According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic officially ended on May 5.
And in a way, the pandemic is just a bad memory. Crowds have returned to professional sporting events in Detroit. They clog the city’s Corktown and theater districts. They line up at popular restaurants in the evenings and fill the seats at school events.
But downtown revitalization is uneven in Michigan and across the country. Office rents are falling as employers are still reluctant to require their employees to work on-site. In some areas, restaurants, particularly those associated with the office lunch trade, remain closed, while others function largely as take-away restaurants. Some downtown businesses are permanently closed. San Francisco was in the spotlight as a downtown area, especially during the crisis.
The hangover of the pandemic has urban planners and executives holding their breath. In downtown Detroit, restaurants that have survived the pandemic can get crowded on typical weekdays, though many office towers remain largely empty. The brain drain from Detroit has spread to more daytime business for suburban restaurants, city planners said in some cities including Royal Oak, where a week of public meetings to plan the city’s future begins Monday.
In Pontiac, a mayor ending his first year in office says people always want to gather in groups, whether for work or play. This aligns with many scientists who have said that a century-old trend will continue to see rural areas shrink in population while cities around the world continue to grow. On Friday, Pontiac broke ground on a skate park, replacing an aging skateboard park nearby. It’s part of a citywide plan to improve youth facilities, delivering on a campaign promise made by Mayor Tim Greimel. “The kids will get together, so let’s provide them with good activities,” Greimel said.
“There will always be an interest in face-to-face interactions, both in our downtown area and in our parks,” Greimel said after lifting a clod of earth for the groundbreaking ceremony. Across from the park, Pontiac plans to convert a 1920s elementary school into a youth activity center, he said.
“I think some doomsayers are premature to announce the deathblow in inner cities. People going out to be with other people is still the future,” Greimel said. Indeed, it took extensive networking, sometimes face-to-face, to elicit support for the skate park from Pontiac City Council, the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, and a group of small but important individuals and organizations attract corporate donors. The new skate park is slated to open in late summer in Pontiac’s historic Oakland Park, which is surrounded by homes built by GM in the 1920’s to house workers who built GM’s then newest and hugely popular model – the Pontiac .
A week full of charrettes begins for Royal Oak on Monday. That’s the fancy word for group meetings aimed at gathering public and expert opinion on how a city should see its future in a new master plan. The process is required by state law every five years and will also take place in Birmingham this spring. Downtown Royal Oak is well positioned to benefit if many of its residents choose to continue working from home rather than commute to downtown Detroit, city planner Joe Murphy said.
As the weather warms, remote workers will find comfortable spots to land their laptops in Royal Oak’s new downtown park, Murphy said. This puts coffee and bagel shops, upscale restaurants or takeaways, and even the library’s squeaky-clean restrooms within easy walking distance with a keyboard punch.
“I think we’re still a small, traditional inner-city community, and I think we’re going to hear people love that,” Murphy said.
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“But will our downtown area be as busy as it used to be?” he said, referring to recent concerns that “downtown San Francisco is becoming emptier.” He added, “While we don’t want to admit it, we are in competition with other communities.” (See www.planroyaloak.com for the schedule of Royal Oak’s master plan meetings.)
Retail experts say malls were dying decades before the pandemic. The question now is whether, despite the simplicity of online shopping, it will be possible to lure shoppers back to brick-and-mortar retail in the city centre. No one can be sure, but one staunch optimist is Cristina Sheppard-Decius, former head of Dearborn’s Downtown Merchants Group and now chief executive of the Birmingham Shopping District, which includes promoting the city’s restaurants and services.
A business with the right mix of merchandise backed by friendly staff and a slick website can thrive in the right location, said Sheppard-Decius, chairman of the Michigan Downtown Association. Sheppard-Decius said downtown commerce in the Detroit suburbs is returning to normal, albeit with some changes.
Alfresco dining has become a staple ahead of many restaurants, she said. As for working from home, she said she knows a lot of people who are “longing to go back to the office.” Still, countless Michigan residents seem happy to work from home, especially if they can avoid paying a city income tax like those incurred when working in Detroit, Pontiac, or any of the two dozen or so Michigan cities that levy income taxes, which is a shift could promote, “she could.” “Stay with us for a long time,” she said.
Despite this chilling incentive, both psychologists and economists say there are reasons why, despite pandemic-related disruptions, people of all kinds either want or should be around others to look their best. This can even include copying each other’s skateboarding moves while modeling purple hair and fake tattoos like those sported by Marijayne Renny of the Pontiac Skateboard Project — dubbed by her mayor as the key networker and fundraiser behind Pontiac’s under-construction skateboard park .
As Renny told the groundbreaking crowd of about 50 people, including a group of young people with skateboards, “People will be watching this project across the country to see how hard everyone has worked to make this happen.”
Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com
