Planning After Bankruptcy: Detroit's Path to Recovery and Innovation

[00:05] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Welcome to another episode of the APA podcast. I'm your host, Ann Dillemuth, PAS editor and quality assurance manager at APA. Our guest today is Alexa Bush, planning director for the City of Detroit. Now, most cities today are dealing with some degree of disruption and uncertainty, with shifting federal policies and loss of funding. But Detroit is no stranger to disruption and uncertainty. In 1950, it was the fourth-largest city in the country with over 1.8 million people. Then, suburbanization, white flight, the decline of the auto industry, and a shrinking tax base led to decades of decline until the city declared bankruptcy in 2013. Despite its challenges, the tide has started to turn under new city management, the revitalization of the downtown area, and new businesses and residents. And through it all, Detroit's planners kept going. And what they learned offers valuable lessons for planners today. Our guest today will talk about all of that, plus some of what she's excited to be sharing with planners when Detroit hosts APA's National Planning Conference in April 2026.

So, Alexa, thanks so much for joining us today.

[01:20] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, thanks, Ann, for having me.

[01:22] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: So here at APA, we're starting to gear up for NPC26, which is happening in Detroit next April, and I know a lot of planners are excited. So tell us, how are things going in the city these days?

[01:34] - Alexa Bush: Absolutely. Well, we are very excited to be hosting and get a chance to share a little bit of our story today, but hope that you'll be able to join us here in Detroit and see it firsthand. You know, I think like everyone at the moment, we are facing uncertainty and I think trying to figure out how best to proceed, you know, where to move forward, where are things paused. But in general, we've really seen a lot of positives in Detroit, especially over the last several years. We've seen, for instance, the last two years, over one percent population growth year on year, which is the first time for us since the 1950s, as you mentioned. So we're really seeing a change of our demographics, of our population. I think we're continuing to see and are encouraged by our downtown, we're seeing increasing numbers of visitors. We've been doing office conversion for quite some time, so we have really growing residential neighborhoods downtown. And even while the office worker census isn't what it was before the pandemic, we're still seeing a lot of vitality, a lot of events, and a lot of excitement around our downtown core. I think we're really working to continue to expand that recovery and that type of urban life throughout the city. And that's really the challenge that we're continuing to pursue moving forward.

You know, I think there was so much coverage of the city's bankruptcy. It was the largest municipal bankruptcy. I think we got a lot of headlines around that. But we are really looking forward to sharing our story and more of the nuance behind it, because I think not all of that is always captured at the national level. And I think we feel like we have a lot of lessons to share, having worked ourselves, I think, from a really challenging position into a place where we're seeing a lot of market momentum. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of stories we can tell about what it meant to come through bankruptcy, how we've been coming since that time. That might not be as covered in as much depth as the story of our decline and how we got to this point.

[03:31] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Yeah, well, that's exciting news, and I am sure everyone else is excited to come to Detroit and see that, that turnaround. You did mention the city's history. I think most folks are familiar with that. But just for kind of some background for the podcast here, can you just give us a quick kind of overview of what happened to the city over the last couple of decades?

[03:54] - Alexa Bush: Sure, yeah. I might even stretch back a little bit more than a few. I think Detroit really got on the map in the industrialization of the 20th century. We were the home of the automotive industry. Henry Ford's innovation with the assembly line really supercharged that type of manufacturing in the city, which had been, you know, building ovens and carts and all kinds of things in the early 20th century. But it was really automotive that drove the expansive growth that we saw, especially pre-war and even heading into World War II. You know, Detroit really became known not only in the US but across the world, as the arsenal of democracy. I think that switch to war production that leveraged the manufacturing base we had here, you know, building bombers, all of that type of thing, was really the heyday of Detroit's manufacturing and really drew people, I think, leaving farm labor. I think it drew people looking to leave and escape Jim Crow in the South. But we saw a huge population boom, really from the 1920s through the 1950s.

But like many American cities after the war, we had an extremely aging housing stock that had been through two world wars and a Great Depression without a lot of investment. You know, I think we experienced the kind of redlining, the, you know, FHA policies that really discouraged that kind of investment into existing housing, especially where we had things like a lot of immigration, which we had experienced, you know, mixed race neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, all places that couldn't get funding to address that aging infrastructure and aging housing stock. You know, we had the highways, we had a lot of highway policy that just really encouraged the growth of our suburbs, really at the expense of the core city. And then I think, as you know, time went on through the 20th century, just changes in manufacturing, globalization. You know, we didn't have space for bigger factories, and those continued to move out into the suburbs. Really just faced a lot of obstacles in terms of our macro economy and how we might face that as the city, as your residents move, your industrial base goes away, and it becomes kind of a vicious cycle of the other things that cities struggle to provide.

I think even more recently than that, in the Great Recession — this was the Great Depression before — in the Great Recession, we're a majority black city. I think we saw a lot of the riskier subprime lending hit us quite hard. We had a lot of people underwater on mortgages. Our single-family housing stock took a really big blow through that period that I think we've been trying to pull out of. In that same time, you know, our automotive industry went through bankruptcy. All of these things, I think, eventually led to our own municipal bankruptcy in 2013. Some of that led by hard choices, and some of that just led by the structural challenge of, you know, how to provide services, how to service roads, pipes, sewers that were built for a population of almost two million. You know, vacant property that essentially ends up in the hands of the public sector at the local level, where we don't have tax base or a dedicated revenue source to take care of it.

So we feel like we've experienced a lot here in the city. You know, our commercial real estate downtown has been in a downturn for decades. And I think we've really been working hard to think about, you know, what does it mean to have a downtown? What does it mean to be a city? What does economic recovery look like? What kind of city do we want to be in the future? That really drove, honestly, the last couple decades, in parallel with this, a real focus on revitalizing our downtown and key corridors.

I mentioned, you know, we've been doing office conversion for quite some time, like a few decades now, and really bringing more residential into the heart of our city. We focused really heavily on our industrial waterfront and converting that from really the back of house, the back of city, into a really vibrant public space that people want to be. Less known about Detroit, we are an international city. We're a border city. Across the river from us is Windsor, Ontario. And I think we've really leaned into really celebrating the river as part of what the city could be about. And that really driving, creating a really great place where people want to be. I think as we began seeing some success in the last decade around the greater downtown, we were seeing, you know, both municipal and some corporate offices actually moved downtown. There was a lot of coordination about housing incentives for employees who worked in the city and really trying to drive this idea of economic recovery in place.

Probably since about 2015, as we started to see some traction in our downtown, in our midtown area, around one of our major anchors, Wayne State University, there was a really big push to figure out how does this expand through our whole 139-square-mile footprint. What does recovery look like in neighborhoods? And I think that's been a lot of our focus in the last decade, is thinking about, you know, what's a great Main Street? What are these neighborhood centers, what are great parks, what are those quality of life pieces that are different than filling a high-story office building? But what is the grain of our city? How does recovery look in a place that is more suburban in character, with a lot of single-family housing stock and single-story commercial districts?

So we've been, you know, we have a lot of work to do. You know, our journey is still going. We have a lot of challenges in our way, but I think it's been really exciting to see the progress and momentum that we've been able to build, especially not only at the city, but building a really robust set of partnerships across sectors to get it done.

[09:44] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Yeah. And you've been there and actually seen that in person, right? Can you tell us a little bit about your personal history with the city of Detroit and related areas over the last couple of years?

[09:56] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, absolutely. So I joined this city first in 2015. This was really as the city had come through municipal bankruptcy, but was in the process of restructuring a number of departments. I joined the city midstream, so I actually started and then got to restructure two weeks later. A friend of mine and I still joke about it. But at that point we were really, at least in planning, rebuilding the department and our capacity around strategic planning, around neighborhood planning, around long-range planning. A lot of the work of the planning department had been to manage some of our federal grants and support development projects. And quite frankly, that was so challenged, given the environment, that there just wasn't a lot of space or capacity to plan for the future. It was really like, how do we manage what we've got?

