Fixing Detroit's Doughnut Problems

Detroit, as you've probably heard, is on the comeback trail. Its six-county, 4.3-million-population metropolitan area has, after a terrible 2000s, been adding jobs at a markedly faster pace than the rest of the country since early 2010.1498745670431 And the city itself, long a byword for urban despair and decline, is becoming known for things like great restaurants, art, real-estate finds and, of course, hipsters fleeing Brooklyn.

But it still has a really big doughnut problem. No, not a lack of fried, circular confections. Detroit and surrounding areas appear to be well supplied with those. The city does, however, have a surfeit of vacant and near-vacant neighborhoods spreading to the north, east and west of its resurgent downtown and midtown that civil engineer Charles Marohn, founder of the great Strong Towns website/social movement, last year dubbed "the doughnut of despair."

It's not a full doughnut -- the presence of the Detroit River on the southern edge of downtown makes that impossible. But I like the metaphor. I think it also can be applied to the way the Detroit area as a whole has developed since the 1960s: a doughnut of growing, mostly white suburbs that surrounded the shrinking, mostly black city and for the most part turned their backs on it. L. Brooks Patterson, the longtime (he was first elected in 1992) county executive of Oakland County, just to Detroit's north, summed it up for the New Yorker's Paige Williams in 2014: