AGabor

By Alexandra Adelina Nita

When Katrina Watkins thinks back to the start of her community organizing in Detroit’s McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, she remembers a pivotal conversation she had with two college students.

James Scott Douglas and Joe Gruber came from the University of Detroit Mercy in 2014 to interview Willie Watkins, Katrina’s father. A grandchild of the Great Migration, the elder Watkins had “lived in Black Bottom, partied in Paradise Valley,” two historically Black neighborhoods in southeast Detroit. The city demolished them and displaced their residents in the late 1950s and early 1960s to build the I-375 freeway.

Detroit had changed in other ways that would also come to influence Watkins’s evolution as a community organizer. Automobile manufacturers, which had dominated Detroit’s economy for close to a century, were devastated by foreign competition, and came near to declaring bankruptcy; beginning in 2000, Detroit lost jobs every year for 10 years straight. As a result, automakers began shifting their operations to the less-unionized South, slashing worker pay and benefits. (Last year’s United Auto Workers strike was staged, in part, to undo the most recent large-scale concessions by the union during the Great Recession of 2008.) Finally, financial mismanagement led the city to declare the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013. 

By the time the students arrived on Watkins’s doorstep, Detroit’s population was in free fall and would reach about 600,000 in 2023, down from its historic height of over 1.8 million in 1950. As residents abandoned the city, neighborhoods like McDougall-Hunt suffered the consequences. During the decade ending in 2010, the neighborhood lost 43 percent of its population, nearly three-times the city’s average population decline during that period.

Abandoned houses and vacant lots encircled the properties where Watkins and her sister live, some becoming spaces for drug use and prostitution. Watkins and her neighbors wanted to restore the quiet and the sense of safety they felt living in the neighborhood, but realized they couldn’t rely on the city.

When Douglas and Gruber finished talking to Watkins’ father, they asked Katrina Watkins what she wanted to see for her neighborhood. “I told them, ‘I just want to clean up my community and if I could do anything, it would be to clear the lots across the street from my home,’” which she said had become overgrown and unsightly.

The students helped Watkins and her neighbors do just that. As part of their master’s project in community development, Douglas and Gruber collaborated with Watkins to help her connect with city agencies like the Detroit Land Bank and state agencies like the Michigan Department of Transportation to clear 16 lots of vacant land.

But Watkins, accustomed to wearing many hats — she is a former social worker and current part-time accountant for home-based businesses — had bigger plans. As the founder of the nonprofit Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation, she would oversee projects that included the reopening of the Calcara Park’s baseball diamond in 2017; the construction of Bailey Park (with the later addition of playground equipment and a grounds crew); and the creation of a mural by artist Ivan Montoya through Detroit’s City Wall Project. The refurbished Franklin Wright Settlements house serves as a community center where, among other things, children attend after-school programs.

In the meantime, Detroit changed yet again. A decade after filing bankruptcy, the city achieved an investment-grade credit rating, and is now working with private real estate developers to build luxury condominiums downtown and with Ford to build campuses for its tech workers.

McDougall-Hunt has the benefit of being located on the periphery of downtown. But the neighborhood, which is 93 percent Black, is also poor, with about 36 percent of its residents making $25,000 to $34,999 a year. The city average income is about $37,761. So far, Detroit’s self-described revitalization has attracted wealthier, largely white transplants to the majority Black city without closing a racial wealth gap formed through decades of previous white flight. 

The city has collaborated with Watkins by allowing her to purchase lots from the land bank, which controls vacant and foreclosed properties and sells them either to developers or directly to residents. Residents can purchase up to ten lots a year from the Land Bank without having to receive authorization from the Detroit City Council. Watkins called the city’s asking price of $1,800 per lot, “very, very reasonable”; Bailey Park has relied, in part, on crowdfunding to purchase lots.

Watkins was clear on what her long-term goal for McDougall-Hunt is: “We would like some commercial [development] and maybe some market rate, but we want mostly affordable.” Watkins said, adding that she is in talks with a nonprofit to buy land.

Building affordable housing in Detroit, however, is a challenge. “Development is expensive, and it either has to charge a lot for rent for purchase or it needs subsidies,” said Tom Goddeeris, the chief operating officer of Detroit Future City, an urban planning think tank that has partnered with the Bailey Park community.