So a lot of what we did in rebuilding the team was to rebuild, build that idea that the city might actually go out and engage with residents about what they wanted their future to be. I think for us, the nonprofit sector, the philanthropic sector had really stepped into that space at a grassroots level. And our charge was really to rebuild the city's capacity to engage in that way of proactively visioning. I spent six years with the team, really helping grow some of those teams and support an effort called the Strategic Neighborhood Fund, which I can talk more about. But this was our big push to think about economic recovery citywide and in neighborhoods. We had 10 different districts. We were looking to plan and then implement projects through that initiative. And that six years took me through kind of the completion of those 10 plans, which was amazing to see go from an idea to reality.

And at that point, I had an opportunity to move over into the philanthropic sector. We had a lot of philanthropic partners. I'd been a grantee, and moved over to the Kresge Foundation, working on the Detroit program where all the grant making is focused on the city, and really dive in on our investment into public space, an idea about child and family-focused neighborhoods in terms of economic development, and also a lot of projects around climate adaptation and mitigation. I spent three years on that team. It was a lot of fun, really, to be in the city and kind of sitting in a different seat with a lot of similar partners. And at the end of 2024, our former planning director was stepping down, and I got a call and had an opportunity to come back to the city, really to help guide the department through this next set of transitions. We are heading into a mayoral race this year and I just couldn't not take the opportunity to really re-engage with the team and think about how to position the city for success as we move forward. In light of a lot of the changes we're seeing and some of the uncertainty that we're seeing across all levels, the economy, you know, funding... Having helped build the team, it felt like a really impactful thing to be able to help guide it through this time.

[13:01] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Yeah, that's great. So, yeah, getting back to that experience of coming in after bankruptcy, where you're rebuilding everything, I can't imagine what that must have been like. We all know that when the budget gets short, you know, police, fire, they must go on, emergency services, and planning often gets kind of the short end of the stick. So how did you all shepherd the department through that time? Like, where was the money coming from? How were you able to keep that function going?

[13:31] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, I mean, I think what was one of the really amazing things to me about the leadership of the time was that recognition that, you know, there was actually a very important role for the city to have planning and have that interface with neighborhoods, to set a vision, especially as we thought about neighborhoods. Like, where do you start? What do you begin with? What are your tools? Yeah, there had been a number of long-range plans done in the grassroots, nonprofit sector, but a real recognition of the city's role there and how that would actually shape our recovery.

So I think one was we didn't have to make the case, right? Like, I think our leadership was really luckily understanding the value of planning. And I think having come through bankruptcy, we just had a lot of rigor about, like, budgets, expectations, not oversetting expectations, and in spite of, you know, limited resources, really wanting to prove that the city had the capacity to deliver and could come through this process and land on its feet.

So I mentioned, you know, the planning department prior had managed the majority of the HUD funding that we received and was, you know, working on affordable development and housing projects. And that that took up so much bandwidth of the department. One of the pieces was we actually split into two and created a separate housing and revitalization department, which is really now where a lot of our grant management, underwriting, public-private partnerships team sit there and allowed us in the planning department to really grow and focus, quite frankly, on long-range planning, neighborhood planning and building those kinds of relationships. You know, we didn't have a line item for general fund in our budget. I mean, we had some staff on the general fund, but I was funded through CDBG when I first was on the team through some of our admin budget. So we were really flexibly looking at, you know, our limited general fund dollars — what federal grants did we have that were aligned with what we were doing? — and had this very entrepreneurial approach. How do we put this together?

I give a huge amount of credit to Arthur Jemison, who's now our housing director, but he was at housing at the time of this split and really helping us mastermind, like, "Okay, we've got, you know, a little bit of leftover NSP. Let's do a plan. We've got some CDBG. We can use it for this." But we had a team, I think that was well versed in some of those federal sources and a real willingness to say, you know, "If our ambition is this and our resources are that, how do we not let our ambition drop to that level, but really get creative with using tools at our disposal to achieve the vision that we want to have?"

You know, I think that led into our planning. We were trying to be very action-oriented with our plans. You know, we were coming into an environment where I think people could figure out, "Okay, I got a $40,000 planning grant, I'm going to do a plan for my neighborhood." And then there was never capital to do it. I think we came in knowing, like, we need to get to action. I think residents are hungry for seeing change. And so our plans in some ways became really tailored to like how do we most strategically, catalytically deploy resources we have rather than, "Let's ask everyone for everything and create a beautiful book," and then step one is to go fundraise. We knew we didn't have that kind of luxury.

