On the south edge of Detroit, the one-and-a-half-mile Ambassador Bridge rises 152 feet above the Detroit River. Here, the state of Michigan curls over a peninsula that juts out from the Canadian province of Ontario. The city of Windsor, Ontario, is on that peninsula, and, in a quirk of geography, in order to cross over from the United States to Canada, drivers must go south.
Ten thousand trucks and four thousand cars make that crossing daily on four lanes of highway. The only other passage here between the two countries is the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, thirty blocks east. The Ambassador Bridge is said to be the busiest international border crossing in North America; the tunnel is said to be the second busiest. For more than a decade, business interests and the governments of the United States and Canada have wanted to build a second bridge.
Unlike the Ambassador Bridge—a private span owned by billionaire Manuel Moroun of Grosse Pointe, Michigan—the new bridge, which is now being constructed, has long been conceived as a public-private partnership. By 2008, a site was chosen and a draft environmental impact statement drawn up for the project. Plans called for the bridge to cut through the Delray neighborhood south and west of both downtown Detroit and the Ambassador Bridge. There are acres of vacant land and scores of empty homes.
But hundreds of people still live there. Most are older and retired, and many live with health conditions including diabetes and lung ailments, says Simone Sagovac, who has spent nearly a decade helping community residents organize their response to the project. An early draft plan threatened a historic Hungarian church. After public objections, she explains, “all they did was kick it up to an old African American part of Delray”—where it encroached on the city’s oldest Latin American church.
“What people recognized back then was, it’s probably going to happen,” Sagovac says. “There was probably no way to stop it, going up against two federal governments.”
But still, over the course of nearly a decade, the Delray neighborhood’s residents organized, paid visits to the state capitol in Lansing, collected information, and pleaded their case to planners and lawmakers. If the community would be irrevocably sundered by a new bridge, it was going to get something in return.
Across the United States, in neighborhood after neighborhood, major projects have come coupled with favors to make the deal more appealing: new jobs, a boost to the municipal tax base, or an infusion into local infrastructure. It’s a trend that goes back to the early urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s, says John Goldstein, a retired union leader and community development activist who now lives in Newark, New Jersey, and works with neighborhood groups around the country.
“A big part of urban renewal was government investment,” Goldstein says. “Developers and contractors realized there was a lot of money to be made in what was initially supposed to be the development of blighted areas. That was transformed into government subsidies.”
Over time, he continues, the development of public projects “became, really, a process for transferring wealth—government resources—using tax money to pay for infrastructure and tax abatements.” Public services like schools and transit were strained as the taxes that people paid to support them were “transferred to the benefit of developers.”
But then, starting on the West Coast, community residents began to understand the connection between declining municipal services and increasing public support for private development, and the movement for community development benefits emerged. California organizations including the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy in Oakland, and the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, Goldstein says, “began to understand and unravel what had become a consistent form of economic development across the country.”
During the past two decades, the movement has spread. Today, Goldstein is collaborating with a colleague on a database of projects around the country that include equitable benefits agreements. So far, they have informally catalogued about a hundred communities, large and small, around the country where residents have organized to develop some kind of benefit deal in connection with projects.
Where development is concerned, “it is transforming the rules of the game into a situation where taxpayers and community residents are stakeholders,” Goldstein says. “Fifteen years ago, developers were saying, ‘You don’t know anything about this. This is our money.’ Now, we’re saying, ‘It’s not your money, it’s our money.’ ”
When residents began to understand the connection between declining municipal services and increasing support for private development, the movement for community development benefits emerged.
The city of Detroit offers one glimpse into the fight for equitable community benefits—at once a road map and a cautionary tale. It’s a fight that is being replicated across the country as communities organize to ensure that new development projects meet their own needs, not just those of wealthy investors or political bosses.
Detroit’s community benefits movement has “taken a number of forms,” notes David Reynolds, a labor educator at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “There’s been a number of groups that have pushed in different ways and found different opportunities. It’s definitely gotten put on the table and in the conversation in Detroit.”