Goddeeris estimates that building a single-family home in Detroit — the city’s most prevalent form of housing — would cost $400,000 for 1,000 square feet. The city’s median home selling price was under $100,000 in 2022 and many of those were in poor condition.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determines the affordability of rents by calculating an area’s average median income (AMI), but it lumps together Detroit and its wealthier suburbs, where average incomes run as high as double the city’s average.

“The rents that you can charge in Detroit aren’t exorbitantly high if you looked at it region-wide or even nationwide, but they’re not serving the majority of our population,” said Goddeeris.

Watkins’s neighbors agree.

“What’s happening in Detroit now is gentrification,” said Kevin Jones, a youth mentor and basketball coach, who is known in the neighborhood by his nickname — Coach Kellog. “They got this new building they just built off the riverfront, probably about five or six thousand dollars a month. So eventually, that’s a form of pushing out the old and welcoming the new,” he said.

While Detroit lacks the jurisdiction to create its own AMI guidelines, its law department proposed possible incentives for affordable development like fee reductions and waivers in 2021. To keep housing affordable for the long-term, it also suggested that the city lobby for Michigan to legalize rent-control laws.

Subsidies for affordable housing are limited, according to Oren Brandvain, a director at the nonprofit Develop Detroit. The organization funds its projects, in part, through federal low-income tax housing credits. But these are scarce. Brandvain said that in Detroit only two-to-three developers a year receive them, which he estimates is enough to build 300 housing units, a fraction of the more than 46,000 needed last year.

“Every year all the developers are forced to compete for the same small pot” of money, he said.

Bailey Park is only one of the many community groups in Detroit attempting to navigate that reality. Detroit Future City’s Goddeeris estimates there are 30 to 40 community based development organizations in Detroit with some paid staff, and many other voluntary community groups. Despite Watkins’s success at transforming vacant land into community spaces, the obstacles her group faces in building affordable housing highlight the scale of the challenges that lie ahead for the rest of Detroit’s far-flung neighborhoods.

By Regina Martinez

In the summer of 2007, Farmer Jack, a Detroit-based supermarket chain, closed its last store in the city. The departure followed decades of de-industrialization, outsourcing and population decline that already had seen other grocery chains abandon the metro area.

That left mainly convenience stores and small grocers, which found it uneconomical to carry a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. Detroit, 80 percent Black, saw itself with little access to fresh produce and other vital provisions.

In 2006, lifelong Detroiter Malik Yakini began guerrilla farming — the gardening equivalent of squatting — on a small plot of land in Detroit’s Rouge Park. “Instead of us just complaining that there’s not good access to food in Detroit,” said Yakini, he was determined to see if a guerrilla garden could be used “to transform ourselves and transform our conditions.”

Yakini’s garden grew into Detroit’s largest urban farm, D-Town Farm, occupying more than seven acres. Using regenerative methods like large-scale composting, rainwater retention, solar energy and beekeeping, the farm grows more than 30 varieties of fruits, vegetables and herbs each year. D-Town focuses on growing relationships as well. By working with volunteer groups, college students and community members, the farm maintains its hoop houses, which extend the growing season in a city where freezing temperatures can last from November to March, as well as a children’s area and a public event space.

Now, at 68, Yakini is the executive director of Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN). A nonprofit organization he founded in 2008 to combat food insecurity, DBCFSN is a wide-ranging Black-owned food enterprise aimed at building “self-reliance in Detroit’s Black community.”

In May, DBCFSN opened The Detroit Food Commons, a two-story, 31,000-square-foot project in partnership with Develop Detroit Inc., a full-service, non-profit real estate development company. On the first floor, The Detroit People’s Food Co-op is a community owned grocery store that sells fresh produce from D-Town Farms, local vendors and commercial distributors. The second floor includes DBCFSN’s offices, four culinary grade kitchens and a banquet hall.

To finance the co-op, Yakini had to reevaluate his core beliefs. Yakini’s first exposure to gardening was in his grandfather Austin W. Burton Sr.’s backyard garden; Burton had moved from Georgia to Detroit like many other African Americans during the Great Migration. Yakini learned to value the earth and, conversely, to hate capitalism, which he saw as exploitative of the Black community.