So I think what we tried to do was not create a five-, 10-, 20-year capital plan, but say, what would be the most catalytic things we want to do? What is the community interested in seeing? And you know, in the next five years, given some of the sources we have at our disposal, what are the projects that we actually want to start to take on and chip away at while giving some space in our plans to think bigger? But you know, I think had an expectation of like, we're going to fund some quick-action stuff and then have longer-term plans that are a little bit more open-ended where we can be flexible, you know, for things like ARPA, things like grant sources we didn't have at the time. It let us be really ready, I think kind of grant-ready, in a way that we could implement as we could find opportunity, but wasn't driven by like, you know, "In year five we'll get this allocation, in year six we'll get that allocation." We were trying to create a framework that could allow us to be nimble in the funding realities that we have.

[17:57] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Yeah, I think that's so important. I've heard that come up before that to prove the value of planning, like quick wins, actually making change happen. So how are you able to identify some of those like feasible smaller projects while still keeping the kind of bigger vision flexible?

[18:15] - Alexa Bush: Absolutely. I mean it really was, we would call it like kind of a process of co-creation that we were trying to do. So for this initiative I mentioned, the Strategic Neighborhood Fund, we created kind of a citywide map of places where, you know, one of the resources we knew we had was our funding through HUD, whether that was CDBG, HOME, like, some of these were formula dollars, some of these were other grants we might go after. In the past, I think the city had really said, "Hey, if a developer comes to us and we can get a deal to work, we're going to go do it." That might be a scattered-site, single-family project in a neighborhood with not a lot of amenities, or it could be somewhere in the heart of downtown. I don't know that we had a strong point of view other than like, "Let's get units, let's get a deal done." There were some really strategic decisions to say, you know what, like, we have this limited funding for housing. We are not going to spread it very thinly across the city. We're going to make some choices and really telegraph to the developer community, like, we're only going to actually fund your projects in these certain strategic areas that, you know, build off areas of strength, might be near a commercial corridor and quite frankly, better position people who might be living in affordable housing for success.  The housing, localizing the housing dollars was a first piece.

I think at that point as well, there had been a gas tax passed in Michigan that we developed a road bond program against and used that to develop a very targeted streetscape program that tried to align with those housing areas that we created. We had some small business support programs, one of which was called Motor City Match, where we were giving resources both to entrepreneurs looking for brick-and-mortar space, but also landlords who might have a vacant property. There was technical assistance, there was facade and design support. And the goal of the program was to get a match of an entrepreneur and a brick-and-mortar. We tried to, as best we could, align those to the streetscapes in the neighborhoods and the places.

And so I think we used that to then reach out partners. Some of those were in private philanthropy, some of those were private sector, others were corporate philanthropy over time. But that's where we started to get creative about like, well, if we leverage this money for streets, we have some housing dollars. Would you be willing to chip in and fund, you know, a park improvement, other commercial corridor work, other real estate gap financing? But we really tried to leverage dedicated funding that we had and then use that to try and find more flexible funding to fill gaps. But once we kind of figured out the formula and knew what some of those sources might be, that gave us the opportunity before we, you know, implemented anything, really worked with residents to create a vision for, you know, for these three or four sources, what would be most impactful? What do you want to see in your neighborhood? Again, not every project fit that. And that's where I think we tried to be clear with expectations about, these are all great ideas. These ones we can, you know, get action on and move really quickly. And these other ones might take us longer while we look for resources to make those happen.

[21:32] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: That's great. Having that really strategic focus and being able to pick the best projects, most bang for the buck. I know a lot of planners today in their cities, just with the federal uncertainty and funding going away, are likely scrambling for different funding sources and trying to figure out what to do with what they have. So can you talk a little bit more about how you all in Detroit braided different sources, where you looked for maybe new funding sources or alternative sources?

