A Radical Plan to Save Detroit and Restoring the Rust Belt

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A Radical Plan to Save Detroit and Restoring the Rust Belt

Bradley Devlin / @bradleydevlin

Bradley Devlin is politics editor for The Daily Signal. Send an email to Bradley.

Detroit has become the poster child of American decline and for good reason: No city in what is now known as the Rust Belt experienced such soaring highs and such abysmal lows.

In the 1950s, Detroit was the wealthiest city in America. By 2014, just one year after the city declared bankruptcy, Detroit was considered the poorest city in America.

Detroit is starting to show signs of comeback by courting large investments from some of the companies who brought Detroit to its zenith, such as the Ford Motor Company, and balancing the city’s checkbook. But plenty of problems persist, and the whiplash has left policymakers and every day Americans asking what happened, and what is the way back for cities like Detroit.

Rodney Lockwood is a member of the Board of Directors of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy with a business background in real estate. Lockwood joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to help unpack Detroit’s collapse, the beginnings of its recovery, and share his bold plan to revitalize a forgotten part of the city.

“I think Detroit is probably the most prime example,” of the Rust Belt’s collapse, Lockwood told The Daily Signal, “because other cities have not suffered as much as Detroit.”

“There was that period of time when it was the city,” Lockwood said of Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s. “Since that point in time, it is now, not even slowly but quite quickly, deteriorated into one third of its previous population.”

In its heyday, Detroit’s population peaked at “almost two million,” Lockwood said. Today, Detroit’s population is just “over 600,000 people.”

Detroit’s collapse was brought about, in part, by the auto industry looking elsewhere for lower production costs. Initially this meant automakers looked to other states south of Michigan—Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky. By the late 1980s, the auto industry was looking to offshore production, incentivized by growing volumes of trade agreements with foreign countries.

But the auto industry moving out is not the entire story, Lockwood claimed. “It was part of it, but we also had some policy changes along the way,” he said.

In Lockwood’s mind, the biggest change was Detroit’s tax structure. “An income tax was enacted in the sixties,” Lockwood said,  “taxing both residents and workers, or if you were a resident worker even more.”

In the past few years, however, Detroit has shown signs of coming back. Lockwood wants to partake in that comeback, and he has an ambitious plan to create a “freedom city,” in Detroit on Belle Isle.

Lockwood lays out his vision for this city through a novel he wrote titled, “Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer.”

“Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River, which is an international river. One side is Detroit, Michigan. The other side is Windsor, Ontario,” Lockwood said. “It’s a total of, to be exact, 982 acres, about 1.5 square miles.”

As Detroit deteriorated, so too did Belle Isle. “In the last couple decades, [Belle Isle] has fallen into, sort of, disrepair. Detroit was facing a budget crisis, so it wasn’t being maintained,” Lockwood added.

Since Detroit’s bankruptcy, however, the state of Michigan took over Belle Isle and helped restore it, “but it’s still underutilized.”

In his book, Lockwood envisions a walkable, densely populated city on Belle Isle where government has a very limited role and is focused on delivering essential services.

The Belle Isle Lockwood describes seems like a town out of a European microstate meets “The Jetsons.” 

And the idea has purchase. “I was shocked or surprised by the interest that this idea garnered from all over the world,” Lockwood said of his book.

It’s not just Lockwood’s readers, either. 

Mitchell Research and Communications performed a survey of Detroit and Michigan residents on the idea of turning Belle Isle into a special economic zone. They found that an outright majority of Michiganders (51%) and Detroiters (68%) support making Belle Isle “a Special Economic Zone as a high-density area within Detroit that is accessible to all.”

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