There have been many maps of walkability both national and local, but there always seems to be a gap in the data. Researchers at Yale University ran analyses of walkability compared to access to amenities. More from the project:
Walk Score and similar proximity-based indices are widely used as measures of walkability, and often treated as proxies for walking behavior, but they capture access to destinations rather than whether people walk. Using GPS-based mobility data for approximately 18 million devices across 272 U.S. urban areas, this paper tests how well amenity access predicts observed walking and under what conditions proximity translates into walking. We find that amenity access predicts walking only selectively. It explains just 25% of neighborhood-level variation in walking, and 89% of the gap between walkability and observed walking lies within cities rather than between them. Two findings help explain why. First, amenity access predicts destination-oriented walking well (R² = 0.51) but is unrelated to recreational walking (R² = 0.03), which accounts for 69% of all walking trips. Second, even for destination-oriented walking, other features of the built environment—street connectivity, traffic, and building design—shape whether access translates into walking. Well-connected, low-traffic neighborhoods generate substantially more walking than auto-oriented ones at the same level of amenity access. These findings suggest that proximity to amenities is necessary but not sufficient for generating walking.
We used to have a regional rail network. Detroit and the world were wildly difference places then and its too easy to fantasize about the past when a lot of things were not great. But … there was a regional rail network. This map from the Detroit Historical Society shows the reach and extent of the system. The map shows the interurban connections, but even within the City of Detroit streets were served by numerous trolley companies connecting different parts of the city.
HT: Dave Gifford for reminding me I have never posted this map.
DETROITography, Outlier Collective, DetroitData, and the GO DATA Advisory Commission invite you to explore the city’s open data and dig into the layers beneath the data!
We’ll be sharing information about public data tools and access options as well as digging into specific projects like Property Praxis, collecting data on secretive LLC property owners, and the Detroit Development Tracker, crowdsourcing real estate project updates, hosted by Outlier Media.
How can we better integrate property data sources to help Detroiters understand and make decisions about how land and property are being utilized in the city from land speculators and property taxes, to building incentives and affordable housing construction.
WHEN: Friday, September 18th, 11am-2pm
WHERE: Urban Tech Xchange, 1520 Woodward Ave.
WHAT: Bring your skills in open data collection, data analysis, system mapping, design thinking, prototyping, or anything else
Universities flocked to Detroit after the Great Recession with every major Michigan university setting up a Detroit center of sorts. Today some of those universities are rapidly expanding and others are selling off their assets. Wayne State University (WSU) remains the top land holding institution of higher education in the city with a considerably larger footprint in the last 10 years while the University of Michigan (UM) has made big moves at the former Marygrove College campus and with a modern innovation center Downtown. There is a new knowledge corridor growing along 6 Mile that stretches from MSU’s urban agriculture experiments at the Detroit Partnership for Food, Learning and Innovation (MSU DPFLI) all the way to the anchor at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM).
A standout oddity was that UM Credit Union is listed as the taxpayer at the historic First Congregational Church, but no other land holdings in the city. Michigan State University (MSU) secured a long-term health and research agreement with Henry Ford Health and has significant new land holdings in the city, including majority ownership of the Fisher Building, although those don’t reflect clearly in the property records.
Wayne State University (WSU)
2015: Repurposed TechTown Two building as the Integrative Biosciences Building, but has largely remained empty since opening. Most recent addition was a brain research group.