[22:06] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. Yes. I mean, I think as I mentioned, we started with some of these sources that, you know, formula funds more dedicated things that we knew were coming, whether that was, you know, state gas tax funding, whether that might be federal grants, and then really used those and built a vision about, you know, what would be the most impactful thing, how does the community inform and buy into that vision, and then use that again to go fill strategic gaps with other sources.

Some of those were private philanthropy. I think we are lucky in Detroit, given our history of manufacturing, of retail, to have some very strong private foundations in our region who are often partners with us in thinking about the city's future. They are also, I would say, the funders who are like most risk-tolerant with us, that kind of public-sector capital. Private philanthropy can really be some of the people that are first in, in a challenged market or a place that's not seeing investment. Quite frankly, once people start to see the change — once people say, like, "Oh, wow, there's a new city park," or like, "Oh my gosh, this commercial corridor that had vacancy and no trees and weeds coming between the sidewalk, there's now this really amazing streetscape and place that people want to go" — we found that seeing that visible change then became a way to pull in developers and private-sector capital, became a way to pull in even corporate philanthropy that I think is a little bit less, you know, open and risk averse as a private funder who might be more mission-driven. But you might find a partner who says, hey, you know, like, we do have this home buyer program, and if we can target something that's really specific around, you know, maybe it's CRA, resources we have from a bank or other initiatives that align. The more tangible, I think, the more real change people could see, it became easier to pull in those other folks as there was less risk, as there was more clarity of where things could go.

I think one of the lessons that we became very, very good at solving is, you know, unlike general fund, which, you know, you might have to go to council, a lot of those rules belong to the city. We were often dealing with, you know, a federal grant that comes with one set of rules, something like bond money that might only have prescribed uses. And really trying to think about, you know, here's the vision that we think is the best for the neighborhood. How do we match a funding source to best meet that vision? And each one won't be able to do everything. So, you know, with federal funds, I would always try and keep them like within a plan, but separate to a project. So maybe, you know, we're funding a new nonmotorized path and we're using CDBG and we're going to go through all of the federal requirements, you know, like Section 106 review, all the stuff that you have to do to be in compliance in a federal project. I'm not going to mix that with a different funding source with different requirements. Maybe I will fund, you know, a pocket park in a different place with a different source. Maybe I will fund, you know, a plaza with something else. But we developed some pretty rigorous diagrams and pathways for ourselves to make sure that we were sort of best optimizing the funds we had for the uses that we needed them to be for, and trying to use funding with the most flexibility, like very judiciously. So, you know, what things can we do public sector, what things can we do with major grants or money with strings attached? And then how do we find things that are more flexible to be able to complete the full vision of what we're hoping to achieve?

[26:02] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Yeah, I was going to ask, do you have like a massive spreadsheet with all the different pieces? Like, how did you keep track of all the pieces? And also, what roles were the planners playing? Like, were you on the phone talking to people? How did, how did that all work?

[26:17] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question. I think we learned some over time, and then over time we're able to sort of create more of a system for ourselves. So I mentioned, you know, we'd been doing probably 15, 20 years ago, a lot of the economic development work had focused on the greater downtown. You know, there were some office conversions, there was residential refurbishing, there was public space work. But again, I think as we moved into neighborhoods, we were like, it's a more nuanced, different kind of thing. It is more than just, you know, gap financing on real estate that we're going to need. We really need to be able to think about quality of life, and we really need to be able to think about housing, parks, connectivity, you know, where do you shop, all these things that residents really wanted to see.

I think we ultimately decided that what we could help do from the public sector, in partnership with sometimes private developers, sometimes banks, sometimes CDFIs — these are kind of nonprofit banks, community development finance institutions — we broke it down into like four main categories. We had parks and greenways, which are public for the most part. We had streetscapes. So we really thought about activating our right-of-ways. We thought about neighborhood stabilization, which for us is a lot of our single-family housing stock, a lot of vacant residential properties that we have. And then we thought about mixed use on our corridors. A lot of this was newer infill. We were trying to diversify housing typologies. We were trying to bring, you know, more density, more mixed use, more 24/7 kind of neighborhoods. And so I think once we had those, like four general buckets, it was a little bit easier to align, like, okay, the road funding goes in the streetscapes, that one's funded. Some of the housing gaps, like those either come from tax incentives or, you know, different tax districts or housing money, that one's clear. You know, the parks was probably a mix of a little bit of public, some philanthropic, some public grants. The housing stabilization just had a mix depending on what type of thing we were speaking about. But I think that gave us a broad way of working that we had a general signpost of, you know, between the city, between our CDFI partners, between others, you know, we developed a campaign essentially where we said, hey, this is the public leverage we're going to bring to the set of projects. And here, as a different kind of funder or philanthropy, is where we would really love to have you plug in. And here's the impact and the types of projects that that will fund. So that became a way to structure the conversation.

