Michigan’s lack of attractive urban areas was closely linked to the state’s population struggles by a governor-appointed commission, sparking discussions in Detroit about how the state’s largest city will benefit from plans to attract new residents. 

The bipartisan Growing Michigan Together Council released its first report in December after six months of discussions, sending a set of policy recommendations to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the state Legislature. The 86-page report highlights an urgent need to improve access to career training, good-paying jobs, public transit and affordable housing in major cities like Detroit.

Whitmer’s council convened to help make Michigan a top 10 state for population growth by 2050. Policy makers are gathering at the Detroit Policy Conference this week to consider whether the road map will direct new residents to Detroit. The event will feature population growth council leaders and sessions on how to make the region more attractive for business and workers.

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Indian Village resident Hilary Doe is Michigan’s first Chief Growth Officer. The east side resident said Detroit will be key to future plans coming from the population commission. 

“There’s no way that we’re going to grow Michigan without making sure that Detroit is set up for the kind of growth that the people here in this city want,” Doe told BridgeDetroit.

The December report makes little mention of specific geographies where growth strategies will be focused, but identifies that Michigan lacks the “vibrant amenities and housing to attract and retain young talent to our cities.”

Anika Goss, a voting member of the population commission and Detroit Future City chief executive officer, advocated for an economic growth strategy that begins with improving education and connecting current residents to career opportunities.

“We had to have some hard lessons about where we are, all over the state but in Detroit in particular, that any new education or economic strategy without the intentionality of being inclusive of Black and brown people will, in its very nature, be exclusive,” Goss said. “It’s just not acceptable that we have a whole demographic of people who are not prepared for the future of work.”

There’s a limited window to catch young people before they settle into a community. Once people begin having kids, they become statistically far less likely to move, said Dan Gilmartin, executive director and chief executive officer of the Michigan Municipal League.

“If you’re not attractive to the 20-somethings and 30-somethings, then you don’t get many people moving into your community,” Gilmartin said.

No cool cities 

During the last 30 years, Michigan’s population growth has ranked second-to-last in the country. Meanwhile, Detroit’s population declined. The state only grew by 9%, but the population in Detroit plummeted by nearly 40% since 1990.

Nearly half (44%) of Michigan’s migration loss in 2021 was attributed to young adults aged 22-24. The average young adult who relocates to Detroit traveled only 62 miles, not much further than Flint or Jackson.

The commission’s research found access to homeownership was the biggest thing that would attract young people to move. Doe said several common themes around housing came up in focus group discussions across the state. Michiganders see a lack of affordable units, plus a mismatch between the available housing and the type that people want to live in. 

Detroit City Council members and scores of residents raised similar concerns about housing in recent years. The council challenged developers seeking tax breaks last year to create more affordable two and three-bedroom units for families. 

The population council said young people are seeking densely populated, walkable neighborhoods with access to parks, outdoor recreation, public transportation, retail and arts. Michigan is falling behind, according to the report, because the state disinvested from placemaking efforts and underinvested in physical infrastructure.

“When we look across the country at cities that are growing, walkable downtowns are a part of that,” Doe said. “Detroit will be, and Grand Rapids, too, as our second-largest city, critical to our growth, especially for young folks. We need to retain and attract our young people and young families.”

Lou Glazer is the president of nonprofit Michigan Future Inc. and has been advising high-level state officials about population growth strategies going back four decades. Glazer said the newest effort has more emphasis on creating vibrant cities to attract young talent. 

His organization is creating a proposal for a new state agency that has responsibility for creating urban neighborhoods designed to attract young people and support local businesses. 

“Somebody has to get serious about creating a different environment in our cities,” Glazer said. “You just need to reprogram existing money. You need a different transportation department that thinks differently. You need a Department of Natural Resources that thinks about urban parks as being as important as wilderness parks. You need sort of housing and zoning policies that allow for this kind of mixed-use high-density housing. We know what these neighborhoods look like. There’s just no commitment in Michigan to building them.”

Decades of reliance on cars has left Michigan floundering to create what the report calls “person-centered mobility,” which emphasizes accessible street design and alternative transit networks.

A growing body of research shows young people don’t want to drive cars, which carries major implications for the Motor City. The population council recommended creating more regional transit authorities to develop high-speed networks. It also suggested the state partner with Amtrak to connect Detroit and Grand Rapids with a passenger rail line. 

“It’s almost hard to bring up anymore because we’re about three or four generations deep now in having failed on regional transportation,” Gilmartin said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to move people around in a better way. We largely built transportation systems to take people through cities not to cities. All we’ve really done is move people further out and create more need for infrastructure.” 

Michigan’s only regional transit authority serves the Detroit region. The Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan (RTA) is led by Executive Director Ben Stupka, who said in December he expects the population council’s report will provide more momentum for investments to connect Detroit and the suburbs. 

One of Glazer’s first public policy jobs was with the previous iteration of the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART), which was at the center of a racially polarized debate over a regional subway. 

Plans for an underground subway line had the support of then-Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, but suburban adversaries vehemently opposed it and Republican President Ronald Reagan ultimately killed the funding. 

