratis y guardería a los residentes que se habían reunido para hablar sobre ejecuciones de hipotecas, contaminación del aire, cierre de escuelas y deterioro. En otro salón, los profesores se preparaban para un taller sobre la dignidad de los estudiantes; en la galería de arte, una exhibición de artistas locales abrió por última vez. Afuera, los guardacoches bromeaban entre ellos y con los conductores que avanzaban de a centímetros en una fila larga, con la esperanza de encontrar un lugar en los estacionamientos atestados. Era difícil imaginar que, dos días antes, la facultad de 104 años había anunciado que cerraba las puertas para siempre.
El cierre de Marygrove College marca el fin de una era para la institución, pero no será el fin del impacto de Marygrove. Marygrove ocupa 21 hectáreas verdes en medio de un vecindario de Detroit que está en vías de revitalización, y es el marco para una historia en desarrollo que trata sobre educación, pero también sobre el rol fundamental que pueden tener las asociaciones públicas y privadas para contener el sangrado lento de la falta de inversión. Lo están haciendo mediante la creación de estructuras nuevas para suplir necesidades de uso territorial a largo plazo. Un programa “de cuna a profesión” centrado en la comunidad cobra forma en el campus de Marygrove, un experimento respaldado por entidades influyentes, como la Fundación Kresge, la Universidad de Michigan, el Distrito Comunitario de Escuelas Públicas de Detroit y otras.
Los miembros de la incipiente asociación de Marygrove no aseguran tener todas las respuestas, pero su emprendimiento tendrá mucho para enseñar a otras comunidades.
Un legado de educación progresista
Marygrove tiene un lugar especial en la historia de Detroit. Fue fundada en 1905 por una orden religiosa llamada Hermanas Siervas del Inmaculado Corazón de María (o las monjas del ICM), y en 1927 se mudó de la ubicación original, 64 kilómetros al sur, a la actual en la ciudad. Pronto se convirtió en un centro de educación progresista que priorizaba el servicio y la justicia social, y recibía a muchos estudiantes de grado no tradicionales. Educó a generaciones de líderes, en especial mujeres afroamericanas, con enfoque en las áreas de la enseñanza y el trabajo social.
“Me encantaba enseñar en Marygrove”, dijo Frank Rashid, profesor de muchísimos años y ex decano. Destacó que Marygrove, comparada con otras universidades locales, era “la más atenta a pertenecer a la ciudad”: miraba hacia la comunidad mientras las demás construían muros.
Rashid recordó a una de sus estudiantes preferidas, una mujer de su edad que trabajaba en el turno noche cosiendo tapizado de autos en GM, pero que lograba tener la energía suficiente para prestar atención en clase. Desde hace más de 30 años, Rashid guarda el recuerdo de un ensayo que ella escribió sobre crecer en escuelas segregadas en Misisipi. La mujer se graduó con doble especialización, obtuvo una maestría en otra universidad local y volvió a Marygrove para enseñar mientras criaba a sus nietos.
“Queríamos hacer una diferencia”, dijo Rashid. “Esa es la llamada que sentíamos quienes amábamos trabajar ahí, y los estudiantes hacían que valiera la pena”. Para el vecindario, que está a unos 16 kilómetros del centro, Marygrove cumplió otra función importante: junto con su vecina, la Universidad de Detroit Mercy (UDM), respaldó a la comunidad, incluso cuando la ciudad soportó décadas de declive. Esta zona de 500 hectáreas se suele llamar Livernois-McNichols, en referencia a dos grandes arterias flanqueadas por comercios bajos. Lleva las cicatrices de terrenos baldíos y casas vacías, de los cuales 400 hoy son de propiedad pública. Pero todavía hay 33.000 personas que viven allí, principalmente en viviendas unifamiliares, y la tasa de propiedad (66 por ciento) y la mediana de ingresos (US$ 43.849) son relativamente altas. En los últimos años, se renovó el parque Ella Fitzgerald, de 10 hectáreas, llegaron nuevas tiendas minoristas para llenar las vidrieras vacías y se programó un festival en Livernois, que se solía conocer como la “Avenida de la Moda” (Ciudad de Detroit 2018).
En los 90, cuando Marygrove empezó a sufrir una disminución en las inscripciones y una deuda sofocante, los vecinos y otros interesados empezaron a preguntarse: ¿la precariedad podría hacer cerrar el campus? Los habitantes de Detroit saben muy bien que el vaciamiento es contagioso. Se propaga como una enfermedad, primero crea un vecindario como punto de inflexión, con más y más puertas vacías, y luego se convierte en una plaga a toda máquina. Saben que perder una institución importante es una amenaza grave para los residentes y los comercios.
Pero lo que ocurrió con Marygrove no ocurrió en ningún otro lugar.
Invertir en un nuevo modelo
En 2018, la Fundación Kresge, que tiene una presencia activa en Detroit y se centra en desarrollos equitativos, anunció que asignaría US$ 50 millones a un programa en el campus de Marygrove, una intervención inédita en uso territorial y educación. Es la inversión más grande que haya hecho la fundación en un solo proyecto para revitalizar un vecindario, y uno de los regalos más grandes de su historia.
Con el dinero se construirá una escuela “de la cuna a la profesión”, o lo que a veces se llama P–20 (es decir, desde preescolar hasta la educación de posgrado). Es una de las primeras de este tipo en el país. En el campus de Marygrove, pronto habrá un centro para la primera infancia, desarrollado con el apoyo del Illinois Facilities Fund (IFF), una institución financiera con base en el centro oeste para el desarrollo comunitario, y dirigido por Starfish Family Services, una organización local sin fines de lucro de servicios humanos (ver nota de recuadro en página 18). También hay una nueva escuela en el vecindario, que pertenece al distrito escolar público local. En las escuelas funcionará una nueva facultad de profesores dirigida por la Escuela de Educación de la Universidad de Michigan, que capacitará a educadores del mismo modo en que los programas de residencia entrenan a los médicos en los hospitales. Luego de graduarse, los flamantes nuevos educadores trabajarán junto con profesores veteranos en las escuelas de Detroit por tres años o más. Además de ofrecer experiencia y orientación práctica, este programa ayudará al distrito de Detroit a tratar la escasez de profesores.
A medida que se desarrollan los servicios integrales en el campus de Marygrove, se espera que se involucren otras facultades de la Universidad de Michigan (UM), como las escuelas de ingeniería, de negocios, de planificación urbana, de trabajo social, de enfermería y de odontología. El campus también ofrecerá cursos de desarrollo profesional y programas con certificación.
Para complementar el profesorado, Marygrove College pretendía ofrecer la otra punta de la educación “de la cuna a la profesión”. Pero en 2017, mientras todavía formulaban la colaboración, la facultad anunció que cerraría su programa de grado. Los administradores esperaban que la escuela de posgrado subsistiera y atendiera a la ciudad y a los estudiantes del P–20, pero este verano llegó con la noticia de que esta también cerraría a fines de 2019. Si bien todavía no se resolvió el interrogante de quién ofrecerá la programación posterior a la secundaria (un representante de la Fundación Kresge dice que la asociación está “explorando oportunidades con varios socios que dieron un paso al frente”), hay algo que es seguro: a pesar de haber perdido la querida institución, no habrá un solo día en que el campus esté vacío, meta de los notables y minuciosos luchadores de la ciudad.
La colaboración en Marygrove es un ataque preventivo contra el vaciamiento a gran escala. También aprovecha la residencia local como un activo. La gente que vive en la zona Livernois-McNichols será la más beneficiada en esta nueva oportunidad e inversión educativas, lo cual invierte la lógica del aburguesamiento. La escuela K–12 (jardín de infantes, primaria y secundaria) tendrá un proceso de selección, como las escuelas con solicitud que están entre las mejores de la ciudad, y los estudiantes que vivan de uno a tres kilómetros de la zona de influencia del vecindario tendrán una ventaja importante. El resultado: los adolescentes de la comunidad conforman más del 60 por ciento de la clase inaugural de 120 alumnos que ingresó en otoño a la Escuela de Marygrove (nombre oficial: The School at Marygrove). El 97 por ciento de la clase es de Detroit, y cerca de la mitad vuelven a las escuelas públicas de Detroit de los distritos suburbanos y las escuelas autónomas. Si la escuela (que se centrará en justicia social, ingeniería y diseño) se llena para 2029, se espera que tenga unos 1.000 alumnos.
“Incluso en medio de las dificultades económicas, Marygrove sabía que quería conservar su legado en Detroit, y es un legado extraordinario”, dijo Wendy Lewis Jackson, directora ejecutiva del programa en Detroit de la Fundación Kresge. “Es por eso que queríamos tener un compromiso profundo con la creación de un camino para el liderazgo educativo en Detroit, en especial para atender a poblaciones desatendidas”.
La inversión de Kresge incluye renovaciones en el edificio de Humanidades de la facultad, que alberga la nueva secundaria, y en el antiguo edificio de la Academia Bates, futura sede de la nueva escuela K–8. Antes, esta última estructura era la Secundaria Immaculata, una escuela de niñas dirigida por las monjas del ICM entre 1941 y 1983. La Academia Bates, una escuela pública, la ocupó durante 15 años y luego se mudó a otra instalación de Detroit, hace algunos años. Kresge también financia la construcción de un nuevo centro educativo para la primera infancia, cuya inauguración se prevé para el otoño de 2021. El Centro de Diseño Colaborativo de Detroit, de la UDM, es uno de los socios responsables de que este proyecto sea posible.
“Realmente intentamos colocar a la educación en el centro del redesarrollo del vecindario”, dijo Jackson, “y usamos las escuelas del vecindario para retener a los residentes, y también atenderlos, y para atraer a residentes nuevos”.
Según sugiere Jackson, este acuerdo trata sobre mucho más que educación. Mike Duggan, alcalde de Detroit, hizo la misma asociación cuando se anunció el proyecto. “Hace no mucho, nos enfrentábamos a la posibilidad de que este campus increíble se apagara, lo cual habría sido un revés terrible para la revitalización que se ejecuta en esta zona de nuestra ciudad”, dijo. “Hoy, en cambio, celebramos un nuevo comienzo”.
Evitar una desgracia comunitaria
Antes de la inversión de US$ 50 millones, la Fundación Kresge había otorgado US$ 16 millones en subvenciones a Marygrove College en los dos años anteriores para respaldar la reestructuración de la universidad, que estaba sumergida en deudas. La posibilidad de que la universidad cerrara y se convirtiera en una carga, más que un beneficio para el vecindario “se consideró inaceptable”, indicó un comunicado de prensa de la Fundación (Kresge 2018). “Los daños para el valor de las viviendas circundantes, los pequeños comercios y otros referentes del distrito habrían sido calamitosos”. Otras fundaciones también otorgaron financiaciones puente, como la Fundación McGregor, la Fundación Comunitaria para el Sudeste de Michigan y la Fundación W. K. Kellogg.
Estos primeros socios crearon Marygrove Conservancy en 2018, para ayudar a mantener el orden de la contabilidad, y adoptaron un modelo de gestión que se usa desde hace mucho tiempo para llevar parques privados al uso público. Ese paso separó la gestión de la universidad de la del campus físico. Jackson, de Kresge, destaca que, si bien se consideró que este cambio era necesario para asegurar el futuro del campus, no todos estuvieron de acuerdo con que la creación de Marygrove Conservancy fuera favorable. “La idea de la protectora era muy ajena para [los organismos evaluadores de la universidad]”, dijo. “Entonces, la universidad se enfrentaba a sanciones graves porque los organismos evaluadores no comprendían algunas de las implicaciones en el uso del suelo al tener este tipo de respaldos”.
La protectora, cuya junta incluye representantes de Marygrove, Kresge, UDM y organizaciones comunitarias, hoy posee la titularidad de los edificios y el terreno. “Nuestra visión es administrar el campus”, dijo la Hermana Mary Jane Herb, presidenta de las monjas del ICM y de la protectora. Una empresa administradora privada está llevando a cabo una evaluación para crear una auditoría de renovaciones necesarias. La protectora también está pensando en alquileres a corto plazo, y “en cómo se podría usar el campus para diversos eventos, como conferencias o bodas”, que generarían ingresos para reducir la deuda y financiar el mantenimiento de las estructuras históricas, dijo Herb. No tiene empleados, pero planea contratar personas en el futuro próximo.
Una colaboración tan rápida y a largo plazo parece poco probable, pero hace eco de la historia reciente de Detroit: en concreto, la respuesta inesperada cuando la ciudad se declaró en bancarrota en 2013.
“En realidad, la bancarrota fue un evento provocador”, dijo Robin Hacke, directora ejecutiva y cofundadora del Centro de Inversión Comunitaria del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, que ayuda a las comunidades con falta de inversión a identificar nuevas oportunidades de crecimiento sostenible e ir tras ellas. Las propias labores de Hacke para construir nuevos canales de capital la llevaron a Detroit en 2010. Tres años más tarde, la ciudad presentó la bancarrota municipal más grande de la historia.