However, as the Food Commons start-up costs rose to $22 million, Yakini began to adapt his thinking. “I realize that we live in the United States of America in 2024, and if you want to do some things, you have to have money,” he said. 

Partnering with the non-profit Develop Detroit in 2017 “brought additional contacts and credibility,” Yakini said, which, in turn, attracted investors, donations, grants and loans. That partnership gave Yakini the legitimacy that a “crazy dude with dreadlocks always talking about how much he hates capitalism,” might not otherwise have had, he said.

Still, financing the project took over a decade. 

Indeed, the biggest challenge facing Black entrepreneurs is acquiring capital. “Detroit was one of the most red-lined cities in the country,” said Brandon Reed, director of external affairs at the Michigan Black Business Alliance, an organization devoted to creating profitable Black-owned businesses and closing the racial wealth gap. According to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution, Black entrepreneurs are denied or given lower bank loans at more than twice the rate of their white peers, and when they do get loans, people of color pay higher interest rates on average than their white counterparts. 

Racial uprising and white flight

To hear Yakini tell it, the seeds of DBCFSN grew out of turmoil in the 1960s, as he witnessed Detroit beset by police brutality and racial uprisings. “You had many white people fleeing Detroit,” said Yakini. Supermarket chains fled with them to the suburbs. Today, all local Sam’s Clubs are outside of the city. 

For Yakini, establishing DBCFSN was about promoting self-reliance in the metro area. “We shouldn’t put a lot of energy into trying to convince the government to change, but we should put more energy into galvanizing and mobilizing our own energies,” he said. 

In 2009, DBCFSN helped create the Detroit Food Policy Council, an organization committed to advocating for, and educating people about, food sovereignty. Yakini defined food sovereignty as a model that consumers control and benefit from, instead of large corporations. Along with community members like Kami Pothukuchi, an urban planner at Wayne State University, and Ashley Atkinson, co-director of Keep Growing Detroit, Yakini held public listening sessions where community members could voice their concerns and suggest additions to the policy. Today the council produces Food System Reports; its most recent data shows that nearly 70 percent of Detroit are food insecure – meaning they don’t know where their next meal will come from. 

In 2007, a statistic like this might have been attributed to the lack of supermarkets, but today residents are being priced out. “Groceries are expensive,” said Nadia Nijimbere, a Detroit resident and co-owner of the East African restaurant Baobab Fare. “One of the reasons we opened a restaurant is so people can come and eat real food.” 

As gentrification raises property values and attracts new businesses, residents travel outside the metro area to shop. “When Farmer Jack closed, that’s when we all started grocery shopping in the suburbs,” said Jonathan Jenkins, a lifelong Detroiter and executive assistant at Detroit Future City. “And I still do today. It’s cheaper than going downtown.” 

Challenging this reality, the new co-op is located in Metro Detroit’s North End, a majority Black, low-income neighborhood. “We want to ensure that longtime Detroiters have access to everything that we’re doing,” said Yakini.

For the 43 percent of Detroiters who don’t own a car, the Food Commons will be accessible via the Woodward and East Euclid bus station across the street, which extends ten miles down the center of Detroit. For the 33 percent of Detroiters who are using SNAP, the store will accept EBT cards. For local organizations that might not be able to afford an event space, the communal banquet hall will be priced at four different levels. The Food Commons aims to be a hub for all community members.

According to the co-op’s website, any resident of Michigan over 21 can become a “member/owner.” It already boasts 2,300 members. A lifetime membership costs $200, which can be paid in one lump sum or spread out over ten monthly installments and comes with multiple benefits. Members vote in elections for the co-op board of directors, have a say in co-op activities and future projects, approve paying a share of profits to member/owners and receive discounts on select products. By contrast, a membership in Sam’s Club Plus, which is owned by Walmart, costs $110 per year and confers no decision-making power. 

Located near the city’s rapidly gentrifying downtown, the Food Commons’ challenge is to serve a broad customer base. “There are going to be people looking for five-dollar local kale,” while others will want “a two-dollar loaf of bread,” explained Chris Dilly, the interim general manager. “We’re trying to find a happy medium that gives people an option.” 

Yakini brought Dilly to the operation because of his nearly 30 years of experience in co-op management, chiefly at the highly successful People’s Food Co-op of Kalamazoo. 

“We’re trying to create a sense of place here, tying the grocery store to the community directly,” said Dilly, echoing Yakini’s vision. In addition to produce from D-Town Farms, the co-op will sell fruits and vegetables from mainly local black-owned farms, including Oakland Avenue Farm, Project Green, Nurturing Our Seeds, and Black Farmer Land Fund. By sourcing from local farms, the co-op is aiming to establish a circular economy — for the people and the product. The co-op will also compost and recycle waste products and try to avoid over-purchasing. 

The co-op will take three-to-four years to generate about $6 million in sales — the level it needs to turn a profit, according to Dilly. While inflation has set back the co-op’s profitability projections, Dilly noted that Yakini has created a financial cushion that will allow time for the store to reach profitability. “You have to be a genius like Malik and build in the room for losses,” he said. 

But, by then, Yakini will be long gone. 

On June 1, Yakini will step down as executive director and begin a year-long sabbatical to work on a memoir of his life. 

A year later, he will retire — presenting the ultimate challenge for his food enterprise. “We’re in a baton-passing process here,” said Yakini. Recognizing that succession planning is one of the biggest challenges for any business, DBCFSN hired a consultant to walk the organization through the process. In keeping with Yakini’s penchant for innovation, he is changing DBCFSN’s leadership model from an executive directorship to a co-directorship — one that is only now beginning to catch on among a number of organizations. Yakini will be replaced by Shakara Tyler, DBCFSNs’ fund development director, and Gi’anna Chears, the chief financial officer.

This is a “less patriarchal, more cooperative form,” Yakini said. 

That said, Tyler and Chears will have big shoes to fill if they are to realize Yakini’s vision for food sovereignty.

By Irza Waraich

Eighteen-nineties Detroit had an abundance of land and a shortage of municipal revenue and city services. To wrest control of the land from speculators, who either profited from rent or left land undeveloped, waiting for it to increase in value, then-Mayor Hazen S. Pingree introduced a property tax as the sole funding mechanism for the city’s essential public services.

By adopting a single tax on land, Pingree was following the precepts of the progressive economist Henry George, whose book Progress and Poverty was hailed at the time as “a cure for poverty and inequality,” said Polly M. Cleveland, former adjunct professor of environmental economics at Columbia University.

Pingree’s single tax targeted only land, and neither buildings nor property improvements. At a property tax rate of 2.5 percent, the city was able to fund public services, such as education, health, water, sanitation, parks, welfare and more. Before Pingree’s land taxes, all revenues came from state and local property taxes on both land and structures; there were no income, sales or business taxes.

The tax also helped lower fares on mass transit — in the form of trolley cars — making it more affordable for working-class families.

Pingree’s strategy worked. In response to the land tax, Detroit’s private sector soon teemed with small machine shops, and even lured Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers to the city.

More than a century later, Detroit is once again flirting with Georgism as a way to spur development and revitalize 19 square miles of vacant land, which comprises close to 14 percent of the city’s 139 square miles. 

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has proposed a new form of land-value taxation and is working on a ballot measure he hopes to put before voters in November. The Land-Value Tax Plan aims to increase taxes on vacant land and spur development, while offering tax relief for Detroit homeowners.

Under the proposal, 97 percent of homeowners would receive a 17 percent cut in taxes, according to the City of Detroit, which will be paid for by increasing taxes on abandoned buildings, parking lots, scrap yards and other similar properties.

The idea is to end a system in which, “blight is rewarded, and building is punished,” according to the city.

“Economists in general like land-value taxation based on the theory that you’re encouraging development and you’re discouraging speculative holding of vacant land,” said Rick Mattoon, vice president of regional analysis and engagement and Detroit regional executive for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “So that part of it makes a lot of sense. The problem is that whether it’s going to be effective really depends on a lot of local conditions.”

Today, there are few examples of land-value taxation in the U.S.  and, among the cities that have tried it, not all have been successful.

