August 29, 2017
Keith Owens, from Michigan Chronicle, highlights how accessible and easily digestible Detroit Future City’s 139 Square Miles report is for all who are interested in understanding Detroit’s status, and he recommends the report as required reading.
Detroit Future City delivers unsparing, clear-eyed look at the future
Michigan Chronicle
By: Keith Owens
August 29 2017
LINK
The recently released report from Detroit Future City, 139 Square Miles, is relatively brief, unsparingly to the point, and should be required reading for anyone who claims to want to honestly understand where Detroit is right now. I mean, where Detroit really is. Not the feel good hype about Detroit being ‘back’, and not the defeatist rhetoric that nothing good is happening beyond downtown.
Sometimes the truth hurts, but it also helps. Most importantly, the truth clarifies. And of all the things that Detroit Future City Executive Director Anika Goss Foster shared with me recently as she attempted to break down the report’s findings, the one observation that stood out to me above and beyond all others was this:
“This is the big headline for me; that economic inclusion is not just rhetoric. And I think that that’s really, really clear. That African Americans who are the majority of the population of Detroit, we need to make much more of a concerted effort for all of us to be able to participate. And that if African Americans are not participating in employment and small business opportunities, and educational achievement? Then that should be everybody’s problem. Anybody who cares about Detroit should be frustrated about African Americans not achieving to their fullest potential in Detroit.”
Click here to read the full article.