detroit to invest $4 million in city airport runway replacement

A JPMorgan Chase–funded initiative plans to turn a run-down nearby retail strip into a walkable mini-downtown. It’s within walking distance of thousands of middle-income households-and within six blocks of two college campuses and a hospital, “anchor employers” supporting decent-paying jobs. Along with nearby Livernois Avenue, McNichols is a main artery of a residential area that has stayed healthy through all of Detroit’s well-publicized woes. It’s an almost-perfect image of Rust Belt stagnation the only detail missing from the stereotype is that none of the shuttered stores is actually on fire.īut the real Detroit is not a blank canvas for apocalyptic visions of decline-and neither is McNichols Road. It’s the picture you might conjure when you read that the city’s population has shrunk by 60% since World War II, or when you see 50th-anniversary remembrances of the riots of 1967. It’s a tableau that epitomizes what people who don’t live in Detroit imagine when they think about Detroit. The driver is conducting a cash-for-something-in-a-sandwich-bag transaction with a passerby, both of them oblivious to the horn blasts from the westbound Number 30 whose space they occupy.

At 10:30 on a Thursday morning, the liquor store on the corner of San Juan is the only business with noticeable traffic-unless you count the one being run out of the Honda coupe idling at a bus stop. There are two kinds of storefronts on this stretch of Detroit’s West McNichols Road: Boarded-up and “Why isn’t this boarded up?” Most of the one- and two-story buildings are clad in drab painted plywood or the gunmetal gray of security shutters.

Detroit to invest $4 million in city airport runway replacement