La bancarrota se resolvió con la ayuda de una “Gran Ganga”, en la cual una gran parte de filántropos y el Estado de Michigan aportaron más de US$ 800 millones para satisfacer a los acreedores y minimizar los recortes en pensiones, además de evitar que el distintivo museo de arte de la ciudad tuviera que subastar cuadros, solución que se había considerado. A pesar de los males tan documentados, la ciudad tenía activos; literalmente. “Creo que debido a su historia económica, Detroit tenía fundaciones muy bien dotadas que querían mucho a la ciudad”, dijo Hacke. “No todas las ciudades tienen la ventaja de disfrutar el hecho de que Kresge esté en la zona. La [Fundación] Ford, que en general no es un inversionista localizado, sí lo es en Detroit”.
Cuando Detroit salió de la bancarrota, a fines de 2014, se liberó de miles de millones en deuda y tenía más recursos para reinvertir en la ciudad. “Lo que a veces vemos en nuestro trabajo es que las cosas están tan mal que la urgencia de unirse supera a la quietud de lo mismo de siempre”, dijo Hacke. “Estas crisis . . . pueden funcionar como un evento catalítico para que podamos imaginar un futuro mejor”.
Apuntar a la equidad
Livernois-McNichols es uno de los vecindarios en los cuales se centra Kresge. La fundación asignó entre tres y cinco años de inversiones en la zona, para apoyar otras labores como la Alianza Live6, una organización sin fines de lucro de planificación y desarrollo que cataliza los corredores comerciales en Livernois Avenue y McNichols Road. Por su parte, el consorcio nacional Reimagining the Civic Commons está trabajando con socios locales para construir un sendero verde que conecte los campus de UDM y Marygrove. En la junta de Marygrove Conservancy hay representantes de Live6 y de UDM. El alcalde Duggan también incluyó a Livernois-McNichols en su Iniciativa Estratégica de Vecindarios, lanzada en 2018. Entre otros proyectos, la ciudad invierte en ella con Fitzgerald Forward, un programa diseñado para reformar y vender viviendas desocupadas.
Todo este trabajo se habría debilitado si se hubiera abandonado una institución referente. Como indica Jackson, el tamaño del campus de Marygrove es más grande que la antigua planta Packard, una de las ruinas más infames de Detroit. Packard dejó de hacer automóviles en el complejo de 16 hectáreas de ladrillo y concreto en 1958, y lo dejó alzarse imponente sobre East Grand Boulevard, a unos 16 kilómetros al sudeste de Marygrove. Está desocupado desde que los últimos grandes usuarios industriales (y los fiesteros) la abandonaron a fines de los 90. La planta desmoronada supo estar rodeada de viviendas, pero hoy la mayoría de ellas desapareció y dejó lotes vacíos. Cerca de allí hay una escuela primaria desocupada, y quienes frecuentan la zona son los turistas de “ruin porn” (“porno de ruinas”). La colaboración de Marygrove está invirtiendo para evitar este tipo de futuro.
Para evaluar el éxito del experimento de Marygrove, Kresge observará la capacidad de la escuela para ayudar a los estudiantes a triunfar. Analizará si la escuela puede reclutar y retener profesores de alta calidad, y hará un seguimiento de métricas holísticas sobre el bienestar de los estudiantes y sus familias. Este último enfoque se tomó prestado del modelo integral de las escuelas comunitarias. Según las personas involucradas, la visión dominante es romper el círculo de la falta de inversión mediante la creación de una nueva institución centrada en la comunidad en el terreno de una institución histórica.
“Solo vale la pena hacerlo si genera una mejor vida para las personas que ya están aquí”, dijo Aaron Seybert, directivo de inversión social en Kresge. Él y Jackson son los dos representantes de Kresge en la junta de Marygrove Conservancy. “Si no estamos creando una cohesión económica, no sé cuál es el punto. Hay lugares que funcionan bien para personas de ingresos más altos. Ya están entre nosotros. No estamos intentando convertir a Detroit en eso. Eso no es lo que intentamos hacer”.
Hoy es común escuchar la frase “Dos Detroits”, que insinúa que los recién llegados y quienes viajan por trabajo (en general, personas más blancas, más jóvenes y más educadas) son valorados de un modo distinto que los residentes de más años. “Al caminar por Detroit en 2010, la idea de tener que preocuparse por el aburguesamiento causaba gracia”, dijo Hacke. Pero eso cambió, al menos en el centro y en Midtown, y ocurrió más rápido de lo que la mayoría pronosticó. De hecho, fue tan rápido, que los residentes empezaron a preocuparse sobre cómo se compara la inversión en el centro de la ciudad con la de los vecindarios, donde los residentes han resistido las peores adversidades de Detroit.
Seybert dice que los inversores se sienten atraídos por el centro debido, en parte, a la escala. “En los vecindarios las cosas son muy, muy difíciles”, dijo. “En el centro y en Midtown, hay edificios más grandes: grandes sistemas de hospitales, universidades, densidad relativa para las proporciones de Detroit. Y se puede desplegar capital a una escala que atenúa muchos de los costos que implican estos tipos de trabajo”.
El noroeste de Detroit contaba con UDM y Marygrove College, pero ni esas dos instituciones juntas podían equipararse a la amplitud institucional de la Universidad Estatal de Wayne, de Midtown, que posee 13 facultades y universidades con 27.000 estudiantes. El acceso al empleo no es el principal atractivo en Livernois-McNichols, como lo es en el núcleo de la ciudad. También hay menos densidad, y la mayor actividad se encuentra en las franjas minoristas de una planta que, según indica Seybert, requieren muchos acuerdos pequeños para obtener el mismo valor agregado en aumento de inversión en el vecindario y de valores de avalúo. Y hay menos herramientas de inversión para hacerlo: un vacío que explica el valor de la filantropía en el vecindario.
Rehabilitar instalaciones viejas y conceptos viejos
La labor de Marygrove verá otra gran victoria con un nuevo centro para la primera infancia de US$ 15 millones y 2.600 metros cuadrados. Es una inversión importante en una ciudad cuyo statu quo son instalaciones decrépitas para la atención a la infancia, que suelen consistir en sótanos de viejas iglesias. Ja’Net Defell, ex líder de desarrollo del IFF y antigua participante del programa Fulcrum Fellowship, en el Centro de Inversión Comunitaria del Instituto Lincoln, recuerda haber visitado algunos de estos lugares cuando trabajaba en la oficina del IFF de Detroit. “Nos teníamos que poner máscaras, literalmente [por el moho y las filtraciones]”, dijo.