Glazer said it was the “biggest mistake a region has made in terms of the economy,” an “all-time dumb” move. 

Doe, a Monroe County native, moved to Detroit in 2018 after leaving the state post-graduation from the University of Michigan. Hers follows a familiar story behind the population problem – new college grads are colloquially known to get a plane ticket along with their degree. Doe said she’s among a category of “boomerang” residents who find their way home. 

“If you look at folks who move most often, it tends to be recent graduates and young families,” Doe said. “I fit into one of those boxes, I was pregnant with my second kid and chose to come back here. I spent a lot of time in some of our biggest cities, I lived in Brooklyn, Washington, D.C. and Chicago briefly, I was in Los Angeles. I tried them all on. Throughout that process, I wanted to get back to Michigan.”

Prospects for tech hubs  

Establishing Michigan as an “innovation hub” for young professionals is one of three main strategies identified by the report. College graduates are leaving the state at a net rate of 5,600 per year. The report partly blames a disconnect between Michigan companies and students, causing young talent to seek better-paying jobs in states with established professional networks.

Detroit is considered a fertile site for an innovation hub. The University of Michigan recently broke ground on a new downtown campus for graduate programs and workforce development in downtown Detroit. Ford Motor Co. emphasized the term to promote its efforts to redevelop buildings around Michigan Central Station in Corktown for tech companies and advanced mobility research.

The District Detroit development has been closely tied to the U-M investment. District Detroit was also cited by the population growth council as an example of strategies to focus investment and growth around anchor institutions.

Portia Roberson, executive officer of Detroit nonprofit Focus: HOPE, was chair of a workgroup focused on jobs and talent. She expects “healthy competition” among Michigan cities to become destinations for young professionals. 

“I was surprised to hear about what Traverse City is doing around tech and entrepreneurship,” Roberson said. There are a lot of people who are trying to see that as a new sort of version of Silicon Valley.”

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan used similar comparisons to Silicon Valley when promoting the Michigan Central project. Duggan said Detroit will surpass the Northern California tech hub during his 2023 State of the City speech. But Detroit was recently snubbed in a national competition to earn a “tech hub” designation and federal funding. None of the 31 new tech hubs designated by the Biden administration last October are in Michigan.

A Detroit-Ann Arbor mobility tech hub led by Ford’s Michigan Central project was among five Michigan proposals that were passed up in favor of other Midwest states like Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

In a 2023 letter to the Biden administration, Whitmer argued state and federal investments in new mobility technologies like electric vehicles are important for keeping up with a changing economy. Duggan’s Silicon Valley comparisons also referenced Detroit scoring GM’s Factory ZERO, a $2.2 billion electric vehicle factory investment. 

However, the population growth council noted that Michigan must diversify its economy after a historic reliance on automotive manufacturing. Glazer said it’s a circular problem: A focus on bringing factories to Michigan has diverted attention from creating vibrant cities, making the state less attractive for young talent and new kinds of businesses.

It comes back to building cool cities, Gilmartin said. 

“We used to make a choice, be a great place for people or be a great place for business,” he said. “When you look at those areas around the world that are thriving it’s because they’re good places to live. It’s no longer about being good for business and throwing a couple of bucks over here to build a park. We have to double down in making our places world class.” 

To start, Glazer said there should be a high priority on creating housing density and improving walkability in neighborhoods near Michigan Central’s Corktown facilities, District Detroit and an expansion of Henry Ford Health’s New Center campus. 

“Unless you change the built environment of the neighborhoods in which those are located, whatever catalyst power they have ain’t going to happen,” Glazer said. 

Doe said there’s a major economic opportunity “centered in Detroit” to lead nationally in the development of advanced manufacturing and mobility technology. But one of her main takeaways from the report is how Michigan children are falling behind academically. Doe said there’s an unacceptably low number of children of color who are reading proficient – only 10% of Black students are at a fourth-grade level.

Goss said Detroiters won’t have proper access to jobs in technology and innovation without better education. This includes K-12 students and Detroiters who could be retrained to work in the tech industry, she said.

“If we have Detroit compete with every other city, then we have to be in the tech space, but we’re not ready because that’s not what we’re teaching,” she said. “We don’t have tech centers that are accessible. The biggest thing missing is having preparedness for young people and retaining people already working.”

Roberson said her workgroup also emphasized job training for adults. 

“The only thing that concerns me is becoming an innovation area in order to draw a certain population to Michigan, and not tune into who we have here and what they can do to draw more people here,” Roberson said. “You have to have some success with the people who are here and really making sure that they understand the opportunities are accessible to them.  It came up in our workgroup over and over again: As quickly as we’re bringing people (to Detroit), we’re losing people who don’t feel that there’s opportunity for them.”

How to fund the population council’s recommendations remains a major question mark. The first report includes no mention of how to pay for growth strategies. Doe said that will be part of the group’s work moving forward. 

“My intention is that the public engagement work is just beginning,” Doe said. “We’ll build a fact base. Our regional growth strategies are just beginning and we’ll continue to build relationships with folks across the city to really listen to Detroiters about what might be between them and staying here.”