1 week Ago
DETROIT — On Thursday, the Pistons hosted their first playoff game in the city for which they’re named in six years. This looked and felt like a good thing. Little Caesars Arena was packed, everyone wearing white in support of their out-of-nowhere home team, which lost an NBA record 28 straight games just one season ago.
The Pistons’ turnaround, to 44 wins this season behind Cade Cunningham, brought them back home to play the New York Knicks. The game was wild and controversial , what with the “ Wasn’t that a backcourt violation on Jalen Brunson? ” ending, and with Detroit coming back, time and again, from big deficits. Advertisement That last part is an apt metaphor for the city, which is on its sixth or 20th reinvention of itself, the days in which the Big Three auto companies created more than 470,000 jobs in the city and state of Michigan in the late ’70s are long gone.
But it’s also in far better shape than it was during the worst of the Great Recession and its aftermath, when then-mayor and Pistons legend Dave Bing had to declare municipal bankruptcy for the city in 2013 , and was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager to deal with its financial crises. On game nights, today, downtown Detroit feels rejuvenated. All four of its major sports teams — the Lions, Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings — play within half a mile of one another, with the Pistons the last to come back home, in 2017, after 29 seasons at the Palace of Auburn Hills, about 30 miles north of town.
That means there are 20,000 fans (Pistons, Red Wings), or 40,000 (Tigers), or 65,000 (Lions), in the area on a given afternoon or evening, nearly 200 times a year. That is not nothing. That is significant taxable income for the city and state, not just in the arena and stadiums, but in the nearby restaurants and bars — and the casinos in the Greektown neighborhood next door.
That represents jobs for local citizens. Not six-figure jobs, to be sure, but having some job is still better than no job. But, in a neighborhood of sports palaces, where there are very few cheap tickets available anywhere and corporate largesse is visible everywhere — the media enters Little Caesars Arena through the Google Gate, which is next to Chevrolet Plaza, just off the Trinity Health Garage — there remains a nagging question.
Questions, plural. For any city and its history. What was here, on this land, before? More importantly, who was here? Who lived here? What neighborhoods and traditions were here for decades? And what happens to a city when its longtime residents, and their history, are replaced? And what has happened to those who remained? Advertisement Those residents were promised thousands of permanent jobs and mixed-income residential units after the construction of the arena was finished.
And a $1.5 billion project known as “District Detroit” was supposed to transform the blocks around Little Caesars into their own economic mini-engine. The development agreement with the city also required developers to contribute to a city fund that preserves and creates affordable housing, and give first priority in its affordable units to people who’ve lived in Detroit for at least 10 years.
But COVID and other delays have kept the District Detroit project on hold. Already, promises for residential housing for one of the first buildings scheduled to be constructed have been scrapped . But the Ilitch family still got its massive tax incentives in 2023 from the city for the project, which partners with another billionaire, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, a University of Michigan graduate and mega donor.
Detroit has wrestled with these questions for decades, as it dealt with seismic economic trauma. There is still a significant affordable housing shortage. It still needs to populate dozens of offices built with public funding, but many of which still sit vacant post-COVID.
It’s still struggling to recompense city residents whose properties were significantly overtaxed during the recession. Doesn’t it have better things to do with its money than give $400 million of it to the Ilitch family , which owns the Little Caesars pizza conglomerate, along with the Red Wings and Tigers? Little Caesars ranked third in the United States sales in 2023 among pizza companies , with sales of more than $4.4 billion.
Every city faces similar questions: improved city services or corporate welfare for massive projects like sports facilities? Detroit gave its answers. Now, Washington, D.C.
, is in the midst of providing its response, as it contemplates the Commanders’ potential return to the District at the RFK Stadium site, after nearly three decades of playing at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md. The Commanders’ majority owner, Josh Harris, and D.C.
mayor Muriel Bowser announced an agreement Monday for a $3.7 billion, 65,000-seat stadium that would, with D.C.
City Council approval, be built on the RFK Stadium footprint as part of a massive redevelopment of the 177-acre land that has lay dormant, essentially, since the football team left to play at what is now Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., in 1997. Harris and his partners have pledged to pay $2.
7 billion of the stadium cost, with the city putting in up to $1.1 billion in infrastructure and other “horizontal” costs for both the stadium and multiple restaurants, hotels and housing that would encircle the stadium. Advertisement It would be the Commanders’ version of the entertainment complex that surrounds “Jerry World” — the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, in Arlington, Texas — alongside the new Commanders’ stadium.
That, along with the use of personal seat license fees for season ticket holders for Commanders games, would most likely recoup the team’s initial multi-billion dollar investment, and then some, rather quickly. But what about the city? Yes, it would get tax revenues from all of those new businesses. It would own the stadium.
It would get property taxes for at least some of the 5,000 to 6,000 new homes it has pledged to build along the site. But the city would have to figure out how to protect the multiple neighborhoods abutting RFK — Hill East, Barney Circle, Kingman Park and others – who would have to deal with not just the enormous disruption of multiple constructions over the next five years, but with the increased traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, along with the noise pollution (and actual pollution) that accompanies major sporting events. What’s in it for them? Bowser was adamant, even fiery, in her insistence that developing the RFK site was essential for the city’s financial future, both short-term and long-term, as the city deals with the furloughing/firing of tens of thousands of federal government employees in the first 100 days of the second Donald Trump administration.
“If you need to add revenue, as we do, you can’t leave 180 acres vacant,” she said at Monday’s press conference. “If you want to attract business, you have to be about business.” Bowser has already threaded a small needle just to get control of the RFK site back to the District, in a miraculous last-second unanimous vote in the U.
S. Senate last December that gave the city the ability to develop the site. And she badly wanted the Commanders to come back to D.