I would say, as a planner specifically, we were really charged with, like, creating and stewarding that vision. And so, you know, all the planning. We funded planning studies explicitly in each of these to guide that vision. A lot of that was different kinds of, you know, public funding or HUD funding. But these are, again, like, you know, $200, $300, $400,000 investments that were our initial commitment through those plans. You know, we really helped coordinate the multiple departments, at least inside of city hall, who implement that work ultimately. So our planning teams would include public works, they would include parks, they would include our economic growth corporation, they would include our land bank. And I would say it was really planning's role to convene those working meetings while the plans were taking place. And then we also had a system of really briefing up through the mayor's office. Each of these initiative districts would have a weekly, I guess it was more like, every Wednesday we might check in, and each of the projects would cycle through that review. But it became a really important accountability tool of like, okay, here's the plan, here's the projects, here's the funding sources. Like, where are we on the street? What's happening with this business opening? Like, is the ribbon cutting happening? Like, oh, no, we can't figure out whose utility pole this is. I think we had an accountability role as well in ensuring that implementation sort of met the vision that we'd work to create with community. So we played kind of an outfront role with residents and neighbors, but also an internal role in helping coordinate across both city departments and external partners we were teaming with.

[30:47] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: We say that planners are conveners, and it sounds like you guys are really doing a lot of convening in that work. So one thing I'm curious about with that history and kind of the practices that you developed in working with flexible funding, how are things feeling today with the federal uncertainties and funding sources going away? Like, do you feel like you're well poised to address these? And how are you taking the practices you've developed and are planning to apply them kind of to the present moment today?

[31:25] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, great questions and tricky for everyone, I think, as we're figuring out how quickly it all changes. You know, one thing I think we developed a lot of discipline around being so grant funded is to be like, very upfront with, like, okay, capital is one time. It's episodic. It comes and goes. Really focusing those kinds of grant resources on capital projects that don't implicate staffing or programming quite as much. When they happen, amazing. If they have to go on hold, I think they go on hold. That projects where we've been less clear, I think are contained to that project. And we sort of triage and figure out each one on its own. But I think had a lot of discipline going in about how we were using that funding already and knowing that it can be cyclical at times.

I think, too, we've always been kind of scrappy about those opportunities. I think the way that we've done planning has tried to give ourselves room to be opportunistic, to say, like, here's the funded list, here's the dream list. You know, how might we need to move things back and forth across those? Are there ways we can, you know, break down projects into smaller pieces? I think in a lot of these, knowing that we have, you know, scarcer resources than what we want to implement, we try to have a lot of clarity about, you know, what's the tipping point, what's the most catalytic thing? And if we can, you know, shrink something down. You can't shrink it down so much, it doesn't have that impact. But, like, how do you start to get really sharp about, like, the minimum you want, really absolutely need? Where can you let something go? Where do you need to really fight to find another resource or fill a gap?

I think we've built a lot of, like, working culture around that, not only in the team, but with, you know, partners in the development sector. You know, even before this moment, right? I think all through the pandemic, we saw, you know, construction costs move high. We saw, you know, can this construction site move forward? Like, there was a lot of challenge that we saw through the pandemic. And so I think, yeah, we're already thinking about projects in this way of a bit of triage. Like, okay, our gap grew 20 percent since we started the project. What do we want to do? Are we pausing? Are we going bigger? Are we going smaller? Are we waiting six months?

