20 things Detroit deserves: Our ideas for gifts for the Motor City

Cheaper parking downtown

That said, parking in Detroit sucks — there’s no way around it. Planning for a nice evening on the town shouldn’t include budgeting an extra $50 to park to go to an event. It would also help if parking areas were more clearly marked, because not everyone loves to play the “will I come back to a ticket or a tow?” game at the end of the night. —Alex Washington

A winning football team

Win or lose, Detroiters are going to cheer for the Lions. We watched Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders lay it all on the turf and retire without championships of their own, and celebrated Ndamukong Suh and Matthew Stafford’s Super Bowl wins, despite both winning after leaving the team. In fact, the Lions haven’t won a championship since the 1950s. It would be nice to see the team we love so much bring a trophy home, and not just in an honorary way. —Alex Washington

More grocery stores

Inflation on food products has been a hot topic, and point of concern, in recent months. But what’s worse than the rising cost of food is the lack of access to it. Earlier this year, WXYZ-TV reported that there are only 62 full-service grocery stores in the city, and many big-box stores are only available in the suburbs. It was also reported that about 30% of Detroit residents do not have a car, which means many are relying on unstable public transportation or friends to obtain basic necessities. (More on that in a minute.) While Target says it will build a store in Midtown in the coming years, and the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op is working to build a Black-owned grocery store in the North End, much more is needed. —Alex Washington

Better public transportation

Most major cities have some form of reliable transportation. In Detroit, we’ve got buses that arrive seemingly whenever they feel like it, a streetcar that only runs about three miles from New Center to downtown, and a rusty old People Mover that feels like a low-budget roller coaster. The downtown area is not the center of the universe, and residents throughout the city need a reliable way of getting to work and school. Sure, Detroit is the Motor City, but not everyone who lives here has the luxury of owning their own set of wheels. —Randiah Camille Green

Actual affordable housing

Apartment hunting in Detroit is like walking a tightrope, with trendy $2,000 lofts on one side and “recently renovated” flats for $1,200 surrounded by abandoned houses on the other. On top of high rent costs, Detroit is plagued by slum landlords who leave tenants in unlivable situations with frequent water shutoffs, busted boilers, and ongoing repairs in so-called historic buildings they’ve failed to bring up to modern standards. —Randiah Camille Green

A foreclosure moratorium

Every year, thousands of low-income Detroiters lose their homes to tax foreclosures. Seized homes often sit vacant until they are stripped by scrappers, leaving neighborhoods with abandoned eyesores. It doesn’t help that Detroit admitted that it had illegally overtaxed as many as 100,000 residents by inflating property assessments. —Steve Neavling

More homeowners

We got some good news earlier this year — for the first time in a decade Detroit has more homeowners than renters, with 51.3% of homes in the city owner-occupied, according to the latest Census, compared to 47.8% in 2019. That’s a welcome return to the past, when Detroit once had a uniquely high rate of homeownership among U.S. cities. However, the findings also showed a decline in Black homeownership, and the Detroit Land Bank is sitting on about 63,000 vacant lots and about 13,500 vacant structures. —Lee DeVito

People

More bad news from the Census — Detroit continues its 70-year population decline, with 639,111 residents recorded in 2020, down from its peak of nearly 2 million residents in 1950, and much of the drop coming from the loss of Black residents. The decline in population means a loss of tax base and federal funds. Mayor Mike Duggan, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and others have challenged these findings, arguing that the Census counting method was flawed, but the fact remains that Detroit has plenty of room to grow. —Lee DeVito

More public schools

Over the past two decades, about 200 public schools in Detroit have been closed, and enrollment has dropped from more than 162,000 students to nearly 49,000 students today. The state has fueled the decline by reducing funding, closing schools, and allowing charter schools to spring up. With more than half of Detroiters living in poverty, quality public education is as important as ever. —Steve Neavling

Better recycling

Detroit offers free curbside recycling to all single-family homes if you request a blue recycling bin online. However, many Detroiters are unaware of the opt-in model, as it’s not widely publicized. Plus, the curbside recycling program doesn’t apply to apartment buildings with more than four units, so us non-homeowners have to load up our recyclables and drag them to centers like Recycle Here!, which can be a hassle. —Randiah Camille Green

More late-night dining options

There used to be more diners in metro Detroit that were open 24-7, where night owls could grab a late-night coney dog and a cup of coffee. Ever since the pandemic, though, local restaurants have scaled back their hours. We compiled a list of some metro Detroit spots that are open later than 10 p.m., but we wish more kept later hours. And it’s not just for concert-goers and insomniacs — more late-night businesses would be good for people who work night shifts. —Lee DeVito

