Rob Linn had some “Ruminations on Right-sizing Part I” and utilized data from a massive survey similar to the recent Motor City Mapping Project. Here is a snippet from his blog:
According to the Detroit Residential Parcel Survey data, 10,683 of the city’s 32,913 blocks are comprised of at least 25% vacant lots.
Mayor Duggan’s ten-point plan for Detroit lays out an urban planner’s approach to remaking a city. It lacks, however, any real economic plans that are necessary for breathing new life into neighborhoods where unemployment reaches over 30% in some areas of the city.
Mayor Bing had pledged in his term of office to demolish 10,000 blighted structures. The numbers aren’t out yet, but Bing’s team says it was a success. The Detroit Residential Parcel Survey on 2009 noted that 86% of homes in Detroit were in livable condition and only 9% or 3,480 needed to be demolished. Bing’s administration reported that 8,966 structures had completed the demolition process as of the close of 2013.
What other 5,486 structures did Bing demolish and what new properties are Duggan/Gilbert (private and foundation supported “Blight Authority”) planning to demolish based on the $1.5 million Motor City Mapping blight survey? Is it all part of Duggan’s efforts to incentivize people to move to more populated areas (right-sizing Detroit)?
Employment in Detroit has followed a downward trend since automobile companies left the city starting in the 1950s. Recent jobs added to the city have largely come in the form of relocated offices rather than new employment opportunities for Detroit residents.
Why can’t Detroiters be offered job training in demolition and construction to both improve their neighborhoods and help Detroit rebuild? Where are the incentives for residents to maintain and improve their homes instead of continuing to turn a blind eye to vicious landlords and blight hoarders? If Detroit’s neighborhoods are going to improve than Duggan needs to consider long-term employment opportunities for residents.
At Duggan’s swearing in ceremony he mentioned that he is bringing together individuals and groups who are tackling blight in order to improve the Detroit Land Bank so that delinquent property owners can be sued and dangerous properties can be demolished. Duggan praised Gilbert’s efforts as part of the Blight Authority, but hasn’t yet made any specific plans or goals for his administration besides stating that reducing blight is a priority.
Anyone have access to the full list of demolitions under Bing?
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Thanks to Nick Micinski for help with brainstorming this piece.
Unemployment in Detroit in 1960 was focused within Detroit’s black population. The continued auto company layoffs and discrimination in hiring practices disproportionately affected the black population.
From the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute Field Notes I.
Yes, another fantasy map of regional transit in Detroit comes from John Good, who grew up near Detroit.
This time, as opposed to truly dreaming about what Detroit transit could be as we saw in the Jackson Woods’ Detroit Metro Transit map, John builds on the work that is currently being done to upgrade and improve regional transit such as: the M-1 LRT along Woodward Ave., tri-county BRT route between Macmob County, and other pieces from the 2008 “Detroit Regional Mass Transit” (PDF) plan from SEMCOG.
Two immediate thoughts:
Homelessness is a common idea of Detroit that many people hold, but what does the data really show? The Homeless Action Network of Detroit (also serving Highland Park and Hamtramck) publishes an annual report based on the people that they have worked with throughout the year. The best metric that they have is of individuals who report being homeless and the zipcode of their last residence. The vast majority of individuals that HAN Detroit sees have been homeless more than once and most for more than 2 years. Counting a population of homeless individuals will never be accurate or easy. This is just one example of an organization that works with 74 member organizations across the city and likely has a pretty good dataset.
What is most surprising about this data is that “eviction” and “no affordable housing” were the top 2 reasons for homelessness. The concentration of the most people reporting homelessness followed the Woodward corridor. I’m not sure if there is any real correlation there, but it isn’t surprising that a main area for renewed economic development would potentially be causing an increase in homelessness.
This map comes from Field Notes I of the Detroit Geographic and Expedition Institute.
I only recently learned more about the significance of the Hungarian population’s concentration in Southwest Detroit from the Old Delray Project. Delray was at times was called “Hunkytown” or “Little Hungry” due to the strength of this cultural population.
“A lot of residents call their neighborhood “Death Valley.” They complain about the huge trucks that rumble down the streets from Zug Island and other nearby industrial sites.
They recall fondly the great Hungarian Fancy Pastry bakery shop where you could get rum and walnut tortes. But the bakery moved to Allen Park. And the trucks keep running. And the factories that remain keep belching soot and grime across the aging, dilapidated buildings that once made Delray a place where people yearned to live.”
Delray was at one time its own incorporated village before being annexed by Detroit in 1906. The area used to be known as Belgrade, but Augustus D. Burdeno returned from the Mexican-American War in 1851 and convinced the residents to rename it after a village he had passed through in Mexico called “Del Ray.” The historic Fort Wayne is located in the northeastern corner of the area Zug Island is not far off.
This is the neighborhood where the new Detroit River International Crossing is planned to demolish most of the historic and blighted buildings.
Anyone ever visit Szabo’s Hungarian Meat Market or Kovacs Bar (closed 2011)?
Detroit Traffic Survey 1936-1937: Mass Transportation Passenger Flow During General Traffic Peak Hours, 5pm to 6pm
Thanks to redditor DetroitStalker for posting this great map!
This map uses a very innovative visualization method with the increasingly wide or narrow pathways of traffic. The method has become popular again with transit planners (see GraphServer). This map is pre-expressways, so you can see the importance of Detroit spoke streets and public transit system. Great use of data visualization in the 1930s to understand traffic flows on the street railways.
Data Driven Detroit and Loveland Technologies developed microhoods and macrohoods as part of the Motor City Mapping project funded by the Detroit Blight Taskforce. This map has been on the wall at “Mission Control” where surveyors and staff have been buzzing around for the last few months capturing every land parcel in the city with a picture and status update.
View the full interactive version HERE
Loveland Technologies has been making waves and their most recent Detroit data visualization of “Detroit building age” only adds to the awesomeness. The map reminds me of other great building visualizations from Brklynr of Brooklyn buildings block-by-block and the Waag Society similar project of Amsterdam. Now Detroit is as much or possibly even cooler than Brooklyn and Amsterdam, right?
Not all the data is quite right, but that is why feedback is important in map making.
Gwendolyn Warren was co-Director of the Detroit Geographic and Expedition Institute (DGEI) and added a wealth of information to the Field Notes III discussion paper. She had formerly led a youth group in the Fitzgerald neighborhood and met the DGEI with strong opposition before starting to work with them and eventually author a significant portion of the third discussion paper based on her experiences.
There have been a few recent calls for better data or even real time data on bicycle crashes. Detroit has been adding many bike lanes, shared lanes, and greenways over the last few years. This map may help identify where some unmet needs could benefit from bike lanes or buffered bike lanes. Key hotspots in Detroit are Midtown around Warren Ave. and Wayne State University’s campus as well as Northeast along Gratiot, specifically at the corner of Gratiot and McNichols. Hamtramck represents an interest cluster. I’m not sure if that represents better bike crash reporting in the smaller municipality, or if just more people are biking there? There is also a cluster Downtown, which could be interesting to see in the future as development increases Downtown and Woodward corridor walkability is targeted along with the M1 Rail.
Additional exciting news is the plan for buffered bike lanes on East Jefferson!
The Center for Urban Studies has put together an interesting piece over at their Drawing Detroit blog. In the name of Valentine’s Day they have utilized the Census Bureau’s data on single people.
“Singlehood in Ann Arbor and Detroit is quite popular, according to data provided by the 2012 American Community Survey. When comparing the City of Detroit to the other municipalities that make up the seven-county region, Detroit was one of only four municipalities where over 40 percent of females 15 and older have never been married.”
Read more at Drawing Detroit. . .