Reynolds sits on the board of Doing Development Differently in Metro Detroit, or D4 for short. Organized in 2010, the nonprofit advises community groups on development benefits campaigns. Sam Butler, D4’s executive director, sees Detroit as “behind some other cities in terms of really codifying [benefits agreements] into our development practice.” But it is also, he says, positioned to “take a leadership role” among the Midwest’s post-industrial cities in bringing community development to the forefront.
It hasn’t been easy. John Philo, a lawyer who advises community benefits organizers on strategy and helps negotiate agreements, says the movement’s growth in Motor City has happened in “fits and starts.”
Philo is executive and legal director of the Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice, a Detroit-based nonprofit. The center works not only in its home city but across the country, advocating for and representing low-income people, their families, and the community groups that come together to exercise their collective power via a broad policy agenda.
It has helped campaigns pass living wage ordinances, raising local minimum wages to a level where they might support families. It has taken on issues including wage-theft, discrimination, and environmental racism. And, as the center states on its website, its mission includes “seeking real economic and quality of life benefits for communities impacted by large-scale development projects.”
In that sphere, the organization tries to negotiate directly with developers, framing the case for community benefits in moral terms. As Philo puts it, “For God’s sake, it’s the community that is giving the tax breaks that make these projects possible.”
The late Mike Ilitch had a classic working-class-to-riches success story. The son of a tool and die maker who migrated to the United States from Macedonia with his wife, Ilitch had, by the age of thirty, already retired from a short career playing shortstop in the minor leagues, including the Detroit Tigers’ farm club. He went on to start a pizza shop that grew into what is now Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc., the third-largest mass-market pizza chain after Pizza Hut and Domino’s.
With wealth fueled by fast-food pizza, Ilitch in 1982 bought the Detroit Red Wings hockey team and ten years later the Detroit Tigers. His privately held company, Ilitch Holdings, folded the teams into a subsidiary called Olympia Entertainment. By 2016, the year before he died, Ilitch and his wife, Marian, were ranked at number eighty-six on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $5.8 billion.
In 2012, wanting a new arena for the Red Wings, the family company, through its subsidiary Olympia Development of Michigan, persuaded the Michigan state legislature and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation to allow the construction of a new facility in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood, northwest of downtown. It also persuaded the state to let taxpayers pick up 58 percent of the $450 million project tab—$261 million—siphoning the money from a fund meant for schools.
This wasn’t the first time that Ilitch Holdings used public money to subsidize a sports arena. In 2000, Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority agreed to pay about 40 percent of the cost of a new Tigers stadium.
Lawyer Francis Grunow grew up near the Cass Corridor area. With friends from the targeted neighborhood, whom he describes as a mix of “small business owners, professionals, and social justice activists,” they organized a response. Rather than try to block the arena (“It seemed like the fate of the project was sealed once it got financing from the state level,” Grunow says), they sought to co-opt the positive spin that the project’s boosters had used to sell it.
Olympia Development had promised to revive an area that had suffered from years of underinvestment; to live up to that promise, Grunow and others argued, would require taking residents’ concerns seriously. They researched other community benefits deals from around the country and sought a formal agreement from the city and the arena’s developers.
Instead, they got a city council resolution establishing a Neighborhood Advisory Committee for the arena district. Although this fell short of their goal, the members of Grunow’s group embraced it as at least a foot in the door. With members, including Grunow, appointed to the body, they canvassed neighborhood residents, small business owners, and social service organizations and held a couple of community meetings.
“People were concerned about displacement,” Grunow says. “They were concerned about the affordability of the neighborhood.” They wanted the developers—who owned at least 60 percent of the properties in the fifty-block “District Detroit” area where the arena would be built—to take into account local concerns for historic preservation. There were worries about traffic congestion around the arena on game or event nights. And they wanted to be sure there would be jobs for neighborhood residents.
Detroit, in fact, already had an executive order from City Hall requiring that projects benefiting from city help must strive to hire at least 51 percent of the construction workforce from the local community. The Neighborhood Advisory Committee made that part of its pitch. But the promise of local jobs also fueled resistance to robust benefits demands. Construction unions strongly backed the arena project, effectively weakening the voice of the community advisory body as it sought more on behalf of the entire neighborhood. “It felt like we were being pitted against what we thought were mutually beneficial interests,” Grunow says.