“Mejorar las instalaciones de este modo es como lavar la ropa o los platos: nadie quiere hacerse cargo”, agregó, destacando que las reparaciones y la renovación pueden ser “abrumadoramente técnicas”. Se pregunta a los programas: “¿Por qué no sacan un préstamo del banco?”, lo cual ignora lo atrofiados que están los préstamos en ciudades y vecindarios con falta de inversión. Según Defell, en Detroit, el IFF tuvo problemas incluso para encontrar arquitectos y contratistas para sus proyectos. Digamos que trabajar con centros para la primera infancia no era tan atractivo como involucrarse en el creciente mercado de las escuelas autónomas.
El nuevo centro Marygrove, que atenderá a 144 niños, tendrá 12 salones de clase, una biblioteca y salas para terapia de la salud, y el diseño incluirá luz natural, patios y un parque lúdico natural construido alrededor de robles ya existentes. Es el resultado de años de trabajo, un proceso que incluyó una evaluación de necesidad de instalaciones de preescolar en toda la ciudad y la exploración de modelos de financiación que fueran sostenibles en un vecindario con niveles de ingreso mixtos.
Se espera que el centro de aprendizaje temprano motive a los miembros de la comunidad. Según Defell, lamentablemente, los programas de ingresos bajos suelen tratarse como tales, lo cual significa que “no hay innovación, no hay emoción. Lo que intentamos hacer [en Marygrove] es ir un poco más allá. Que el edificio [nuevo] atienda a familias de ingresos bajos no significa que deba ser un ‘proyecto de ingresos bajos’”. Hace una comparación con una buena práctica con viviendas asequibles: “si desarrollas viviendas asequibles que parecen viviendas asequibles, no hiciste un buen trabajo en el proyecto de desarrollo”.
Invertir en una instalación de alta calidad tiene una importancia especial para familias que podrían ser transitorias, que no viven en las mejores condiciones o que luchan contra ejecuciones hipotecarias y propietarios deshonestos. “Detroit estaba sumida en la depresión, y estamos sacando a las personas de la depresión”, dijo Defell. “Sí, fue un período horrible, pero hoy es un nuevo día. Es hora de salir de la modalidad depresiva y energizarnos mucho con una nueva forma de pensar”.
Si bien la pobreza sigue siendo el mayor desafío de Detroit, los cambios de la última década resaltan la importancia de ser “mucho más conscientes de planificar para el éxito”, dijo Hacke. Es decir que es importante establecer procesos y políticas al principio, que crearán estructuras equitativas para cuando las cosas vayan bien, y no solo si van bien.
En ese sentido, la asociación de P–20 podría ampliar aun más el alcance. En el lanzamiento, Rip Rapson, presidente y CEO de Kresge, presentó la idea de que algún día se podrían usar otros edificios del campus como viviendas asequibles o para alumnos del último año (Rapson 2018).
Lecciones de Marygrove
Detroit no es el único lugar donde las instituciones referentes se hallaron pendiendo de un hilo. En otras antiguas ciudades industriales que sufrieron pérdida de población, algunos lugares parecidos a Marygrove están atrapados en la rueda de la falta de inversiones en la ciudad. Si cierran, la exacerban.
Si bien la orgullosa universidad de Detroit no perduró, la readaptación revela una forma de salir del círculo vicioso. La reinvención de Marygrove es un microcosmos de las posibilidades descritas por Alan Mallach y Lavea Brachman en el informe del Instituto Lincoln Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities (Regenerar las antiguas ciudades industriales de Estados Unidos, Mallach 2013):
Si desean regenerarse, las ciudades deben capitalizar sus activos para aumentar las ventajas competitivas y construir nuevos motores económicos . . . . Para que la regeneración triunfe . . . debe ser multifacética e incluir mejoras en los entornos físicos de las ciudades, sus bases económicas y las condiciones sociales y económicas de sus residentes. Si aumenta la demanda de mercado y las personas restauran edificios desocupados o construyen nuevas viviendas en terrenos abandonados, mejorará el entorno físico de la ciudad. Si las habilidades de los residentes aumentan para que puedan competir y obtener empleos en toda la región, mejorarán sus condiciones económicas.
Hacke es optimista respecto del triunfo del proyecto en Marygrove, porque reconoce qué hace falta para que la gente prospere en un lugar y sea saludable: tener una vivienda asequible, una buena escuela y un buen empleo. “En el modo en que fue diseñada, Marygrove no solo elimina una partecita del problema. También observa varias necesidades diferentes e hila una solución”, dijo. Si el modelo de entrenamiento de profesores triunfa, “tendrá repercusiones muy amplias para la educación”.
Si bien la intervención de Marygrove está hecha a medida para el noroeste de Detroit, Hacke destaca que “en el país, hay una cantidad considerable de campus como el de Marygrove”.
Las escuelas católicas presentan un riesgo particular, según Rashid, ex profesor de Marygrove. Esto se debe a muchos motivos, y uno, que no es menor, es el éxodo de católicos blancos de clase media de los centros urbanos, lo cual aportó al cierre de parroquias y “escuelas proveedoras” católicas K–12. Además, a medida que decayeron las vocaciones religiosas, las instituciones de educación superior que durante mucho tiempo dependieron de las monjas y los curas como empleados de los campus debieron contratar más seglares con sueldo de mercado.
Pero no solo las universidades urbanas presentan desafíos como instituciones referentes; Hacke indica que el cierre de los hospitales rurales crea un vacío similar de actividad económica y uso del suelo. Al igual que un negativo de una foto, estos cierres exponen la relación simbiótica entre las instituciones referentes y las comunidades donde se hallan (Deve 2014).
De algún modo u otro, las inversiones físicas son una forma común de atraer a la gente para que regrese o se quede. También ofrecen la satisfacción de los resultados concretos. El equipo de Marygrove está respondiendo a un problema de uso del suelo al invertir en educación de alta calidad para todas las edades. Da la casualidad de que el espacio que funciona como vehículo para realizarlo es público (el campus).
Tal como explicó Seybert, no fue únicamente la falta de inversión en el paisaje físico lo que provocó el deterioro de Detroit. Otra causa fue la falta de inversión en los ciudadanos, principalmente los afroamericanos, y esto se extendió a todos los sistemas que atienden el potencial humano. El proyecto de Marygrove contrarresta ese aspecto.