I was surprised to find that Southwest Detroit has a longer history of Mexican migration than I had ever thought. This map was part of the Field Notes I from the Detroit Geographic and Expedition Institute. The bold line surrounds areas of black population majority in the city.
Francis Grunow ponders on Model D about regional cooperation and efficiency. Important identity questions that match up with the definition of Detroit through our “100 Maps of Detroit” piece. There is a larger question here, but one that is critical to the future of Detroit and Michigan as a whole: “can we recognize and move past our troubled history to make Detroit better for everyone?”
“Of all the things I might change about Detroit, if I could choose just one, I would settle the question of what it means to be “from Detroit.” Of course this question is a powder keg. Identity, class, race and politics all get tied up in a pretty sticky wicket. On the one hand, it’s easy. Historically, Detroit is a pretty well defined place, growing in stages since its founding in 1701, and today, “Belle Isle to 8 Mile,” as a recent guidebook so simply suggests, is straightforward enough. You’re either from here, or not.
But, by turns, Detroit is also, equally, a state of mind, a badge of honor, and a curse for some — far too many, unfortunately. The thing is, Detroit could have had a wholly different history. It may have grown and expanded in much the same way it did, but in another version, the city would have also annexed the communities around it as it grew, and as it had done for most of its history.
[…] To see what One Detroit might look like, I did a little experiment of my own. Using the household size map as a base, and the free (but frustrating) open source GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, for short, I was able to create a new map of One Detroit, in a few easy steps.”
Even Ford Motor Company wasn’t beyond fantasizing about regional rapid transit and recognized the crucial role for rail rapid transit in the growing metro Detroit region. In the 1970 report, “Master Plan for Ford Properties” by William L. Pereira & Associates, an 81-mile rapid transit plan is laid out according to the TALUS study. At this time, supposedly a commuter line (2 trains per day) was already running between Pontiac and Detroit. The main lines important for Ford were:
Grand River-Schoolcraft Line
“[…] conveniently located for the low-income low-auto-ownership residents of the area. Six more stations serve an estensive residential corridor of about eight miles lying directly north of the site. In a second phase, the line would continue to Merriman Road […]”
Michigan-Airport Line
“[…] this line on the system originates in the Central Business District running in subway under Michigan Avenue to the Lodge Freeway and sharing some stations with the Grand River-Schoolcraft line in the CBD. […] In a second phase, the Michigan-Airport line continues along the Penn Central right-of-way, wit stations in West Dearborn and Inkster.”
The planners recognized that the feasibility and funding weren’t there for the comprehensive rapid transit system and so proposed an interim system that connected Downtown to the Metro Airport due to the expected population increase in that general area of Wayne County. This sounds much like the commuter rail development that SEMCOG is trying to establish between Ann Arbor and Detroit, over 40 years in the making.
The report closes, noting that “[…] all large scale development in the future must take into account the possibility of rapid transit.”
These mental maps of Detroit come from Jeffrey Gordon of the Detroit Geographic Expedition Institute (DGEI) and build on the “hand map” example from Detroit.
“A full time member, the cutting edge of Expedition, faces three tasks. First he must get “unlost.” We mildly haze those who are spatially illiterate and it is a condition that must be ruthlessly corrected. We simply can not take the time to explain every location that comes up in conversation. We have two potential instructors in the “Get Found” course.
[…] several different schemes can be used one after another.”
The hand map is the first example followed by these other mental maps as an important method to “unlost” in Detroit.
Do you use a different mental map to know your way around Detroit?
In response to a few comments that the last “motor vehicles in the motor city” would be better based on vehicles as a percent of population, here is the updated version with the new 2012 data. I actually think it might even be better to look at vehicles available per household, but the Census is still an imperfect measure of vehicle ownership.
I could go on for a few paragraphs, but the short answer is that Detroit needs a public transit system.