I think really trying to, like, give yourself time to see if things play out and change, to sort of not giving up on a project right away, but also, you know, building some comfort with, like, maybe it's just not right now. Is there a way to keep this project? Is there a way to kind of like, mothball this thing until there is a more ready time? I think are all conversations that in our ecosystem we got really used to having. You know, it'd be easier if we didn't have them and it was more consistent. But I think we have a culture that maybe accepts the reality that, like, there's a lot of stuff in these processes that are out of our control, and how can we be the best champion to try and get them done?

[34:31] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: That's great. So it sounds like having that flexible mindset and focus on reality is really helpful. Do you have any other thoughts for planners in other cities who are maybe facing this level of uncertainty for the first time? Like what, what lessons can you share from your experience in Detroit that might apply to those folks in those places?

[34:52] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, I think that there's an opportunity to really think about not just what's in your control, like what's out of your control, but what are things you can do to have an impact now, even if those resources never came back. You know, I mentioned a really big streetscape effort that became a really fundamental part of our economic recovery in neighborhoods. You know, most cities control their own right-of-way for the most part. You control your parks. There are things that you might be able to influence, that you might be able to push forward, that are more programmatic, that are already on land or property that you control.

I think, again, being really clear about, you know, hey, the outcome we're trying to achieve in the neighborhood is X. We thought we were going to do that through development. We thought we were going to do that through this kind of planning. Maybe there's another way to achieve that same outcome, or minimally at least, keep making progress in service of that outcome, even if you can't get the whole way there. I think that way of, you know, taking a hit, keep going and figuring out, is there a next bite we can take? Is there a smaller bite we can take? Is there something that we wholly control that we don't need a developer for? Like, what could the city purely on its own do, using the resources of staff, of departments, of residents, right?

I think we've thought a lot about, about implementation being very multifaceted. I think, you know, bankruptcy taught us that probably the 1950s way of being like super top-down and heavy and resource-intensive, and the city does it, it wasn't going to work for us. There are projects where we have, you know, partnered with residents and block clubs. Like, are there smaller things that you can get done as a community without, you know, other infrastructure, other funding sources? There might be a lot there that is wholly within the control of your community. It's a different way of working and it's a different type of relationship, I think, between cities and their residents. But I think there's a lot of untapped potential to explore. You know, what can you do just within your own community? And what resources does the community have to move action forward.

[37:04] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: That's a really positive kind of ending note. And it does seem like Detroit is something special. You all have gone through a lot, but you've been able to tap into your community, officials, you've had champions at the top levels of government. What is it about Detroit that makes it such a special place?

[37:25] - Alexa Bush: Yeah, you know, we talk about this a lot. We're working on a master plan, and we keep being like, is it "stick-to-it"-iveness? Is it hustle? Is it grit? Like, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, overly valorize how hard it is to have to, you know, work two jobs and figure things out. But I do think there is really a spirit in the city of being a place of makers, being a place of creators, being a place of builders that, you know, I think the national conversation for a long time really counted Detroit out. I think the city has always just, like, believed in ourselves and our own worth and sort of, you know, said, well, fine, if you guys are going to leave us out here, we're going to figure out how to get back and get on our feet on our own. That, yeah, it kind of becomes a way for people to band together.

I think there is something in scarcity that breeds creativity, and I think the community has really developed a lot of capacity to be that creative, to really, you know, believe in the community, to believe in ourselves as a city and not give up in the face of really hard things. I think over time, that just builds this kind of resilience that, you know, you hit an obstacle, you don't fall down. You figure out, like, how do I come back and how do I take it on? That really pervades the city. It's a majority black city. I think there's just pieces of that experience that really pull people together and keep them pushing for better things.

[38:57] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Great. Well, I think we're all excited to come to Detroit next year and see for ourselves.

[39:02] - Alexa Bush: Wonderful. We're excited to host you and look forward to telling our story and letting people see for themselves the transformation taking place in the city.

[39:10] - Ann Dillemuth, AICP: Well, thank you so much, Alexa, for joining us today and for sharing your story and the story of Detroit.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the APA podcast. Looking to present at the 2026 National Planning Conference in Detroit? The call for session proposals and reviewers is now open. Submit your session proposals by August 20th.

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