Process for change - Breakout 3

Process For Change – BREAKOUT 3 (Facilitated by Donele Wilkins)

• Coordinating community ideas with city action
• Educating entire city home by home about engagement opportunities
• Start young
• Schools?
• CDC’S resources and energy towards actually organizing neighborhoods
• Better coordination between city agencies w/ overlapping responsibilities
• Create an Office of Sustainability to coordinate all actions
• Citizen representation
• Transparency of city functions

• Better public info
• Budgeting
• Specific allocations
• Actual use
• Community benefits
• Business incentives for sustainability work/jobs creation
• Look at what residents in mostly abandoned areas as people who have done something right to keep their homes
• Use as community anchor points
• Develop incentives for residents to serve in their communities and take ownership of their “struggling” neighborhoods
• How to take the reasons behind DWP and make it work for residents (density concerns)
• Talk to residents in those less dense communities
• Need to change mindset of how to inform process and reach assets of those not in the conversations
• Use lived experience
• Change message: “we need you” to actually reach residents in affected areas
• Are we about people or about profits of displacement
• Need to get out of box and not go where we’ve been
• Need to figure out way to engage community in neighborhoods and reverse disinvestment
• Decentralize input and decision-making
• Need info/availability/incentives/education to help residents create businesses instead of just looking outside limits for companies
• How do we get the city to both facilitate and get out of the way of local business
• Preferential treatment
• Tie into office of sustainability
• Need to be able to demonstrate value of your new business/org/project
• Need to take into account environmental and social value, not just economic
• Need to take ideal development model and present it to the city
• Develop a mktng package for city to take to streets
• Show ideas of sustainability to thrive, not just survive
• Needto address system of real estate
• Need fundamental shift in concept of land ownership
• Respect desires for density or lack thereof
• Citizen say over how saved money from downsizing should be spent
• Can’t take services and community from residents and give nothing inreturn
• Tax revenue - redistribution
• Allow community say over what to do with cleared/vacant land
• Alt. energy
• Bioremediation
• Remaining residents as stewards of those projects
• Issues of race and environmental justice to be considered across/throughout/integrated with all issues
• Need holistic sustainability approach
• Train people around environmental injustice
• Areas with historically high death/illness
• People and stewardship 1st over profit
• Holistic, realistic, humanistic – heal hurts of race and environmental damage
• Not to be all handed over to city
• We need to do it
• Want organizational charts and contact info for all city departments/duties
• Database of commonly requested documents online
• Permits
• Business forms
• Etc.
• Seek native Detroiter “celebrity” spokesperson to raise consciousness & urgency
• Balance corporate welfare (tax incentives) with the welfare of residents
• Historically imbalanced

Land Use

• Clear deeds and demolish vacant bldgs in batches/concentrated areas
• Issues with ownership
• Concerns with open/dangerous
• Efficiency, not chaos
• Detroit Land Bank
• Who governs it?
• How does it function?
• How is it growing or not?
• Compliments to city service delivery last two years
• Answering phone
• Waste collection
• Farm-a-lot regulations, paperwork and limitations poorly conceived and cut out many farmers
• No soil improvement
• No rain water allowed
• If high rises along Jefferson could purchase land across street for community gardening
• Concerns over gardening on brownfield sites and garden permits
• Cannot address contaminated soil on sites due to code
• Capture demolition materials
• Deconstruct& reuse brick from commercial bldgs/rejected concrete
• Brightmoor’s huge cleanup
• Need easier access/process to lots
• Acquisition
• Permits : why 50 applications for 50 lots?
• Many issues of land use management solved by local control of:
• Use
• Ownership and/or control of assets
• demolitions
• vacant land use
• don’t allow uncontrolled building, suburbaniztion
• consider aesthetics
• If Detroit is “ground zero” for brownfields, where is $$?
• What’s happening with vacant schools/fields?
• Problems w/ historic zoning conflict with desired current uses
• Historically polluted, heavy industry in same neighborhoods, now have heavy industry where now residential areas
• Speeding
• Heavy trucks
• Air quality
• Noise @ night
• Worried that community will be discarded, but residents have good revitalization ideas that are hampered by zoning
• Concerned that prioritized neighborhoods (DWP), schools (DPS), and churches (Archdiocese) not coordinated, but should be
• No coordinated policy on urban gardening & problem w/ Right to Farm Act blocking
• Detroit Parks Coalition community resources to help neighborhoods maintain own parks
• Clark Park community-driven
• Only overused park in system
• Make parks assets
• “D4” zone if their neighborhood faces dwindling services:
• Allow current residents right of first refusal on bldgs/land
• Some residents already maintaining
• Concepts of “valleys” of like interests
• Entrepereneurship
• Garment district, e.g.
• 25k properties have lead poisoned kids, 5k multiple times
• Many more with lead exposure
• Lead paint from demolitions going into ground
• Include testing in demolition process
• Garden Resource Program provides one test per garden for free
• Bioremediation considered
• Access vacant land for ecosystem services like storm water management
• Bring more contact with nature into city
• Psyc and phys benefits
• Lawns to gardens
• Create natural spaces with MI indigenous plants
• Community now has to fit with city system
• City should instead create a function to receive community input & respond
• Extremely important to use managed open space, provide for long-term management, fix system for residents to purchase and love vacant property
• Thanks to participants for showing how much people love Detroit
• Local food system
• Commons
• Community-based economy
• City as sustainable ecosystem
• Alternative energy generation
• With great amt of open space, city should look at alt. energy generation
• Avalon model: people, profit, earth
• Detroit like no other place
• Embrace this; plan around ecological services
• Greatest urban ag system
• Need to craft principles for responsible disinvestment