First-run movie theaters

While the years have not been kind to Hollywood— with Netflix, the pandemic, and the Marvel-Industrial Complex helping to decimate what we used to call the “movie industry” — things have been even more brutal in Detroit, where there is only one remaining first-run movie theater, the Bel Air Luxury Cinema on Eight Mile. That’s no knock on Detroit’s great art-house theaters like the DFT and Cinema Detroit, but you’re going to have to drive to the burbs to see, say, that new Avatar movie. A Detroit outpost of the Alamo Drafthouse chain was recently announced and then canceled, though rapper Big Sean has said he plans to open a multiplex with Emagine sometime in 2024. We think Detroit could use even more movie magic, though. —Lee DeVito

A return of film incentives

Speaking of movies, nothing was cooler than when celebrity sightings and film crews in metro Detroit were commonplace. Back in 2008, then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed a package of film incentives into law that were the most aggressive in the nation, ushering in an era of major Hollywood productions here, including multiple installments of the Transformers series and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (scene from a set featured above), among other projects. That was true until Gov. Rick Snyder ended the incentives in 2015, though some state senators are hoping to bring the film incentives back to Michigan, which would not only allow the charm of the Great Lakes State to be showcased, but also bring plenty of jobs back. —Alex Washington

Less surveillance

Detroit is one of the most surveilled cities in the country. High-definition surveillance cameras saturate downtown, as well as gas stations, schools, parks, health care centers, and low-income housing complexes. Coupled with an extensive facial recognition technology system, Detroit has eyes all over the place, though critics say the technology is flawed, pointing to the wrongful arrest of several Black men. The city also recently approved expanding ShotSpotter, a controversial technology that detects gunshots, raising concerns about increased police presence and potential civil rights abuses. —Steve Neavling

Adult-use dispensaries

Detroit’s debacle over recreational weed is one of the great clusterfucks of the century. While municipalities in the suburbs and beyond have been successfully profiting from the flourishing industry since Michigan voters legalized adult-use cannabis in 2018, Detroiters have been waiting for the City Council to get its shit together. And it’s not entirely the council’s fault — they tried to do something good for once, ensuring that lifelong Detroiters affected by the racist war on drugs would get the first shot at opening dispensaries, but some who felt discriminated against halted those efforts with lawsuits. After a revised ordinance and another slew of lawsuits that were eventually thrown out, the city has finally opened applications for adult-use dispensaries. While we continue to wait for them to become a reality, we’ll just have to continue getting our stash from nearby places like Hamtramck. —Randiah Camille Green

Pro sports owners who don’t bill taxpayers

The billionaire owners of Detroit’s professional sports teams — the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons — have relied on tax dollars to build their stadiums, and public officials have been all too happy to let them. Most famously, while facing bankruptcy, the city of Detroit gave hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to the Ilitch family to build a new Red Wings arena and a surrounding “District” of investment. The family has yet to follow through on its promise to develop apartments, restaurants, and other businesses, however. —Steve Neavling

That RoboCop statue

In 2011, some joker tweeted at then-mayor Dave Bing saying that Detroit needed a monument honoring the star of the 1987 sci-fi action movie RoboCop, because Philadelphia had a statue of Rocky and the cyberpunk hero “would kick Rocky’s butt.” The viral tweet sparked a crowdfunding effort that raised more than $60,000 for the cause, and respected Detroit metalworker Giorgio Gikas eventually managed to build an 11-foot tall bronze sculpture all while dealing with a cancer diagnosis. More than a decade later, however, Robo still doesn’t have a home… yet. Last month, Crain’s Detroit Business reported that the statue could be displayed at Eastern Market, but the plan has not yet been finalized. Though we find the idea of a statue of a robot cop to be a bit cringe-inducing, especially following the 2020 protests against police brutality, Detroit needs to get this over with before they actually do invent real-life robot cops. (San Francisco is reportedly already working on it.) —Lee DeVito

A new story

There are a lot of things that annoy us, but this narrative about Detroit “making a comeback” makes our eyes roll to the back of our heads so hard we’re scared they may get stuck there one day. We’re not saying Detroit is without its problems, but merely investing in trendy downtown areas to attract suburbanites and tourists “back” into the city does not a comeback make. It is grossly offensive to Detroiters who have built their lives here and continued to live here through bankruptcy, emergency management, and corrupt leadership. We don’t necessarily have a problem with trendy restaurants cropping up, either, because we love a bougie brunch, too. But it’s problematic when TIME magazine names Detroit one of the “World’s Greatest Places” in 2022 for its “newfound glory” and “vibrant economic recovery.” For whom? Because Detroiters — the artists, visionaries, hard workers, hustlers, creatives, and families who fuel this city — have always been here. Detroit never left. We’re gonna say it louder for the people in the back. —Randiah Camille Green

Reparations

In 2021, a resounding 80% of Detroit voters approved a measure to set up a task force to investigate reparations to make amends for generations of systemic racism, joining other cities across the U.S. including Evanston, Illinois, and Burlington, Vermont. Detroit has a strong history with supporting reparations, with former U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. fruitlessly introducing legislation to create a commission to explore reparations every year for nearly three decades until he retired in 2017. Detroit City Council will soon select 13 residents to serve on its new reparations task force, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with in 2023. —Lee DeVito