GREATER DETROIT WINDSOR LAUNCH 10/16/24 - REMARKS

REMARKS

Welcome again! I read somewhere that you can’t expect people you give speeches to remember more than three things. So if that’s one thing, I’ve only got two more! 

And I don’t know if it was the same article, but they say people start losing track of what you say after seven minutes! Here you’re out of luck, because I’ve got you on a boat for two hours! 

So I’ll try to keep those guardrails in mind though my theory this afternoon is that the greater majority of us are dyed in the wool nerds and can stand for pushing some normative boundaries when coming together on a topic like this. 

Thanks again for joining us this afternoon. We have former and current city council members from both sides of the water, as well as other local elected officials. We’ve got civil servants, policy makers, community organizers and developers, folks in academia, in civic and nonprofit leadership, consultants and business interests, philanthropy, and even a few of our friends in the media. It means so much that you’re here.

I want to thank Hudson Webber and Ford foundations for helping to underwrite seed funding for this project (and this entire boat ride) and for believing in this idea as it launches. So again, you may be asking yourself, What is the Greater Detroit Windsor Project?

I will get to that by way of a personal pandemic story. As the first year of Covid ground on, I saw people starting new hobbies: gardening, writing screen plays, getting Instagram fame. Meanwhile I became increasingly obsessed with this idea of finally pulling together something about this super sexy idea of regionalism in Metro Detroit. You know a real winner of an idea; something nobody’s thought about or worked on for the last, what, 70 years?!? 

Of course, I jest. Smart folks have been working on developing a shared vision for shared issues like transit, sprawl, schools, and economic development for decades. And it’s been rattling my cage most of my adult life. I was aware of it early. Growing up on the northwest side of Detroit in the 1980-90s, I was always so proud to call myself a Detroiter. Yet at the same time, I had an undeniable sense that Detroit was a broken place that the region had largely abandoned; it had as much to do with the places that weren’t Detroit as it did with the city itself.

Going to Detroit Public Schools, I was lucky to attend places like Ludington Middle School and Cass Tech. My classmates and teachers gave me a first rate education, but I knew well we didn’t have the resources some suburban schools had. Taking the bus to high school on Grand River is seared into my mind’s eye as it afforded a nominal opportunity of freedom of mobility yet made me painfully aware that when you miss a bus, or it never comes, with a 30 minute headway and the cold of a January morning whips winds through an unsheltered bus stop on one of Metro Detroit’s main arteries, it can make a 15 year old wonder where his region’s priorities are, and whether there’s any future here for him. 

But I loved my city and wanted to understand cities better to help mine work better. I moved to New York in the early 1990s–back when getting across the river to Windsor as a 19 year old was a much easier thing to do–and went to study urban planning, policy, and eventually the law. I came to develop a deeper grasp of places like Metro Detroit; how they can pull away from their centers, empower hundreds of separate fiefdoms, each with their own priorities, often at the expense of the greater whole. Since moving back home nearly 25 years ago, I’ve become enamored with the theories of folks like Myron Orfield, David Rusk, and Heather McGhee who coined terms like metro fragmentation, phrases like elastic and inelastic cities, and book titles like, the Sum of Us, to try to make sense of the socioeconomic dynamics and inequity we see in places like Metro Detroit.

This came to something of a head in 2010 when I was in law school, digging into the conundrum of Home Rule in Michigan, and how the state’s views on local control can be complicit in this dynamic of dysfunction; how it allows places to work together, but so rarely takes a stand for a greater good. At the time, the idea of a Constitutional Convention was very appealing to me: Let’s rewrite Home Rule! Let’s implement regional government! Well, we didn’t vote for a convention that year and my thoughts have evolved a bit since then… though the next opportunity to vote for a convention is in 2026!!!

I’ve been thinking and writing about regionalism in Detroit a lot since then. My friend and co-conspirator on this effort, Mike Smith who’s now at Invest Detroit, said to me in 2017, “How would you feel about working on this issue for the next 25 years and not have anything to show for it.” I thought, “What if there was a chance we could actually move the needle? Sign me up!!! And, well now since I just turned 50 this year, I figured I better get going.” 

