Detroit mapping huge greening projects for 2016

In what may be the city's most ambitious ecological project ever, Detroit plans to plant tens of thousands of trees in two quarter-square-mile patches to show how greening strategies can improve life for everyday Detroiters.

Maurice Cox, the city's director of planning, told the Free Press the project will target two districts: the Fitzgerald neighborhood west of Livernois between Puritan and McNichols, and the area in and around the old Herman Kiefer hospital complex.

Cox said every vacant lot within those quarter-square-mile districts would be either planted with trees or given some other "green" or "blue" treatment — rainwater gardens, fields of sunflowers, urban farms and more. It would be paid for largely with money from philanthropic foundations. The city will team with the nonprofit Greening of Detroit to get the work done.

The project represents a big bet that embracing green and blue strategies on a major scale will convert Detroit’s vast expanses of vacant and abandoned land — estimated variously at 20 square miles to more than 30 — from a negative to a positive.

“Land is our greatest asset,” Cox said.

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Economic development strategies usually involve new housing, retail, commercial or industrial projects. But the greening campaign will test —  on perhaps the largest scale ever —  whether widespread greening strategies can deliver an economic benefit as real and significant as new construction.

“We want to show that you can increase property values without building a single house in a neighborhood,” Cox said. “Research shows that the greener the neighborhood the higher the property values, so we think we can have an impact on that."

Detroit and other cities have already been experimenting along these lines for years, with hundreds of community garden plots created in the city and projects such as Hantz Woodlands and the RecoveryPark farming project moving ahead. But the plan Cox describes would be bigger and more concentrated than any yet seen and could serve as a model for postindustrial cities worldwide.

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The multiple goals include creating jobs by hiring and training residents as landscape workers, cutting air pollution, and keeping rainwater and snowmelt out of the city’s already burdened sewer overflow system.

Training a workforce from among neighborhood residents will become a key part of the program. Rebecca Salminen Witt, president of the Greening of Detroit, said her organization plans to hire up to 100 residents from the districts this winter to have them trained and ready to do the landscaping work next spring and summer.

“Our goal is to recruit people from the neighborhoods where these things are happening,” she said. “A change in landscape feels a lot better to you when someone from your neighborhood is chosen to do the work.”

Academic research in recent years in cities such as Philadelphia has found a link between greening strategies and benefits such as crime reduction and improved health for residents.

“We think we can have an impact on safety and security, and impacts on illegal dumping," Cox said. "People generally don’t dump on beautiful flower beds. There’s a whole psychology about areas that are cared for, that appear that someone genuinely is taking care of it, stewarding that land.”

With that in mind, the project will not appear “wild” as if left to nature, but will appear well-tended and planned, Witt said.

“It’s going to create real significant ecosystem services” for residents, Witt said. “They’re going to notice that the air feels cleaner, that the flooding is reduced, that their property values are going up.”

Cox emphasized that point.

“We’re convinced that this is something that’s going to make a visible difference in peoples’ lives,” he said. “They see it when they take a walk.”

Deciding what happens with each vacant parcel will be determined in coming months after more talks with  residents.

“We’re not being real exact about that because we want to leave room for community engagement,” Witt said. “If people want to see fields of sunflowers, we will find a way.”

Getting buy-in from residents of the two districts is key to the project’s success. To that end, Cox and Witt and their teams have been engaging in conversations with residents, explaining how the project would work and its potential benefits.

Last week, Cox met with members of the University District Community Association to outline the plans for the Fitzgerald district. Nora Gessert, president of the association, said it was a "great idea" to deal with the "stunning amount of vacant land" in the district.

"They need to do something. It's a lot of empty land," she said.

But many details remain to be worked out.

"They admitted it was a pilot," Gessert said. "It had never been done before. My impression was they haven't really figured all those pieces out yet."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.