“Educación es invertir en personas, en vez de en instituciones”, dijo. “Apostamos al sí”.
Anna Clark es periodista en Detroit y autora de The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (La ciudad envenenada: el agua en Flint y el drama urbano en Estados Unidos, Metropolitan 2018).
Fotografía: Marygrove College y el barrio Livernois-McNichols del noroeste de Detroit. Crédito: Jordan Garland, cortesía de la Fundación Kresge.
The Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (PLC) was founded jointly by Peking University (PKU) and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2007. Located on the campus of PKU in Beijing, the PLC is a research and educational institution and a policy think-tank. The PLC brings together scholars in related fields from China and abroad to carry out comprehensive, interdisciplinary, data-based empirical analysis and policy research.
The PLC is now accepting applications for two two-year postdoctoral fellow positions. The application deadline is November 15, 2019.
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conservación, medio ambiente, vivienda, uso de suelo, finanzas públicas, políticas públicas, desarrollo urbano
Big Plan on Campus
At a Shuttered Detroit College, a Community Development Experiment Takes Root
By Anna Clark, Septiembre 13, 2019
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On a cloudy summer morning in northwest Detroit, the campus of Marygrove College was bustling. A crowd of adults and children in bright blue shirts swarmed the green lawns, surrounded by tents and balloons, readying for the opening ceremony of the Relay for Life cancer walk. A DJ blared rousing music to keep energy levels high. Elsewhere, in one of Marygrove’s English Gothic buildings, the Detroit Neighborhood Summit offered free lunch and childcare to residents who had gathered to discuss foreclosures, air pollution, school closings, and blight. In another room, teachers prepared for a workshop on the dignity of learners; in the art gallery, an exhibition of local artists opened for its final day. Outside, parking attendants joked with each other and with drivers inching up in a long line, hoping to find a spot in the packed lots. You’d never guess that two days earlier, the 104-year-old college had announced that it was shutting its doors for good.
The closing of Marygrove College marks the end of an era for the institution, but it won’t mean the end of Marygrove’s impact. Occupying 53 leafy acres in the middle of a Detroit neighborhood that is on the road to revitalization, Marygrove is the setting for an unfolding story that’s about education, but also the instrumental role public and private partnerships can play in stanching the slow bleed of disinvestment. They are doing it by creating new structures to meet long-term land use needs. At Marygrove, a community-focused “cradle to career” program is taking shape on campus, an experiment supported by influential entities including the Kresge Foundation, the University of Michigan, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, and others.
The members of the nascent Marygrove partnership don’t claim to have all the answers, but their venture will have a lot to teach other communities.
A Legacy of Progressive Education
Marygrove has a special place in Detroit history. Founded in 1905 by a religious order known as the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary — or the IHM nuns — it moved to the city in 1927 from its original location 40 miles south. It quickly became a hub for progressive education, prioritizing service and social justice while serving many non-traditional college students. It nurtured generations of leaders, especially African-American women, with a focus on the fields of teaching and social work.
“I just loved teaching at Marygrove,” said Frank Rashid, a longtime faculty member and former dean. He pointed out that Marygrove, compared to other local colleges, was “most responsive to being in the city” — turning toward the community while others built walls.
Rashid remembered one of his favorite students, a woman about his age who worked a graveyard shift sewing upholstery in cars for GM, but somehow had enough energy to be attentive in class. An essay she wrote about growing up in segregated schools in Mississippi has stayed with Rashid for more than 30 years. The woman graduated with a double major, got a master’s degree at another local university, and returned to Marygrove to teach while raising her grandchildren.
“You want to make a difference,” Rashid said. “That was the call those of us who loved working there felt, and the students made it worthwhile.” For this neighborhood about 10 miles outside downtown, Marygrove served another important role: along with the nearby University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), it anchored the community, even as the city endured decades of decline. This two-square-mile area is commonly called Livernois-McNichols, referencing two major corridors lined by low-rise commercial outlets. It is pockmarked by vacant lots and vacant houses, 400 of which are now publicly owned. But 33,000 people still live here, mostly in single-family homes, and their home ownership rate (66 percent) and median household income ($43,849) is relatively high. Recent years have seen the renewal of the 2.5-acre Ella Fitzgerald Park, the arrival of new retail to fill storefront gaps, and festival programming along Livernois, once known as the “Avenue of Fashion” (City of Detroit 2018).
When Marygrove began suffering from declining enrollment and suffocating debt in the 1990s, neighbors and others began to wonder: Would its precariousness cause the campus to go dark? Detroiters are all too familiar with how vacancy is contagious. It spreads like disease, first creating a tipping-point neighborhood with more and more empty doors before becoming all-out blight. They know that the loss of any major institution is a grave threat to residents and businesses.
But what happened with Marygrove isn’t like what’s happened anywhere else.
Investing in a New Model
In 2018, The Kresge Foundation, which has an active presence in Detroit and a focus on equitable development, announced that it was committing $50 million to a program on the Marygrove campus, an unprecedented intervention in land use and education. It is the foundation’s largest investment ever for a single neighborhood revitalization project, and one of the largest gifts in its history.
The money will build a “cradle to career” school, or what’s sometimes called a P–20 (as in, preschool through graduate education). It is one of the first of its kind in the nation. On Marygrove’s campus, there will soon be an early childhood center, developed with support from IFF, a Midwest-based community development financial institution, and operated by Starfish Family Services, a local nonprofit human services organization. There is also a new neighborhood school, part of the local public school district. A new teachers college led by the University of Michigan School of Education will work on-site at the schools, training educators in the same way that residency programs at hospitals train doctors. After graduating, the newly minted educators will work alongside veteran teachers in Detroit schools for three years or more. Besides providing on-the-ground experience and guidance, this program will also help the Detroit district respond to a teacher shortage.
As wraparound services develop at Marygrove’s campus, other University of Michigan (UM) colleges are expected to become involved, including the schools of engineering, business, urban planning, social work, nursing, and dentistry. The campus will also offer professional development courses and certification programs.
To complement the teachers college, Marygrove College had intended to provide the tail end of the “cradle to career” education. But in 2017, as the collaboration was still being formulated, the college announced that its undergraduate program would close. Administrators hoped that the graduate school would persist, serving the city as well as the P–20 students, but then this summer brought the news that it too would close, at the end of 2019. While the question of who will provide the post-high school programming remains unresolved — a representative of the Kresge Foundation says the partnership is “exploring opportunities with a number of partners that have stepped forward” — one thing is certain: despite the loss of a beloved institution, there won’t be even a single day that the campus sits empty, a target for the city’s notorious and meticulous scrappers.
