The New York Times put together this interesting map of ancestry data from the American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. You can easily find the well-known pockets of racial-ethnic populations in Detroit, but the metro region provides some nuance as to where many immigrant population migrated to outside of Detroit. The Grosse Pointes are very English, further east is very Polish. Detroit’s Chaldean populations moved northward to Sterling Heights and Bloomfield. Indian populations centered in Novi and Madison Heights. Southfield remains a strong Black majority city just outside of Detroit.
I happened to walk past the Consulate of Iceland on Kercheval Avenue in Grosse Pointe Farms and that got me wondering how many consulates are in the Detroit area or how those get decided. I tested this data collection and mapping exercise with AI assistance. Google Gemini put together a list of consulates, but it was a short list because I learned that there is a difference between a consulate and an honorary consulate. Gemini gathered a few outdated consulate locations that I had to manually check, but overall it was a quick process that reduced my own time putting together a list and geocoding the locations. The map is color coded by “most common continent of birth” among foreign born residents.
Purple = Asia (including Middle East)
Green = Europe
Orange = Latin America
Blue = North America
Yellow = Africa
A consulate is a diplomatic representative for a specific city or region working under an Embassy. Typically large cities have consulates for various countries while the Embassy is most likely located in the capital, Washington D.C. Honorary Consulates are usually independent individuals working part-time on behalf of a particular country to fulfill consular duties, but with limited powers. I learned that the Consulate of Iceland was an honorary consulate even though it had a bronze placard outside the building.
The consulates that I mapped are all listed as “Detroit” specific missions, yet only six were located within Detroit’s borders: Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, Romania, and the Bahamas. The highest number of consulates were located in Southfield (n=8) followed by Bloomfield Hills (n=5). There were also some surprising mismatches in location of consulates compared to populations of people from those countries. The Consulate of Yemen is located in Dearborn which makes sense with a high number of Yemeni people living there, but the Consulate of Mexico is located in Warren perhaps to be a middle ground between Detroit and other Mexican population clusters like Pontiac?
Reliance on Honorary Consulates
Dominance of Honorary Representation: Out of 39 diplomatic missions, 32 (82.1%) operate as Honorary Consulates or Honorary Consulates General, while only 7 (17.9%) are career diplomatic posts (Consulates or Consulates General).
Career Consulates Focus on Key Trade & Population Partners: Full career missions are maintained by Canada, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Iraq, Lebanon, and North Macedonia.
Operational Impact: The heavy reliance on honorary consuls indicates that many foreign governments leverage local corporate executives, attorneys, and community figures to handle bilateral trade advocacy and passport/visa queries rather than funding full-time embassy staffs.
Suburban Diplomatic Hubs
Southfield as the Leading Suburban Hub: Southfield hosts the highest number of offices with 8 consulates (20.5% of total), including full Consulates General for Iraq, Lebanon, and North Macedonia.
Detroit Core Retains High-Impact Offices: Downtown/City of Detroit holds 6 consulates (15.4%), including crucial economic and career posts for Canada, Japan, and Italy, as well as honorary consulates for the United Kingdom, Romania, and the Bahamas.
Bloomfield Hills & Suburbs: Bloomfield Hills comes in second with 5 consulates (focused primarily on European honorary posts such as Finland, Poland, Iceland, and Luxembourg), followed by Dearborn with 3 missions (Belgium, Slovenia, Yemen).
European and Automotive Industry Partners
Heavy European Presence: European nations represent 27 out of 39 missions (69.2%), reflecting deep historic immigration ties and manufacturing partnerships.
Americas & Asia-Pacific: Latin Americas account for 3 missions (7.7%), Asia-Pacific represents 3 missions (7.7%), the Middle East accounts for 3 missions (7.7%), and Africa is represented by 1 mission (2.6%).
Economic Alignment: Major automotive manufacturing centers (e.g., Japan, Germany, Canada, Italy, South Korea, Mexico) maintain active representations, reinforcing Metro Detroit’s status as an international automotive and mobility hub.
Dr. Larissa Larsen’s was quoted in the Washington Post about impacts of extreme heat in Detroit.
Roughly a third of the city’s residents live in homes that are 80 years or older, said Larissa Larsen, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. Those homes can become heat traps during hot stretches because they lack proper insulation and newer windows. Some of the homes are made of brick, which absorbs heat during the day and radiates it in the evening instead of allowing the home to cool down.
The annual “Detroit Loves Maps” day or Detroit GIS Day is coming up! We are excited to have Richard Sadler from Michigan State University as our keynote. He is the health geographer who helped prove the spatial connection between children’s blood lead levels and unsafe drinking water in the Flint Water Crisis. Dr. Sadler has multiple exciting projects that intersect spatial and geographic phenomena with health equity.
Check out the full list of panels, lightning talks, and workshops! or propose your own talk!
Registration is open for the conference day and for virtual workshops throughout the Geography Awareness Week on Open Data 101, Tableau for Mapping, ArcGIS Online, and QGIS.
Use the registration link to submit a 10 min lightning talk or to submit a to the Map Gallery to show off your maps.
We’re very appreciative of the sponsorship support from ReGrid, OHM Advisors, and Data Driven Detroit along with our hosts at the UM LEAPS program at Marygrove. If you would like to reach the local GIS, geospatial, data, mapping, urban planning and architecture community consider sponsoring GIS Day!
From the UM Clark Map Library, this map shows street railway lines in multiple colors, which is rare after the formation of the Department of Street Railways (DSR) and consolidation under city government. On this map there are two main railway companies represented, the Detroit Citizens Street Railway and Fort Wayne & Belle Isle Street Railway. The railway lines have some great names as well:
The Little Belt Line
Cross-Town & Belle Isle
Ferry & River Loop
On the Eastside of this map there is a large “Linden Park” which no longer exists as many of the street area also no longer. The southern border of the park was Field Avenue, which is now Kercheval Avenue and today there is a separate Field Street that did not exist in 1895. Linden Park is all gone today, but at least part of the empty area near Van Dyke (which is maybe in the wrong place on this map?) was incorporated into Butzel Playground.
From 1893 to the early 1900s, Karl Baedeker published a travel guidebook titled, “The United States, with an excursion into Mexico.” The handbook is full of interesting content and maps for those interested in traveling North America. The particular route that Baedeker suggests to Detroit originates in Buffalo, NY and goes on to Toledo, OH.
The map shows some really interesting historical points such as the Parke Davis facility creating pharmaceuticals nearby the Michigan Stove Works on the eastside. Belle Isle clearly deserves its own call out box as a critical location to visit if a tourist in Detroit. The street labeling always gets me, so unique and beautiful, but so difficult to read.
Welcome to our Data Forum where we will discuss open data and adjacent topics.
We’ll be joined by the Joel Reyes-Klann from City of Detroit District 6, Office of Councilperson Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Uri Heru House of the Equitable Internet Initiative, and Andrew Bashi from Great Lakes Environmenal Law Center.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with fellow data enthusiasts and expand your knowledge.
WHEN: Friday, October 23rd, 12:30-1:30pm
WHERE: Virtual
WHAT: Join us for our Data Forum where we will discuss data centers, historical and present proposals
I can’t say I ever thought it might exist, but here we are. None of the proposed expansions matches up with the historical concepts that I’ve highlighted in the past, but they do potentially make sense with a focus on the Downtown bubble. Prioritizing rail connection to the airport is a must and numerous cities with far off airport connections have invested in elevated rail to get it done.
The concepts don’t note an airport connection, but I can only assume that is the natural conclusion to expanding westward. The focus in this report is connecting DPM to the renewed train connections at a new train station near Michigan Central Station. That may not be the highest or best case for expansion unless train travel really takes off.
The eastern expansion concept seems odd and the one sentence about connecting to Eastern Market is lackluster. Again there seems like a larger opportunity to note its connections to City Airport with Eastern Market in between. A previous proposal focused on eastward expansion to connect to entertainment in Rivertown area. Maybe there is more potential with the East Riverfront efforts at Bedrock?
How well do these concepts match with your ideas for DPM expansion? Obviously, we need to talk about elevating the Qline first.
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?
Contact
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