The only successful example of a modern land-value tax is in Pittsburgh, which used the system to solve a very different problem. Like many Pennsylvania municipalities, the city has played with multiple versions of land-value tax since 1913. Toward the end of the 20^th century, Pittsburgh used the land tax to help meet high downtown commercial and residential-housing demand — the mirror opposite of Detroit; taxes on structures were about twice as high as on land. The land tax was credited with spurring a higher level of construction in Pittsburgh than similar-sized cities in the Midwest that also had low-vacancy rates, but didn’t have a land tax, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

The land-value tax is also credited with helping to raise the funds needed for a redevelopment initiative known as Renaissance 2, and the creation of the Pittsburgh Light Rail System, also known as the “T.”

Additionally, Mattoon said the reason why the tax may not prove effective in Detroit is because it’s unclear how much demand there is for land, making it difficult to draw expectations from other experiments.

“It was successful in Pittsburgh, because it was only applied in the downtown area where there was a high demand for property,” Mattoon said. Apply the system across a large city where land values vary significantly, and you could see all kinds of “distortionary effects.”

Mattoon explained that the real idea behind the land-value tax is to get the land to be used for its highest and best purpose, and “that could be a parking lot,” he said, noting that not all locations are suited to the development of large commercial buildings.

Indeed, one of the most controversial aspects of the Detroit land-value tax plan is that it would double taxes on scrap yards and other land the city deems to be under-utilized. In the process, it raises concerns about how the city defines efficient land use.

“In the context of a city that’s been losing population, the development pressure isn’t everywhere,” said Tom Goddeeris, chief operating officer of Detroit Future City, a local think tank. “It’s only certain places that have become desirable.”

The high amount of empty acreage is a byproduct of Detroit’s years-long economic decline, which saw the city’s population shrink to around 630,000, down nearly two-thirds from the peak in the 1950s. Locals question the development potential of scrap yards and other underutilized properties far from downtown.

Indeed, much of Detroit’s vacant and blighted land is owned by the city — land that was abandoned or declared bankrupt — and not by private individuals, and thus would not be subject to any tax. The Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) owns over 70,000 properties, which account for 18 percent of all city property. Of the Land Bank holdings, 62,000 are vacant lots.

The land bank’s mission is “to return the city’s blighted and vacant properties to productive use,” according to its website. It has sold over 25,000 lots, rehabbed 99 properties and demolished over 15,000 properties that are deemed uninhabitable. The “Side Lot Program” also allows homeowners to purchase vacant lots that surround their homes for just $100.

However, the land bank has faced criticism on how it operates, including complex requirements for land rehabilitation and land acquisition.

“There are a lot of good people at the land bank if you deal with them on an individual basis, but institutionally, it’s still a challenging organization to work with,” said Goddeeris.

Critics note that while Detroit publishes a mowing schedule for the vacant land it owns, city-owned properties sometimes contribute to neighborhood blight. Nor is the city always amenable to planting trees on property it hopes to sell, according to Goddeeris.

“If you go down the street, there’s seven or eight burned-down houses and a bunch of junk,” said Ross Winston, the fourth-generation owner of Winston Brothers Inc., a local scrapyard. The property neighboring his business is mostly owned by the city. “The street is so rough you can’t drive your car down it. And then the one lot that we own, we maintain it, we cut the grass, we trim the tree back.”

The city has made progress in revitalizing a few areas, especially downtown and the riverfront — a three-and-a-half-mile walkway overlooking the Detroit River — and several walkways leading to it, within and around the downtown area. Several downtown development projects are currently underway or set to commence soon, including the $1.5 billion District Detroit development project, expected to introduce numerous high-end residential buildings and luxury hotels.

However, it’s unclear that the land tax can resolve the problems of far-flung neighborhoods in a diverse landscape.

For now, the land-tax strategy faces more immediate hurdles. It will need to pass the Michigan state legislature to get on the November ballot. Three earlier attempts to pass the plan failed last October. To put the ballot measure in front of Detroiters in November, it must be passed by the legislature in the summer.

The city says that international economists are hopeful for the land-value tax, with some participating in a poll expressing hope for substantial economic growth within the next 10 years.

If the ballot measure passes, Detroit homeowners could see a big tax cut in 2025. But measuring the land-value tax’s success could take years — the time it takes to redevelop vast swaths of empty land.

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