We originally shared a post from Jackson Woods (jwcons) and his proposal for Detroit Area Rapid Transit (DART) fantasy transit map, which received over 12,000 views and 3,000+ shares on Facebook. I was finally able to track him down and found out that he has some great route and design updates to the map, which was recently featured in a Wired Magazine piece on fantasy maps. He has shared the absolutely most up to date version with us. Here is a snippet about the map from Jackson’s new website:
“My first attempt at a Detroit rapid transit map was based on a specific historical what-if: what if Detroit had built a metro system during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Atlanta, Washington, DC, and the Bay Area were building MARTA, Metro, and BART respectively? The new map is more expansive, and it’s more of a best case or dream scenario. Since the 1980s, Los Angeles has made a major effort to build a modern rapid transit system, going from nothing to about 90 miles of track in less than 25 years with much more still to come thanks to Measure R. What if the Detroit region were able to take a similar course?
What I ended up with is surely deserving of the title “fantasy map.” The Detroit Metro is a system comprised of 155 miles of track and 119 stations. This compares to the 90 miles of track and counting in LA, 129 miles with 97 stations in Washington once the new Silver Line is completed in 2018, and about 220 miles of track with 145 stations in Chicago. The circumferential St. Clair line is a big contributor and the main layout difference from my earlier map, adding nearly 40 miles of track on its own. If your fantasy maps need to have stricter limits to be enjoyable for their plausibility, just imagine the map without it.”
This map was published in Discussion Paper No. 1 from the Detroit Geographical Expedition led by William Bunge. It is interesting to see that the areas with the highest percentage of deteriorating or dilapidated houses are focused in areas at the time that were predominately low-income and minority communities. Today those same areas of Detroit are the focus of massive development along the Woodward Corridor, Corktown, Southwest, and along the Riverfront.
This is an important map as independent groups, led by Dan Gilbert, attempt to tear down every vacant structure in the city. In 2009, the Detroit Residential Parcel Survey helped inform Mayor Bing’s initiative to tear down 10,000 blighted structures even though the DRPS recommended that only 3,480 needed to be demolished. Mayor Bing was able to demolish 8,966 structures during his term. Now the Motor City Mapping initiative (Loveland Technologies & Data Driven Detroit), funded by the independent Blight Authority is completing a repeat survey and including every single structure in the city.
“Maybe I’m out of my mind, which I am for various reasons,” he said. “You get these structures down and, I mean, all of them, not most of them, all of them.” – Dan Gilbert
It is unclear what year this map is from, but my guess is around 2009. The map includes Detroit Future City (DFC) demonstration areas which would have come at the beginning of the DFC process. The map demonstrates how there Detroit’s core has been devoid of development and strong neighborhoods which in turn caused the population to move to the outer edges of the city or to move out of the city all together. Most telling is the “steady” distinction along the Woodward corridor surrounded by a sea of red “distressed” areas.
Detroit Free Press can we get a year reference on this data?
The theme of mapping birthplaces began, I think, when redditor “pete8789” made a map of “Number of US Presidents born in each State,” others followed including, Birthplaces of: South African Presidents, French Presidents, New Zealand Prime Ministers, Leaders of the Soviet Union, Australian Prime Ministers, Swedish Prime Ministers, Dutch Prime Ministers, etc.
I think Detroit should be a part of the fad and has a very interesting map that reaches across the Atlantic showing Detroit’s days as a “frontier town.” The majority of early Mayors came from states on the East Coast, which is not surprising given the level of immigration moving from the East to the Midwest. Detroit was a main way point as immigrants made their way West to new areas of the United States. Detroit’s proximity to Canada earned it two Mayors born in Ontario. Emblematic of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South starting in 1910, Detroit had one Mayor who was born in the South, Coleman Young. His family moved to Detroit in 1923 and he began working for the Ford Motor Company.
In the last 130 years only 9 Mayors were born outside of the City of Detroit.
Source: Wikipedia
DETROITography 