Myth #1: Duggan Brought Business Back Downtown
Do we still believe that "trickle-down economics" fairy tale Reagan told us? Anyway, if you recall, the downtown "revival" was already getting underway by the time Duggan plopped down into the mayor's seat in 2013, despite the other negative things going on in the economy. Since then he has arguably helped attract more corporate investment to the downtown area, since big money is always attracted to perceived stability, and—racist as it is—a white mayor taking over the reigns of a black city looks like stability to big corporate interests. And owing to Duggan's record as an adept corporate shill, this certainly made investment prospects in Detroit look more attractive to a certain set.
But let's not forget that despite the increase of corporate interest in downtown and Midtown™ over the past decade since the Great Recession, the wealth "trickle-down" effect still has not made any noticeable positive effect on the neighborhoods of the city. And that's always been the promise, right? They say, "once we save downtown," it will have a "ripple effect" and spur economic growth further out into *The Neighborhoods*...! Has gentrification ever worked that way? How long are we going to keep waiting for this ripple, or trickle, or golden shower from the rich before we realize it was a tax break scam for corporations? The more downtown gentrifies, the more it has an adverse effect on the impoverished neighborhoods as rising costs of living, and land speculators push longtime black residents further and further away from the city they held together for all those years when the affluent were divesting from Detroit. That's the only ripple effect I see.
Here's the other problem...almost all land in downtown Detroit is owned by one man—Duggan's good buddy, the Ohio billionaire Dan Gilbert. This is unprecedented, and dangerous for one person to control so much of a major city. Yes, yes, I know you are all screaming "But Gilbert has renovated so many abandoned buildings, blah blah blah!!" Well, Detroit is made up of people, not buildings. The rest of downtown is comprised of vacant parking lots, owned by one family...the Ilitch Family. The problem is that great wealth (that is, land) held in the hands of a few elites is oligarchy, a system dependent upon keeping everyone else out of the game, including small businesses. It also keeps the cost of living high, which means only rich kids get to live downtown.
 |
| Gilbert, and Duggan |
"But what about all the new jobs that he brought in?!" Well, survey says most of those "new" jobs have been going to suburbanites whose companies relocated to Detroit to dodge taxes...
"Just because a job is located in Detroit, it does not mean that a Detroit resident holds that job. In fact, over the same five-year period [2011-2016], the number of Detroit residents who had jobs declined by more than 4,800 (2%) according to American Community Survey data." The number of jobs increased in 20 of Detroit’s 26 ZIP codes, but fewer than half of those ZIP codes recorded gains in the number of employed residents.
Speaking of the Ilitch slumlords, Mayor Mike Duggan went on M.L. Elrick's podcast to defend them, saying, "There were a lot of people who could have bought those parking lots and built on them in the last 50 years who didn’t do it. As far as I can tell all of the critics were people who didn’t acquire land and build in Detroit."
Okay Duggan, there were a lot of people who *could* have bought those parking lots and built on them, but...
- Only ONE family got a bankrupt city to give them dozens of parcels of land for free as it cut pensions and services for its residents in order to develop this area,
- Only ONE family spent decades manufacturing blight to drive down nearby property values so that they could buy even more land in this area,
- Only ONE family had the capital to form proxy companies to conduct their real estate transactions without property owners knowing who they were actually being bought out by,
- And only ONE family was awarded $400 million in taxpayer subsidies diverted from Detroit Public Schools to pay for their arena and spin-off developments...
...the Terrible Ilitches!
 |
| Duggan and the Ilitches |
(They also scored a sweetheart deal off Mayor Coleman Young back in 1988 to keep the Red Wings downtown by giving Ilitch complete operational control over city-owned Joe Louis Arena and parking structures, as well as capping his property taxes at $250,000 per year for 30 years, which helped them build their dynastic wealth—but let's not go there!)
As of 2020, the Ilitches own almost 200 vacant downtown lots. Duggan rattled off three that the Ilitches have actually developed. City-owned lots are *supposed* to go to the Land Bank auction to see if there are other interested buyers, and to ensure that the highest bidder gets the lot (and that their money goes into the city treasury). Many Ilitch owned lots were given to them by the city, by funneling them through the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) to be given away to the Ilitches, bypassing the Land Bank or any other bidding process. For Duggan to say there were no other interested buyers is total bullsh*t, because if I recall correctly there was even a kerfuffle a few years ago where the Ilitches were in trouble over a certain neglected property, and other buyers (including Dan Gilbert) were clamoring to buy it from them, but they refused to sell. The whole Ilitch land speculation game began in the 1990s when Comerica Park and Ford Field were planned. If you remember they did the same thing to build Comerica Park that they did to build the "Pizzarena." They began buying up land back then with plans to build a new hockey stadium nearby, but they never told anyone. The Ilitches purposely sat on that huge sector of downtown, holding it hostage from other development attempts for three decades, because they were waiting to get enough parcels to build their Pizzarena.