Still, when the advisory committee ended its five-year term this past summer, it pointed to accomplishments: the preservation of two affordably priced apartment blocks threatened with demolition by the developers, and an agreement by Olympia Development to create more than 700 residential units in a group of historic properties. But disputes over whether and how to mitigate traffic problems remained largely unresolved.
Among its final recommendations, the committee declared that “the city of Detroit and local community need continued advocacy and accountability for neighborhood issues” that the advisory committee had raised.
The challenges that activists, and later the Neighborhood Advisory Committee, faced in dealing with Olympia and the Little Caesars Arena were in many ways typical of those faced by others on previous projects. For many years, “it was very difficult here in Detroit to get developers to sit across the table from community groups,” Philo says. And when it came to one of the most common trade-offs, the city requirement for local hiring, “there’s almost no accountability from the city or the planning department once the project gets started. There’s no incentive to see the jobs actually get delivered.”
Three years ago, the Sugar Law Center and other Detroit development benefits activists worked to get a measure on the ballot that would require developers to agree to binding community benefits agreements for projects costing at least $15 million and receiving at least $300,000 in government support in the form of tax credits, land transfers, or other means.
After a lengthy battle with City Hall to get the proposed law on the ballot, the city council, the mayor’s office, and the development community got behind a weaker version with higher thresholds for projects: at least $75 million in costs and $1 million in public investment. The weaker measure passed. Philo and others who had worked for the more stringent requirements were disappointed, but have since begun a campaign to strengthen the provision.
For nine years, Simone Sagovac worked with residents of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood to mitigate as much as possible the problems caused by what would eventually be named the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Back in 2008, a draft environmental impact study for the project caused alarm—not because it predicted problems, but because it didn’t, even when they should have been obvious.
“It had a couple of startling conclusions,” Sagovac says of that report. “Truck traffic was going to more than double, but air quality was going to improve.”
There was talk of a lawsuit over the environmental study and the project’s actual likely impact, but the cost—Sagovac estimates it would have been $90,000—was prohibitive. When Manuel Moroun, the other, private bridge’s owner, sued on his own and eventually lost, the wisdom of not suing was essentially confirmed.
Political wrangling over the bridge held up its development, until eventually the Canadian government agreed to bear the entire cost. Neighborhood residents formed the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition, and the Canadian Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority became the chief entity with which the coalition negotiated.
And in the summer of 2017, after several more years of work, the organizations involved negotiated an extensive list of benefits for which the city and the state would provide funding. These included health and air quality monitoring; job training and placement so that local residents could fill the next round of construction jobs; an option for homeowners to either voluntarily move to escape noise and pollution, or be outfitted with new windows and air filters should they choose to stay; and safe pedestrian crossings enabling people who live in the immediate area to safely get to a nearby clinic.
The cost of those amenities totaled more than $50 million. And more benefits are promised as work gets underway and additional provisions are negotiated, according to the coalition.
Construction of the new bridge began in late 2018; it is expected to be completed in 2024. But the benefits to the community will go on for decades. Sagovac ascribes the coalition’s success to a series of lessons: “Always being truthful and standing by what the community’s needs are. Taking every opportunity to get in front of legislators. Arming yourself with your own information. Going to see what is done elsewhere.”
Another lesson, she adds, is “realizing that everybody involved in this is a human being. Can we reach people at the human level? You have to find common ground going forward.”
There have been other successes. The most recent involved a smaller development project, an apartment and retail building being built without public funds: The voluntary agreement calls for more than 20 percent of the residential units in the building to be provided at rents affordable for people paid 80 percent of the area’s median income. Both D4 and the Sugar Law Center were involved in providing legal and technical support to the project.
Butler, of D4, credits the community benefits ordinance, even in its weakened form, with helping change the conversation.
“One of the greatest benefits it has brought is [to get] Detroit public officials—and even Michigan public officials—talking about community benefits and what it means in social equity in the development process.”