2018: Opened Ilitch School of Business in the empty lots along Woodward
2022: Hilberry Gateway Performing Arts Center opens
2025: Groundbreaking for new Health Sciences Research Building in parking lot near School of Medicine
Michigan State University (MSU)
2017: Launched Detroit Partnership for Food, Learning and Innovation (DPFLI) on city-owned land
2021: Launched Apple Developer Academy
2023: Became majority owner of the Fisher Building (taxpayer still listed as DPS)
2024: Invested in Piquette Flats affordable housing
2025: Innovation Hub launches as part of 30-year partnership with Henry Ford Health, new building in former HFH parking lot
University of Michigan (UM)
2017: Final third of ownership purchased of Rackham Building (WSU lease ended 2019)
2022: Detroit Center moves, but remains in same building
2023: LEAPS program at Marygrove campus, expanding into Madame Cadillac Building
2025: Center for Innovation broke ground Downtown
*BONUS: UM Credit Union holds the land where the historic First Congregational Church is located
Marygrove College
2018: College shuts down after years of decline, many students move to WSU and UDM programs
University of Detroit Mercy (UDM)
2022: Opening of new student union
2023: Fisher Administration Building demolished
Lawrence Technological University (LTU)
2021: Detroit Center for Design and Technology space closes up after consolidating LTU’s Detroit programs in one building, space is now used by AECOM
Grand Valley State University (GVSU)
2026: Selling Downtown building next to Comerica Park to the adjacent Detroit Athletic Club, for a DAC future expansion
Central Michigan University (CMU)
Maintaining Downtown outreach center mostly for alumni and partnership events
Wayne County Community College District (WCCCD)
2018: Downtown campus expansion, addition of health and wellness building
There is a lot in motion with some major projects still in progress. Who or what did I miss? I’m still waiting for MSU and UM to build rapid train lines between their main campuses and the city of Detroit.
Aging infrastructure has become a persistent problem. The concern with lead water service lines has been highlighted after the Flint Water Crisis where the water source switch and proper treatment and corrosion controls were ignored. The Detroit water system, now a regional entity known as the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), commissioned a report in 2024 to better understand the issue of lead in water samples across its service area and improve water treatment to reduce lead in tap water. Twenty-five metro Detroit communities have had lead levels exceed Michigan’s rule since 2018. Efforts remain active to remove all lead service lines. Planet Detroit reported on the issue and shared more about their mapping:
Each community is a public water system that purchases finished drinking water from GLWA. Lead in tap water typically comes from lead service lines and household plumbing. GLWA is required to treat water to control corrosion to minimize the amount of lead that dissolves in drinking water. Michigan’s lead and copper rule revisions lowered the action level from the federal 15 ppb to 12 ppb in 2025; readings shown are the 90th-percentile result of each compliance sampling round, with all rounds above 12 ppb between 2018 and 2025 included. One Hamtramck reading from 2018 used the older first-draw sampling protocol; all other readings used Michigan’s stricter fifth-liter protocol.
This mapping effort is a broad coalition of organizations working together to map school gardens led by the School Garden Support Organization (SGSO) Network, including GenThrive, The Edible Schoolyard Project, USDA, and others. I found this map to be amazingly full while I also expected more locations in Detroit. I know the original School Garden Collaborative is no longer, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk attempted work with the school district with his Big Green nonprofit (I don’t think that went anywhere), and more recently Keep Growing Detroit was helping independent teachers set up school gardens.
“The National School Garden Map is an interactive platform that layers school garden locations, support organizations, social vulnerability indicators, and climate risk data in one application. Visit the website landing page for more information: https://bit.ly/sg-map
The City of Detroit has a long history of school garden efforts back as far as the origins of “urban gardening” know as the Home and School Garden Movement in 1917 from the City’s Recreation Department with 600 participants listed. The school garden effort worked with the Detroit Chapter of the National Plant, Flower, and Fruit Guild along with the Michigan Agricultural College (MAC) Extension, now MSU Extension.
This post will be both a soapbox and a rant. Recently, Mayor Mary Sheffield’s transition team led by HR&A Advisors published the results of their large-scale survey of residents and the priorities they would like to see from the incoming mayoral administration. All of the marketing copy includes language that all of Detroit’s “39 ZIP Codes” were canvassed in order to arrive at these numbers. Detroit does not have 39 ZIP Codes within its borders. Over time nearby ZIP Codes have encroached into Detroit’s border as a result of population loss and there are a number of administrative-only ZIP Codes, such as the Renaissance Center exclusive, 48243. The city’s own map of survey responses perfectly shows how there are only 27 ZIP Code areas that physically exist geographically.
I have a regular set of slides where to remind people that ZIP Codes, yes all caps acronym that stands for Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) Codes are routes created for delivering mail by the US Postal Service (USPS). These routes include the only floating ZIP Code in the United States, 48222 best known as the J.W. Westcott II tug that delivers mail to the passing lake freighters traveling down the Detroit River.