While Duggan was not directly involved in the early Pizzarena negotiations, here are the other ways his administration has bent over backwards to enable the enrichment of the private Ilitch empire:
- In 2016, the city approved Ilitch owned parking lots that did not meet city zoning requirements for landscaped islands. This allowed the Ilitches to collect $1M in additional parking revenue due to increased capacity, while runoff water is redirected to public streets (hey, remember those drainage fees that everyone's always complaining about?) https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2019/05/31/finley-holding-ilitches-promises-not-priority-duggan-says
- In 2017, the Ilitches managed to snag an entire block of property (14 parcels) from the Downtown Development Authority for just $104,900. The DDA does not accumulate land by tax default like the City or County. The DDA must have the land transferred to the authority, where they are then able to skip the Land Bank, skip the Side Lot program, skip any competitive bid and pass the land over to the Ilitches at a very low price. This is just one of many examples where city owned property was sold to the Ilitches without competing bids and outside the normal process for liquidating city owned properties.
- In 2017, the city issued dozens of blight violations on one single victorian home in the shadows of the Pizzarena, while Ilitch-owned properties in much worse shape went unticketed. Hundreds of Ilitch properties continue to go unticketed for blight violations that neighboring properties are penalized for.
The Duggan administration may not see holding the Ilitches to their promises as a top priority, but they have certainly made a priority of giving them favors. I wonder what Duggan gets out of the arrangement, don't you? What does the taxpayer get out of it? All I know is that working class residents like me get a ticket if we don't keep our grass cut, and yard clean...so I wonder why billionaires are allowed to own multiple abandoned buildings that are literally crumbling into the street—for decades—with no fines?
It's also worth noting, as Terrible Ilitches points out, that in 2012, State Rep. John Walsh (R-Livonia) sponsored HB 5463, which allowed the DDA to take funds that previously went to pay off historical debt at Detroit Public Schools and divert them to the Ilitch Pizzarena. For his efforts to shift public school funds to a billionaire family, and for failing to yield the spinoff developments which these tax payer funds were supposed to create, Walsh was named president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership that January. Chris Ilitch is also on the DDP board...how comfy! Duggan also stacked the Historic District Commission with some of his loyalists in order to make it easier for the Ilitches to demolish buildings protected by historic designations.
In 2013 when Detroit filed for bankruptcy they cut pensions and liquidated assets to pay off creditors. Meanwhile, the Ilitch family snagged 39 parcels of city-owned land for just one dollar. To date not one penny has been returned to the retiree pension fund after it was robbed for the "bankruptcy"...but Mayor Duggan and City Council have all gotten raises since then. In a city with such a high percentage of elderly, retired city employees living on fixed income, how can Duggan justify taking a pay raise and letting city property get sold to billionaires for one dollar, when the very taxpayers who carried Detroit on their backs through bankruptcy are still cold and starving in homes with leaky roofs?
Now let's talk about the process—and the pricetag—of moving the Detroit Pistons back downtown. Again, the deal was done in secret, closed meetings, free from scrutiny by the public, journalists, or City Council. Even though we are talking about $34.5 million of taxpayer money...and $250 million in taxpayer money was already spent for the Pizzarena.
The team is owned by two billionaires: Chris Ilitch and Tom Gores. They could have easily funded this move out of their own pockets. $34.5M is nothing to them.
Amid the "hoopla and giddiness" of the 2016 at the press conference to announce the deal, "Mayor Duggan put a brief damper on things by blurting out a little surprise factoid: The deal to use the $34.5 million for the Pistons' move is only preliminary. That surprised NBA Commissioner Silver, who looked a bit puzzled and said it was the first time he had heard the agreement wasn’t assured. Yes, even Silver looked surprised, as he should have been. Duggan explained that city council still had to approve taxpayer backed bonds for $34.5 million to pay for the changes in the arena to accommodate the Pistons."
 |
| That look... |
That right there exposed the Duggan scam—Commissioner Silver knew that the deal was already done, but Duggan and his billionaire buddies had to run their little play on the taxpayers for their $34.5M payoff. You see how they do us now? Gores is worth $3.3 billion, and the Ilitch family is worth $6.5 billion. That deal wasn't going to fall through, Duggan just helped them get their hustle on. Which means he got something on the side too.
Okay, it's technically true that Duggan "brought" business back downtown, but at what cost? Meanwhile the schools are still struggling, crime is rampant, and the fire department still have duct tape on their boots. Mike Duggan helped billionaires take $34.5M from Detroit Public Schools...period.
And I could go on forever about Duggan's slimy backroom dealings with Dan Gilbert or Roger Penske, but here's another recent example of how Duggan does "development":