The Marygrove collaboration is a preemptive strike against large-scale vacancy. It also leverages local residency as an asset. People who live in the Livernois-McNichols area will most benefit from this new educational opportunity and investment, turning the usual gentrification narrative on its head. The K–12 school will have a selection process, like the application schools that are among the city’s best, and students who live within a one- to two-mile neighborhood catchment zone will receive a significant boost. The result: Teens from the community make up more than 60 percent of the inaugural 120-student class that entered The School at Marygrove, as it has been officially dubbed, this fall. A full 97 percent of the class hails from Detroit, and nearly half are returning to Detroit public schools from suburban districts and charter schools. At capacity in 2029, the school — which will have a focus on social justice, engineering, and design — is expected to serve about 1,000 students.
“Even in the midst of the financial difficulties, Marygrove knew it wanted to preserve its legacy in Detroit, and it’s a tremendous one,” said Wendy Lewis Jackson, managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s Detroit program. “It’s why we wanted to be deeply engaged in creating a path for educational leadership in Detroit, particularly in serving underserved populations.”
Kresge’s investment includes renovations to the college’s Liberal Arts building, which houses the new high school, and to the former Bates Academy building on campus, future site of the new K–8 school. (The latter structure was originally Immaculata High School, a girls’ school run by the IHM nuns from 1941 to 1983; Bates Academy, a public school, occupied it for 15 years before moving to another site in Detroit some years ago.) Kresge is also funding the construction of the new early childhood education center, expected to open in fall 2021. The Detroit Collaborative Design Center at UDM is one of the partners in making this happen.
“We’re really trying to put education in the center of neighborhood redevelopment,” Jackson said, “and using neighborhood schools as a way to both retain residents and serve residents well, and serve as a magnetic factor for new residents.”
As Jackson suggests, this deal is about much more than education. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan also made that link when the project was announced. “Not long ago, we were faced with the prospect of this incredible campus going dark, which would have been a terrible setback to the revitalization that is taking place in this area of our city,” Duggan said. “Instead, today we are celebrating a new beginning.”
Avoiding a Community Calamity
The $50 million commitment from the Kresge Foundation followed $16 million in grants that it had provided to Marygrove College over the previous two years to support restructuring of the debt-choked college. The prospect of the college closing and becoming a burden rather than a boon to the neighborhood “was deemed unacceptable,” stated a Kresge Foundation press release (Kresge 2018). “The damage to surrounding home values, small businesses, and other anchors in the district would have been calamitous.” Other foundations provided bridge funding as well, including the McGregor Fund, the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
To help get the books in order, these early partners created the Marygrove Conservancy in 2018, adopting a management model that’s long been used to move private parks to public use. That step separated the management of the college from the management of its physical campus. (While it was deemed a necessary shift to secure a future for the campus, the creation of the conservancy was not looked upon favorably by all, notes Kresge’s Jackson. “The idea of a conservancy was very foreign to [the college accreditation bodies],” she said. “So the college was facing severe sanctions because the accreditation bodies did not understand some of the land use implications of having these kinds of anchors.”)
The conservancy, whose board includes representatives from Marygrove, Kresge, UDM, and community organizations, now owns the buildings and grounds. “Our vision is to steward the campus,” said Sister Mary Jane Herb, president of the IHM nuns and conservancy chair. A private management company is conducting an assessment to create an audit of needed upgrades. The conservancy is also looking into short-term leases, and “how the campus could be used for various events — conferences, weddings,” that will bring in revenue to pay down debt and support the caretaking of historic structures, Herb said. It doesn’t have staff, but intends to hire in the near future.
Such a swift and long-term collaboration might seem unlikely, but it echoes recent Detroit history — namely, the unexpected response to the city declaring bankruptcy in 2013.
“The bankruptcy was actually a galvanizing event,” said Robin Hacke, executive director and cofounder of the Center for Community Investment at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which helps disinvested communities identify and pursue new opportunities for sustainable growth. Hacke’s own efforts to build new pipelines for capital brought her to Detroit in 2010. Three years later, the city filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in history.
The bankruptcy resolved with the help of a “Grand Bargain,” which saw a vast swath of philanthropists and the State of Michigan contribute more than $800 million to satisfy creditors while minimizing pension cuts — and spared the city’s signature art museum from having to auction off paintings, a solution that had been considered. For all its much-documented ills, the city had assets — literally. “I think that because Detroit had the economic history it had, it had some really well-endowed foundations that really cared about it,” Hacke said. “Not every city has the benefit of enjoying the fact that Kresge is in the neighborhood. Ford [Foundation], which is not generally a place-based investor, is a place-based investor in Detroit.”
When Detroit exited bankruptcy at the end of 2014, it was freed of billions in debt and had greater resources to invest back into the city. “What we find in our work sometimes is that things are so bad, the urgency of coming together overcomes the stasis of business as usual,” Hacke said. “These crises . . . can serve as a catalytic event so we can imagine a better future.”
Aiming for Equity
Livernois-McNichols is one of Kresge’s focus neighborhoods. The foundation has committed three to five years of investment in the area, supporting other efforts including the Live6 Alliance, a planning and development nonprofit that is catalyzing the commercial corridors along Livernois Avenue and McNichols Road. Meanwhile, the national consortium Reimagining the Civic Commons is working with local partners to build a greenway that connects the UDM and Marygrove campuses. Representatives from both Live6 and UDM sit on the board of the Marygrove Conservancy. Mayor Duggan also included Livernois-McNichols in his Strategic Neighborhood Initiative, launched in 2018. The city is investing in it with, among other projects, Fitzgerald Forward, a program designed to rehabilitate and sell vacant houses.
All this work would have been undercut if an anchor institution had been abandoned. As Jackson points out, the size of the Marygrove campus is larger than the former Packard plant, one of Detroit’s most infamous ruins. Packard stopped making automobiles at the 40-acre complex of brick and concrete in 1958, leaving it to loom over East Grand Boulevard about 10 miles southeast of Marygrove. It has been vacant since the last major industrial users (and ravers) left in the late 1990s. While the crumbling plant was once surrounded by houses, most have vanished into empty lots. A vacant elementary school stands nearby, and the area is frequented by “ruin porn” tourists. It is this sort of future that the Marygrove collaborative is investing against.