ZIP Codes are delivery routes, squiggly paths across a place. ZIP Codes are not bounded polygons or shapes. The shapes that we’ve come to know as ZIP Codes are actually creations of the US Census Bureau, not USPS. For the sake of data literacy, the Census recognized that people more easily knew their five-digit ZIP Code rather than their 11-digit Census Tract code. The Census takes the mail delivery routes from USPS and generates ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) in order to link the Census survey data to these well-known areas. ZIP Code has become ubiquitous in sharing information, linking life expectancy, and tracking change – for better or worse. I’ve lamented the misaligned boundaries of ZIP Codes compared to literally any other geographic place.
Since ZIP Codes are mail delivery routes, they change fairly regularly. It’s true that ZIP Codes in Detroit have remained relatively stable since the 1950s with nearly identical numbers back to 1946. For the most part these areas have remained untouched. Yet, when mapping the city the issue arises that half of 48203 is Highland Park, 48212 is mostly Hamtramck, 48236 includes the Grosse Pointes, and the section of 48239 in Detroit only covers Rouge Park. The US Census data for these areas are incomplete or over-representative if the ZIP Code is cropped to the Detroit border. Personally, I typically omit 48236 and 48239 with a not “insufficient data.” There are other odd ZIP Codes that exist randomly in space, 48232 is located near the salt mines, but has no boundary. 48231 in Downtown and 48244 in Southwest Detroit are similarly only existing as a point location.
The City’s Open Data Portal includes a dataset with 39 ZIP Codes, which I assume simply includes any ZIP Code that intersects the city boundary. The result has anchored Mayor Sheffield’s community framework press coverage, but incorrectly includes Ferndale, Royal Oak, Harper Woods, River Rouge, Ecourse, and Redford simply because a sliver of their ZIP Codes have crept across the Detroit border. At best, Detroit has 27 reliable ZIP Code areas that can easily be canvassed and tracked with Detroit residents. This matters because it informs the data we talk about and the people represented by numbers that influence policy choices. Now is a time for critical thinking and clarity.
Detroit has had a significant Latino and Mexican American population since the 1920s when merchants and restaurants started showing up in the Irish enclave of Corktown. Today a Mexican-Irish festival has been held for a number of years showing the blend of cultures in Detroit’s oldest neighborhood.
Regionally, the migration of the Hispanic/Latino population can be seen as higher overall percentages are seen in Downriver communities. I learned of this shift when making the taco map of Detroit and it shows in the Census data.
This map from the Library of Congress adorns the wall of the exhibition hall at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle. I recently visited the museum for the first time with my son and just could not place this map from the wall. Typically I like to say that Windsor has been holding Detroit’s map legend since 1876, but that was not the case on this map. Windsor was labeled and the shoreline was fully populated. Thankfully, Emily Kutil recommended the US Lake Survey and there it was. The lake survey needed to map both sides of the river where locally we usually leave off our dear Canadian neighbors to the South.
Fun history bits on the map include the marshiness of the Grand Marais, the funky shape of Belle Isle before the ends were filled in to create Sunset Point, the well-defined Grand Trunk rail line encircling the city limits, and the demarcated farmland along the edges of the city. I personally adore the compass roses on this map.
Here’s to a pleasant map surprise on a random summer weekday!
Within the City of Detroit there are 4,661 not for profit or nonprofit corporations registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). There are 82 nonprofits registered in Highland Park and 73 in Hamtramck. The vast majority (n=3,268) or 70% of those nonprofits have $0 income. Most nonprofits are classified by the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) as “christian” churches followed by “human service” organizations and “community improvement and capacity building” such as community development corporations (CDCs).
Income
Among the nonprofits that reported income, 966 reported some income under $1 million and 427 reported income over $1 million. The nonprofits with over $1 million that stand out in those very large yellow bubbles are:
Henry Ford Health System ($4.5 billion)
Blue Care Network of Michigan ($4.2 billion)
UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust ($3.8 billion)
DTE Energy VEBA Trust ($3.4 billion), and
Wayne State University ($1.4 billion)
Clearly this group of nonprofits are specific benefit funds that are massive in scale. The majority of nonprofits have budgets under $100 million. When nonprofits are filtered to just those with income over $0, “private foundations” become the dominant category of nonprofit making up almost 30% of all nonprofits making income in Detroit. Community economic development and capacity building nonprofits make up 16% and “christian” nonprofits make up about 11%.
