Word: detroiters
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...late March a star urban planner named Toni Griffin will begin a new assignment. She'll help lead what might be the most ambitious urban makeover in American history - the downsizing of Detroit, a city built to accommodate a population more than twice its current size. At a recent panel convened by TIME and the Brookings Institution, Mayor Dave Bing made clear what many had suspected - that he intends to shrink the city, which cannot afford to serve dying neighborhoods...
...considerable national reputation. Enter Rip Rapson, president of the $3.1 billion Kresge Foundation. While Griffin will work inside the city's planning department, she won't be on the public payroll. Her salary, plus the cost of assembling a team of consultants, is covered by Kresge. (See pictures of Detroit's decline...
Philanthropic dollars are seeding the reinvention of Detroit. Demographer Kurt Metzger heads up Data Driven Detroit (DDD), an agency that just completed a plot-by-plot analysis of the city's 139-square-mile footprint, without which Griffin would be flying blind. DDD is backed by $1.85 million from the Kresge and Skillman foundations. Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for the Detroit public schools, draws one-third of his $425,000 salary from an alliance of philanthropies led by the Eli Broad Foundation. And if all goes according to plan, Detroit will break ground this year on a trolley line...
These are heady days in Detroit. After decades of false starts, the city is finally starting to see movement. Major efforts are under way to consolidate neighborhoods (one-third of Detroit's residential parcels are vacant lots or empty homes), close failing schools (one-third of Detroit children attend schools that rank among the state's bottom 5%), invest in new-economy job creation (one-quarter of Detroiters are officially unemployed) and improve its woeful public-transportation system. (See pictures of school kids in Detroit...
...Remember Yemen? For a few short weeks this winter, after the Yemen-trained Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried (and failed) to blow up a commercial airliner in Detroit, the troubled country found itself under a rare media spotlight ... And now: nothing ... [U.S. policy toward Yemen] requires a sustained focus from policymakers and analysts (and even reporters!)--not a reactive approach...