To count the Marygrove experiment a success, Kresge will look at the school’s ability to help students achieve. It will evaluate whether the school can recruit and retain high-quality teachers, and it will track holistic metrics on the well-being of students and families. The latter approach is borrowed from the wraparound model of community schools. The overarching vision, say those involved, is to break the cycle of disinvestment by creating a new community-centered institution on the grounds of a historic one.
“It’s only worth doing if it creates a better life for people who are already here,” said Aaron Seybert, Kresge’s social investment officer. He and Jackson are Kresge’s two representatives on the board of the Marygrove Conservancy. “If we’re not creating economic cohesion, I don’t know what the point is. There are places that work well for upper-income people. They’re already around us. We’re not trying to turn Detroit into that. That’s not what we’re trying to do.”
The phrase “Two Detroits” is commonly heard now, suggesting that newcomers and commuters — generally whiter, younger, and more educated — are valued in a way that long-term residents are not. “Walking around in Detroit in 2010, the idea of having to worry about gentrification was laughable,” Hacke said. But that’s changed, at least in downtown and Midtown, and it’s happened faster than most predicted. So fast, in fact, that it’s caused concern among residents about how investment in the central city is matching up against investment in neighborhoods, where residents have endured the worst of Detroit’s hardships.
Seybert says investors gravitate toward the central city in part due to scale. “The neighborhood stuff is really, really hard,” he said. “In downtown and Midtown you have bigger buildings — large hospital systems, universities; density, relatively speaking for Detroit — and you can deploy capital at a scale that smooths out a lot of the costs of doing this sort of work.”
Northwest Detroit had UDM and Marygrove College, but even together, they couldn’t match the institutional breadth of Midtown’s Wayne State University, which has 13 schools and colleges serving 27,000 students. Access to employment isn’t a primary draw to Livernois-McNichols, as it is for the core city. There is less density, too, with activity mostly along the single-story retail strips that require, Seybert said, many little deals to get the same aggregate value in increased neighborhood investment and appraisal values. And there are fewer investment tools to do it — a void that explains the power of philanthropy in the neighborhood.
While poverty remains Detroit’s greatest challenge, the changes of the past decade underscore the importance of being “a lot more mindful of planning for success,” Hacke said. That is, it’s important to establish processes and policies in the beginning that will create equitable structures for when (not just if) things are going well.
In that vein, the P–20 Partnership might broaden its scope even further. At the launch, Kresge President and CEO Rip Rapson floated the idea that other campus buildings could someday be used for senior housing and affordable housing (Rapson 2018).
Lessons from Marygrove
Detroit isn’t the only place where anchor institutions have found themselves teetering on the brink. In other legacy cities that have suffered population loss, places similar to Marygrove are caught up in the city’s spiraling disinvestment. If they close, they exacerbate it.
While the proud college in Detroit didn’t last, its repurposing reveals a way out of this cycle. The Marygrove reinvention is a microcosm of the possibilities described by Alan Mallach and Lavea Brachman in the Lincoln Institute report Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities (Mallach 2013):
To regenerate, cities must capitalize on [their] assets to increase their competitive advantages and build new economic engines . . . . Successful regeneration . . . must be multifaceted and encompass improvements to the cities’ physical environments, their economic bases, and the social and economic conditions of their residents. If market demand increases and people restore vacant buildings or build new houses on abandoned land, the city’s physical environment will improve. If residents’ skills increase so they can compete successfully for jobs throughout the region, their economic conditions will improve.
Hacke is hopeful about the Marygrove project’s success because it acknowledges what it takes for people to thrive in a place and be healthy: to have an affordable home, good school, and good job. “Marygrove, in the way it is designed, is not just taking a sliver of the problem. It’s looking at a number of different needs and weaving a solution together,” she said. Its teacher training model, if successful, “has ramifications for education very broadly.”
While the Marygrove intervention is tailored to northwest Detroit, Hacke notes that “the number of campuses like Marygrove around the country is not small.”
Catholic schools are particularly at risk, according to former Marygrove professor Rashid. There are a lot of reasons for this, not least the exodus of white middle-class Catholics from urban centers, which contributed to the closure of parishes and Catholic K–12 “feeder schools.” Also, as religious vocations declined, higher education institutions that had long relied on nuns and priests to staff their campuses had to hire more laypeople at market salaries.
But it’s not just urban colleges that present anchor institution challenges; the closure of rural hospitals, Hacke said, creates a similar vacuum of economic activity and land use. Like a photo negative, such closures expose the symbiotic relationship anchor institutions have with their home communities (Dever 2014).
One way or another, physical investments are a common way to lure people back or entice them to stay. They also provide the satisfaction of concrete results. The Marygrove team is responding to a land use problem by investing in high-quality, all-ages education. It just happens that physical space — the campus — is the vehicle to deliver it.
As Seybert explained it, blight wasn’t just caused by disinvestment in Detroit’s physical landscape. It was caused by disinvestment from the city’s people, mostly African-Americans, and it was carried out through all the systems that serve human potential. The Marygrove project is countering that.
“Education is investing in people as opposed to institutions,” he said. “We bet yes.”
Rehabilitating Old Facilities and Old Ways of Thinking
The Marygrove effort will see another big win in a new $15 million, 28,000-square-foot early childhood center. It’s a significant investment in a city where decrepit childcare facilities, often in the basements of old churches, are the status quo. Ja’Net Defell — former lead developer of IFF and a past participant in the Fulcrum Fellowship program at the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Community Investment — remembers visiting some of these places while working in Detroit’s IFF office. “We literally had to put on face masks [because of mold and leaks],” she said.
“Improving facilities like this is like doing laundry or dirty dishes — nobody wants to deal with it,” Defell added, noting that repairs and rehabilitation can be “overwhelmingly technical.” Programs are asked, “Why not get a loan from the bank?,” which overlooks the stunted lending in disinvested cities and neighborhoods. In Detroit, IFF had trouble even finding architects and contractors for its projects, Defell said. Working on early childhood centers wasn’t as appealing as, say, getting involved in the growing marketplace of charter schools.
The new Marygrove center, serving 144 children, will have 12 classrooms, a library, and health therapy rooms, and its design will feature natural light, courtyards, and a natural playscape built around existing oak trees. It is the result of years of work, a process that included a citywide needs assessment of preschool facilities and the exploration of funding models that would be sustainable in a neighborhood with a mix of income levels.