C. But she had some cards to play with Harris in negotiating what else, if anything, goes on the site besides a new Commanders stadium. A new $89 million “SportsPlex” on the 27-acre “Fields of D.
C.,” which is adjacent to the RFK site, will house gymnasts, indoor track athletes, cheerleaders and other athletes that currently need to go to Maryland or Virginia to compete in events. Advertisement But the city also needs all types of housing for its residents, both working-class and low-income residents.
It needs affordable housing. It needs more subsidized housing. The new deal promises all those new homes, with at least 30 percent of them deemed “affordable.
” Half of that 30 percent would be targeted for residents making 30 percent or below of the city’s “Area Median Income,” which is determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The other half would be targeted for residents making 60 percent of below the city’s AMI. But Detroit thought it was getting a lot of affordable housing for its $300 million outlay for the Pistons’ arena, too. It’s still waiting .
The nostalgia to bring the Commanders back to D.C., where the then-Redskins became a juggernaut in the ’80s, winning three Super Bowls, is strong.
But so is the opposition to massive public funding for the new stadium. “The public investment in this is going to more than a billion dollars, already, and I don’t think that’s a good deal for D.C.
,” said Ward 6 City Councilman Charles Allen, who represents the neighborhoods surrounding the RFK site, and who’s been a longtime opponent to a publicly-funded stadium deal, on “The Politics Hour” on WAMU-FM radio last week . Allen also cited the notion that the stadium would be dark “340 days out of the year,” along with parking structures for more than 8,000 vehicles, and the current economic downturn. The new stadium in D.
C. is to have a roof, which would also put Washington in line for Final Fours, the next wave of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift concerts, presidential inaugural events and other big-ticket items that both Harris and the city would like to bring to D.C.
The proposal says the city and team will have a goal of up to 200 events at the stadium every year – not just NFL, college and/or high school football games, but concerts, UFC and WWE events, and private events. That is, let’s say, an ambitious goal. Capital One Arena is open 250 nights a year.
Nationals Park is open a minimum of 81 times a year for regular-season games, with another dozen to two dozen concerts/events in the stadium when the baseball team isn’t playing. Can D.C.
make an economic deal for the Commanders’ stadium that would guarantee that local residents are part of the redevelopment, with affordable housing and open, green spaces alongside the massive parking structures that will be needed to handle the vehicular traffic? Could an additional Metro entrance be created to better handle the ingress and egress of fans using the subway to get to the new stadium, rather than the current two? Advertisement These issues, of economics and race and gentrification – and sports – are ones that just about every big city with an NFL or MLB or NBA or NHL team faces. Billionaire team owners, with few exceptions , don’t usually pay the freight of building their palaces alone. They didn’t in Detroit.
And most of the people who used to live where all those stadiums now rise aren’t there anymore. I knew that poor Black and Asian communities populated the area, along with White families who chose to remain rather than flee to the suburbs. (That included the family of the venerated comedian Lily Tomlin, who grew up on the city’s west side, graduated from Cass Technical High School, and attended nearby Wayne State University.
) But I was today-years-old when I learned about what was known in Detroit as the “Red Ghetto” — a large swath of Native American people who emigrated and stayed in the area for decades, part of the eclectic collection of artists and small business owners (including the staff of the music magazine Cream) who stayed after so many people left the city, amidst the drug deals and sex work that went on all around them. Little Caesar’s is at the southern end of the old Cass Corridor, where the neighborhoods once stood. And, to be sure, there are majority Black neighborhoods in Detroit outside of the downtown area that have managed to retain their populations and not be displaced, while receiving new investments.
Detroit has gotten off the deck. The city’s bond rating is back to “investment grade” for the first time in more than 15 years . Thousands of people and dozens of businesses , with all manner of differing constituencies , who’ve been in the city for a few months or all their lives , are responsible for the city’s revival.
And that does include folks like the Ilitches, and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, a Detroit native, who’s reportedly invested more than $6 billion through his Bedrock company in various business and housing development projects over the last two decades. The Ilitches donated $40 million to Wayne State to fund the Mike Ilitch School of Business there. Famously, Mike Ilitch, who died in 2017, paid the rent of civil rights icon Rosa Parks during the final decade of her life .
She’d moved to Detroit after sparking the Birmingham bus boycott in 1955, one of the first national benchmarks of the Civil Rights movement. But, the truth remains: the Ilitches and a handful of billionaire investors now own more than 70 percent of the downtown office space in the city. The pull of sports is strong on many residents of most cities.
It’s strong on the players and staff who understand their unique ability to bring disparate groups of people together, if only for an hour or two, to support the same thing. Advertisement “When you take a job, you can’t take that for granted,” Pistons coach J.B.
Bickerstaff said last week. “The fan base here has been, and seen, the best of the best. It has high expectations.
But they love the Pistons. And to be a part of that is special. To be a part of that is unique, where the fan base is so connected to its team, and cares so much about it.
So just to be a part of that in itself means a lot, and it’s not something I take for granted.” It was a fun evening at Little Caesars. But I didn’t have to pay to get in.
You hope everyone, not just those who were blinged up inside the building, but also those who will never set foot in the building, and whose people used to live on the grounds, got as much out of it. There’s a deal to be made in D.C.
for the Commanders and the city. To me, it will require the Commanders to pay a little more, and the city to pay a little — a lot? — less, and to guarantee that those residents who weren’t involved in the negotiations for the deal nonetheless get a seat at the table as the land around them is parceled out. Billion-dollar sports facilities need to work for everyone, not just those who are sitting courtside, or in the comfort of luxury suites, in which most of us will never set foot.
(Photo of Josh Harris, Muriel Bowser and Roger Goodell: Win McNamee / Getty Images).
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