Mike challenged me to start thinking about a framework and an action plan. I had something of a random epiphany when I saw images of the region from space at night, and it occurred to me that there were no municipal boundaries clearly evident from that perspective. With just the lights of our communities, it was clearly evident that we’re all one big blob, or more accurately, one economic unit, including Windsor, from Monroe to New Baltimore, Ann Arbor to Amherstburg, Pontiac to Tecumseh. Where we turn on the lights, we support life. It’s where we invest in infrastructure– neighborhoods, offices, main streets, and we’re often just as likely to go to work, school, parks, a ball game, concert, dinner, in any one of these communities as any other. And when we don’t it’s often because we can’t, we’re prevented from or we actively prevent our neighbors from participating. 

Wouldn’t a strategy for managing ourselves be a goal to maximize the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people living in this light? Wouldn’t that be a sound organizing principle?

Fast forward to my Covid ruminations and the continued prodding of Mike Smith, intellectual sounding board Ann Bueche to develop the concept and build a vehicle for funding this work. In 2021 I submitted a paper and presentation for the Environmental Design Research Association’s virtual conference in Detroit that year.

That exercise got me thinking about reframing three ways to move the idea forward: first, presenting data in a regional way, that illuminates the opportunities as much as the disconnects; two, using this data to develop narratives that appeal to our more enlightened self interest about Metro Detroit’s possibilities rather than about the failures of its past, and, three thinking about ways to incentivize a new generation of stakeholders, including electeds to behave in a more and more collaborative manner over the course of their careers, during a 20-30 year horizon.

After the conference I hosted a number of subsequent Zooms to a growing “Coalition of the Willing” which included discussion and a survey, which was eventually filled out by over 100 of you, and a growing list of contacts, now numbering around 400.

A second Zoom ensued with “Findings from the Survey and Next Steps”, where I used the fact that most people who answered believed that philanthropy was essential in this stage of the conversation. This grew to an additional brain trust of Don Jones, Mike Shaw, Matt Lewis, and eventually Erin Casey - our founding advisory board member. We worked to develop a tiered budget and encouraged friends at Hudson Webber and Community Foundation, and eventually Ford to get involved with startup resources, which began earlier this year.

I’ve been having a series of one on one conversations, with several of you. I’ve since learned more about how things like  sports allegiances could be used as a way to break down barriers across the region, how Wayne County, and counties in general can play a bigger role in leading progressive regional decision making, and the very exciting work that’s happening to bring together Detroit and Windsor leaders to take bi-national action around positioning strategic assets for mutual benefit. Yes, this is truly an international opportunity. 

In addition to these conversations with individuals, this first year of funding we’ll fill out the Advisory Board, hopefully made up of some of you! We’ll launch a website and social media presence to begin to engage a broader audience to start signaling some of these ideas. We’ve also begun working on a survey of both elected officials as well as candidates to local office about their sentiments related to regional collaboration with our friends at Detroitography, as well as Erin and Lauren Hood, of the Black Thriving Index. We plan to launch those next year in time for the 2025 election cycle. These answers will serve as a baseline going forward, and hopefully will help inform what could be a first targeted issue and feed into a case statement for a multi year funding proposal.

I don’t intend to create another organization. But I believe we need to model behavior over time for existing organizations so that a new generation can leverage successes and operate in a new paradigm. Maybe even one that demands a regionalized government?

I hope to get us together again over the next year to showcase these outcomes and get us excited about what’s next. I certainly don’t pretend to have an answer or a grand vision for exactly what we should do, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist or that we all can’t work together on imagining something else. If the last century was defined by lines and borders, why can’t this one be the story of how Greater Detroit-Windsor cooperated better than everyone?

We are starting to model ways, through greenways, making incremental progress on transit, and acknowledging the growing threat of climate change. A recent World Bank study says climate refugees are already on the move around the globe, with as many as 200 million people displaced in just the next several decades; we know it’s happening here, too. We have a region with the bones of infrastructure to accommodate millions more. If we could get ahead of that together, create a goal to capture one half of one percent - a million people. Just imagine the template we could model, the economic benefit we could reap, and the beautiful city and region we could build together.

The Greater Detroit Windsor Project aims to build this capacity with your help, input, and guidance. At the end of the day, the two things that I hope you remember are - one, the fact we’re all neighbors here on both sides of the water, despite what imaginary lines and boundaries say on a piece of paper. separating us. And two, we are well positioned to unleash the power of a city to become its best self, an international metropolis that is stronger, more dynamic, more equitable, and greater because it is the sum of all of us working as neighbors.

Again, thank you so much for your attention and your attendance this afternoon. Please sign our boards commemorating this event, and add a wish for Greater Detroit-Windsor. Let us know what your dreams for the metropolis are! Then, please grab a drink and bite, mix and mingle and introduce yourself to someone new if you haven’t already!