Neighborhoods
All nonprofits were aggregated to the 56 Master Plan Neighborhoods to show spatial clustering and distribution. Nonprofits in the city have some obvious groupings in office heavy areas like Downtown, Midtown, the Woodward corridor, and Brewery Park in Eastern Market. After those areas, nonprofits follow a pattern of income with most nonprofits outside of Greater Downtown locating in the higher income Northwest Detroit neighborhoods.
Nonprofit 101
The City of Detroit Assessor is hosting a Nonprofit 101 Day on June 10th to learn about city taxes and compliance.
A colleague was recently talking about Civil War history and this map popped back up on my radar. Published by Silas Farmer & Co., this map was digitized by in the NYPL Map Division. In 1863, everything of importance was half a mile away from Campus Martius from government buildings, colleges, high school, hospitals and churches. Notably, a number of “colored” churches are listed along Beaubien Street which would have been in the historic area of Black Bottom.
The same year represented a momentous shift in Detroit as one of the city’s deadly race riots broke out after Thomas Faulkner (Spanish-Indian descent) was falsely convicted of assaulting two white women. A white mob utilized his case to violently vent their anger about the Civil War, conscription, and racial issues against the Black residents of the city. Homes and businesses were burned along Lafayette Street downtown and two people were killed. The Faulkner Riots led to the formation of Detroit’s first official police force.
Since 2014, I’ve tracked 52 different coworking spaces (not including spaces where one could “co-work,” but specific places marketed for coworking). As of May 2026, 25 coworking locations are open. Six locations have been around since 2014, including: Junction440 at Techtown, OmniCorpsDetroit, Grand Circus Co., Bamboo Detroit, Grand River Workplace, and Green Garage. These locations seem to have hit the bullseye when it comes to spaces, amenities, and pricing. They are all staples of Detroit’s tech and startup ecosystem. Bamboo Detroit has expanded multiple times since 2014 in Detroit, Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids. Grand Circus Co. was acquired and had a shift in some of its programming, but coworking remained.
There are six new coworking locations since the last updated I made in 2021, including: an additional WeWork location downtown, Jefferson Hub (coworking managed by Bamboo Detroit), Regus at RenCen, Detroit FinTech Bay at Techtown, The Michigan Central Mezz (only open to members) and Spaces also located downtown.
The pricing and accessibility of coworking is a real hurdle when thinking about what it takes to make it in the startup world. All but two coworking locations are outside of the 5 mile bubble of Greater Downtown. The monthly cost presented here is the minimum cost for only a monthly drop-in or “hot desk” to cowork. Coffee shops and public libraries function just as well as coworking locations at significantly less cost. Perhaps the future of the libraries could be to foster community collaborative spaces, pop-up cafes, and other amenities inside the library branches?
Summer Fridays, Midnight Basketball, and expanded Recreation Center hours – Mayor Sheffield is tackling youth opportunity head on with the same kind of focus we’ve seen in past administrations from Kilpatrick’s “Mayor’s Time” to the exponential growth of “Grow Detroit’s Young Talent” (GDYT) under mayors Bing and Duggan. The effort is powered by the United Way with groups from Slow Roll, Motown Museum, and the Joe Louis Greenway to Detroit Cultural Center, Detroit Parks Coalition, and the Detroit City Football Club. What is different in this Occupy the Summer effort is a clear focus on fun and opportunity rather than work opportunities and future employment – letting kids be kids.
I’m most excited that there is a map where you can search programs near you and filter by age groups, program type, ZIP code, cost, and even month and day of the week when programs are offered.
This map in the 1950-51 Master Plan jumped out to me as an interesting “what if” these routes had become a light rail system in the city? I know a good chunk of these old railways are being turned into the 30-mile Joe Louis Greenway and maybe we can imagine elevated rail above the greenway? Maybe that could be Duggan’s promised People Mover expansion?
Make it count! Detroit By The Numbers latest monthly segment on the Authentically Detroit podcast is live! We highlight significant data and numbers from the past month for Detroiters!
New trees to be planted by the City of Detroit’s General Services Division (GSD) this spring. Detroit is almost halfway to its goal of increasing the city tree canopy.
