Local activists in Detroit want to rebuild NorthTown with help of Syrian refugees
Haifa Fakhouri, president and CEO of the Arab American and Chaldean Council, has a vision for Detroit — specifically, one square mile of the city.
A nearly 20-year-old plan to redevelop an area on Seven Mile Road, now known as NorthTown and formerly called Chaldean Town, was stalled several years ago after the first phases were completed.
Now, Fakhouri and the ACC see opportunity coming from war-torn Syria, where millions have fled seeking asylum across the eurozone to realize the NorthTown project, including new multifamily Section 8 housing.
She believes as many 5,000 Syrian families seeking refugee status could call NorthTown home and revitalize the blighted neighborhood.
Fakhouri said the placement of refugees will jumpstart the local economy and create a vibrant district, much like Greektown or Mexicantown, but roadblocks remain.
“We’ve met with several organizations and leaders, but it’s moving slowly,” Fakhouri said. “We can turn the city around and repopulate that area as more and more Syrian refugees need a place to go. We believe in this revitalization project; it will add to the social mosaic of Detroit.”
Tom Kelly, director of government affairs for law firm Clark Hill PLC in Washington, D.C., and adviser to the ACC, said refugees can stabilize the neighborhood while offsetting population losses in the city.
“That stretch of Seven Mile could be used as an anchor to build up the neighborhood,” Kelly said. “The wave of immigrants coming into the region stopped 30 years ago and these neighborhoods desperately need attention. This isn’t reinventing the wheel but something other major cities have done and continue to do.”
Red tape in the way?
Photo by Glenn Triest The Arab American and Chaldean Council has invested $14 million of its own money into the NorthTown section of Detroit since 1998 to build community, human services and youth centers. It also acquired vacant lots for multifamily housing.
The future of the redevelopment rests on buy-in from federal, state and city governments as well as the pooling of public and private funds.The ACC has invested $14 million of its own money into NorthTown since 1998 to build community, human services and youth centers. It also acquired several vacant lots for the multifamily housing units.
In 2013, it signed a deal with Penrose Village Development Corp. to build 72 single-family homes, but the final phase of building multifamily housing didn’t happen because, Kelly said, the city of Detroit never approved the project, and without support, the developer won’t break ground.
“The bureaucracy in the city of Detroit has been discouraging and difficult to navigate,” Kelly said. “(The developers) have had trouble identifying who needs to approve plans, and have been sent in many directions that have led nowhere; typical inefficiency, too many layers and incompetence on the part of the city’s planning function, which we are aware Mayor (Mike) Duggan is trying to rectify.”
Duggan could not comment on the plan and where it stands in the city’s approval process. However, the mayor would welcome Syrian refugees into the city, John Roach, director of communications for Duggan’s office, said in an email.
Kelly said funding could, and should, come from various sources to ensure the refugee resettlement goes smoothly — including funds from the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, various nonprofits, Michigan State Housing Development and other state and local agencies.
Success elsewhere
There are arguments to be made for using refugees for revitalization efforts and using public and private funds to do so.
Minneapolis-St. Paul and Cleveland both have found at least some success rebuilding neighborhoods with immigrants.
Cleveland welcomed 4,518 refugees from Bhutan, Ukraine, Burma and Somalia between 2000 and 2012.
Volunteer agencies (commonly referred to as “volags”) and cities spent $4.8 million on refugee services in 2012, according to an economic impact study on the population by Chmura Economics & Analytics. The funds included $2.5 million on wages to staff members at the organizations and $1.1 million on food, clothing and transportation.
However, the economic impact outpaced the support spending tenfold, the study reported. The economic impact of those refugees in 2012 is estimated at $48 million and the creation of 650 jobs.
Between 2003 and 2012, the refugees in Cleveland started 38 businesses, employing 141 employees, and accounted for 248 home purchases in Cuyahoga County, according to the study.
The refugees also created an estimated $2.7 million in tax revenue at the local and state levels.
In 1980, thousands of Hmong, an ethnic group from rural regions of Laos and Thailand, were granted refugee status and immigrated to the U.S. following the Laotian Civil War, which was rife with ethnic cleansing and military attacks.
St. Paul, Minn., is home to the largest Hmong population in the U.S. with more than 65,000 people of Hmong decent.
As of 2013, Hmong businesses in greater Minneapolis-St. Paul had combined revenue of $100 million, according to Asian Americans, an encyclopedia published in 2013 on the economic history of the group.
However, refugee settlement is not without pitfalls. According to the 2011 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, 31 percent of Hmong living in Minnesota live in poverty — though that figure has dropped steadily since 1990, when it was 65 percent.
Kelly said population gains are positive, even if a small number of people are low-income.
“Considering that 41 percent of Detroit residents live in poverty, 30 percent would be an improvement. Though the national average is 14.5 percent and the Hmong are roughly double that, it’s still better than Detroit,” Kelly said. “However, the focus should really be on the 70 percent who are not in poverty considering that they came to the U.S. with nothing.
“Nevertheless, the some-people-are-better-than-no-people argument is salient, especially when you consider all the theory about the impact that watchful people have over crime rates compared to vacant houses.”
Historical support
Locally, Syrians were among the first Middle Eastern immigrants to the state in the late 1880s. By the early 1900s, they were flocking to Detroit seeking employment from Henry Ford and settling in Highland Park and later in Dearborn. Many of them were Chaldeans, who are Catholic Assyrians with roots in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
Later, in the 1980s, many called the Seven Mile stretch near Woodward Avenue home. It became Chaldean Town in 1999.
Michigan is now home to an estimated 120,000 people of Syrian and Lebanese descent, according to census data.
Most live well above the poverty line.
Syrian immigrants in the U.S. have a median household income of more than $65,000, according to census data, compared to less than $52,000 for native-born Americans, more than $48,000 for Michigan’s median household income and nearly $59,000 median household income for Southeast Michigan families.
Frederick Pearson, director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University, said the U.S., and Michigan, have longstanding traditions of settling refugees with success.
“If you look to various populations, including the Chaldeans that settled in the same area, that were able to bootstrap their way into economic success,” Pearson said. “The people coming from Syria, in many cases, are skilled and they’ve been displaced.
“People in this situation are generally dedicated to work; it’s an old tradition for our refugee population, going back to our own history with the Jews, Italians and Irish. This is quite a viable plan.”
Gov. Rick Snyder is open to working with the federal government on the issue of Syrian refugees, but is in the early stages of any discussions, Dave Murray, Snyder’s deputy press secretary, said in an email.
Currently, President Barack Obama’s administration has authorized the U.S. to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees, but legislators and refugee support groups are urging the U.S. to take in as many as 200,000.
“If the United States aims to continue as a global humanitarian leader, then it is our obligation to significantly increase the number of refugees we resettle,” U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, and other party leaders said in a statement last week.
But that would take a significant financial commitment from the federal government.
Kelly worries that the political football over refugees could implode the entire plan.
“We need to get moving on this; we need Mayor Duggan saying we can do this here, we need the support of our leaders,” Kelly said. “People are saying this is far-fetched, but time is of the essence. We have an opportunity to repopulate Detroit by bringing in a new customer base, and I’d hate to see Detroit miss out.”
Dustin Walsh: (313) 446-6042. Twitter: @dustinpwalsh
Source: www.crainsdetroit.com