The early learning center is expected to motivate community members. Too often, Defell said, low-income programs are treated as such, meaning that “there is no innovation, no excitement. What we tried to do [at Marygrove] is push the envelope. Just because the [new] building serves low-income families does not mean it has to be a ‘low-income project.’” This parallels a best practice with affordable housing, she said: If you develop affordable housing that looks like affordable housing, you’ve done a bad development project.
Investing in a high-quality facility is especially meaningful for families who may be transient, not living in the best conditions, or battling foreclosure and dishonest landlords. “Detroit was in a depression, and you’re bringing people out of depressions,” Defell said. “Yes, it was a horrible period of time, but it’s a new day. It’s time to come out of this depression mode and be really energized by a new way of thinking.”
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit and the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Metropolitan 2018).
Photographs in order of appearance
Marygrove College and the Livernois-McNichols neighborhood of northwest Detroit. Credit:Jordan Garland, courtesy of the Kresge Foundation.
The catchment zones for the new school, shown in yellow and blue, give a leg up to students form the revitalizing Livernois-McNichols neighborhood in the admissions process. Credit: Detroit Public Schools Community District.
Marygrove staff extended handshakes and pom-poms to welcome students on the first day at the new school in September 2019. Credit: University of Michigan.
Over the past four decades, more than 500 million people have moved from rural China to the nation’s cities, drawn by economic opportunities unavailable in the countryside. Today, 60 percent of the population lives in urban areas, compared to just 18 percent in 1978. The rapid, often uncoordinated urban growth caused by this massive migration has dramatically altered China’s cities and the land around them, resulting in pollution, overcrowding, and other challenges. Officials in China are now encouraging a shift from policies focused purely on growth to those that prioritize a higher quality of urbanization, explains Lincoln Institute of Land Policy China Program Director Zhi Liu. This shift, Liu says, “implies environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and better quality of urban life for all.” Examples of quality urbanization projects range from converting a sprawling industrial complex in Guangzhou into a cultural district to mandating the reduction of emissions from coal-fired power plants in Beijing.
Liu and the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (PLC) recently organized an international conference to explore China’s urban development trends, hosting more than 300 scholars and experts from 12 countries. Topics included the growth of “super megacity regions,” which are clustered metropolitan areas with a combined population of more than 10 million; the impacts of the shift from labor-intensive to high-tech industries; research on community well-being in suburban areas; and a discussion of how to finance urban growth through densification and redevelopment. The event was co-organized by the Peking University College of Urban and Environmental Sciences (PKU), University of Hong Kong, and Regional Science Association of China.
The conference—the fifth in a series, with previous incarnations held in Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, and Glasgow—brought together researchers from the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, economics, political science, urban planning, urban management, and public policy, as well as China studies. “The research presented at this conference provides much-needed empirical evidence that will be helpful for policy making and policy reform,” Liu said. In addition to sharing research and data, presenters recommended steps such as improving inter-city coordination to equalize basic public services and continuing to study the well-being of residents to develop a robust evidence base for community planning and development.
“The policy reform underway in China reflects a growing recognition that the outcomes of urbanization are not meeting the rising expectations of the government or people,” said the Lincoln Institute’s Vice President of Programs Armando Carbonell, who facilitated sessions at the conference. “China is a laboratory of urbanization, with fast-moving systems and a government willing to engage in policy experiments. Things move so quickly, you can hypothesize about what will happen, then actually see and learn from the results on the ground.”
With that type of learning in mind, the PLC also hosted a roundtable discussion at the conclusion of the conference, convening experts from China, Mexico, Uganda, and the U.S. to talk about land policy themes and research that cut across Africa, Latin America, and China. The group explored opportunities to build a research or educational program that bridges land policy work in those areas, concluding that there is a need for increased South-South knowledge sharing.
“Given that China’s urbanization process has been more recent than Europe’s or North America’s, and that it has been as fast as, if not faster than, what is happening in Africa, there are opportunities to learn from China’s successes and avoid the pitfalls,” said Astrid Haas, a senior economist at the International Growth Centre who attended the conference and roundtable. Haas, who is based in Uganda, thinks learning about the policy shift underway in China will help African cities “embark on a path of quality urbanization from the outset.” She also points out that policy makers in China can learn from African experts on topics such as the property tax, which is in use in some African countries but only just being considered in China. “There are strong opportunities for two-way learning,” Haas said.
As the PLC explores the possibility of expanding its work in the region—an idea that PKU President Ping Hao voiced support for in a meeting with Lincoln Institute staff members ahead of the conference—the Center could play a role in facilitating that sharing. “This is a perfect example of an opportunity for the Institute to help connect people across regions,” said Enrique Silva, who leads Lincoln’s International and Institute-wide Initiatives program and helped organize the roundtable discussion. “Though their state structures differ, China, Africa, and Latin America face many of the same ‘headline issues’ related to resource distribution and the challenges of rapid urbanization. We are eager to help develop peer networks and build capacity so they can learn from each other.”
Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.
Photographs in order of appearance:
Recent efforts to improve quality of life in Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China, include addressing air pollution and redeveloping industrial areas. Credit: Sergei Gussev/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.
Leaders from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Peking University met in Beijing this summer. On the front step, left to right, are Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy, Lincoln Institute Board Chair and Chief Investment Officer Kathryn J. Lincoln, and Peking University President Ping Hao. Zhi Liu, director of the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy, stands second from left in the back. Credit: Courtesy of Peking University.
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The Marygrove collaboration is a preemptive strike against large-scale vacancy. It also leverages local residency as an asset. People who live in the Livernois-McNichols area will most benefit from this new educational opportunity and investment, turning the usual gentrification narrative on its head. The K–12 school will have a selection process, like the application schools that are among the city’s best, and students who live within a one- to two-mile neighborhood catchment zone will receive a significant boost. The result: Teens from the community make up more than 60 percent of the inaugural 120-student class that entered The School at Marygrove, as it has been officially dubbed, this fall. A full 97 percent of the class hails from Detroit, and nearly half are returning to Detroit public schools from suburban districts and charter schools. At capacity in 2029, the school — which will have a focus on social justice, engineering, and design — is expected to serve about 1,000 students.
The conference—the fifth in a series, with previous incarnations held in Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, and Glasgow—brought together researchers from the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, economics, political science, urban planning, urban management, and public policy, as well as China studies. “The research presented at this conference provides much-needed empirical evidence that will be helpful for policy making and policy reform,” Liu said. In addition to sharing research and data, presenters recommended steps such as improving inter-city coordination to equalize basic public services and continuing to study the well-being of residents to develop a robust evidence base for community planning and development.