25
ICE arrests in the last week of March that local groups have responded to, if that is a weekly standard that is close to 100 Detroiters a month (Peoples Assembly Detroit)
$3 billion
Balanced budget proposal presented by Mayor Mary Sheffield to City Council. This is on par with previous city budgets, but includes key budget changes that align with Sheffield’s people focused plans and launch of a new department of Health, Homeless, and Family Services (HHFS).
65%
Detroit landlords have a Detroit address (not sure if that is just the LLC though?) 93% own 1 or 2 properties, 62% are not associated with bad actor or speculator behavior (Detroit Future City)
Join the annual and unofficial Detroit Regional Transit Fantasy Support (DRTFS) Group. Come see the great transit fantasy maps of the Detroit region and make your own! We’ll focus the evening with Transportation Riders United (TRU) sharing steps we can all take to expand mass transit in Wayne County and Nate Mullen sharing his new zine on how to ride the bus!
Presented in partnership with Transportation Riders United and Young Professionals in Transportation Detroit Chapter.
WHEN: Wednesday, May 6th, 7-9pm
WHERE: Social Brews, 211 W. Fort St.
WHAT: Meet others who fantasize about regional transit, look at cool maps, make your own map!
The team at Felt made a incredible map of the US from a Zillow-based dataset to explore urbanization analysis across the country. The interesting stories shine through the data in major cities, like Detroit. SEMCOG has a great hand drawn version of this map type and its really interesting that this could be recreated from Zillow data.
More from Felt,
“By the 1900s the majority of the US population lived in urban areas. This map highlights the pattern of urbanization across the continental United States between 1900 – 2000 in 10 year increments. The data were compiled by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder using the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset and the raster layers represent the presence of at least one built-up structure at 250m spatial resolution over each time period.”
Make it count! Detroit By The Numbers latest monthly segment on the Authentically Detroit podcast is live! We highlight significant data and numbers from the past month for Detroiters!
Vacant lots in Detroit, 48% held by DLBA with over 60,000 (20k of which are side lots).
$500 million
Property assessment valuation announced by the Sheffield administration, but analysis finds many of the homes used to calculate that valuation were “sold” from the RealToken crypto real estate entity to its subsidiary inflating the amounts. Read more on our blog linking to the analysis by Gratiot Labs. (Gratiot Labs/DETROITography)
23%
Jobs in City pay 23% more than state average, however 70% of jobs in Detroit are held by commuters. (UM RSQE – Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics)
6,500
Respondents to the Detroit Rise Higher community survey from Mayor Mary Sheffield, if you haven’t yet check it out and provide your input. Their goal is to have 10,000 responses along with their community discussions and members on the various transition committees to set the agenda for the new mayoral administration. (Rise Higher Detroit)
There is a spatial mismatch in where people live and where jobs are located, but there is also a eligibility and skills gap. The Duggan administration regularly cited numbers that showed there were thousands of jobs available to Detroiters. That number came from listings on the State of Michigan’s Pure Michigan Talent Connect site where any employer could list a job they were hiring for in Detroit. I pulled the list of jobs open within the last month on March 1st and found over 5,400 listings. It seems like a massive number, how could any Detroiter be out of work?
In Detroit, 21% of residents have no high school diploma and just 18% hold a bachelors degree. During the pandemic funding increase from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Duggan administration funded Detroit at Work to the tune of $100 million for multiple programs including a program that paid Detroiters to earn their GED. The difference in economic opportunity for those with no GED compared to those GED was insignificant. Economic opportunity and pay rate doesn’t significantly shift until someone changes from having no higher education to a earning a bachelors degree.
Now when I dig into the 5,400 jobs available in Detroit and filter for those where the minimum qualification is a high school diploma or GED, the number drops to just 172 jobs. Just 3% of jobs in Detroit are available to Detroiters who do not have a college degree.
The latest, although not unexpected, controversy from the Duggan administration’s demolition program is hundreds of sites backfilled with toxic dirt. Testing was supposed to have completed by last month, but the data shows many sites still need to be tested on the West side. Researchers have been raising the alarm on demolition dirt for many years. RJ Koscielniak published his dissertation work in 2019 on “Ground Forces: Dirt, Demolition, and the Geography of Decline in Detroit, Michigan.” Examining backfill dirt sources from 2014 to 2018, RJ found 75% of backfill sources were development projects in the suburbs.
DETROITography 