City planners fight post-pandemic trends seeking downtown rebounds

The pandemic officially ended May 5, says the World Health Organization.

And in some ways, the pandemic is just a bad memory. Crowds have returned to Detroit's pro sports events. They jam the city's Corktown and theater districts. They line up at popular restaurants at night and fill seating at school events.

But the revival of downtowns is uneven across Michigan and the nation. Office rents are sliding as employers still hesitate about demanding that staffs work onsite. Restaurants in some areas, especially those tied to the office lunch trade, continue to close while others operate largely as take-outs. Some downtown shops are closed for good. San Francisco has been in the spotlight as a downtown especially on the skids.

The pandemic’s hangover has city planners and leaders holding their collective breath. In downtown Detroit on typical weekdays, the restaurants that survived the pandemic can be crowded although many office towers are largely vacant. The exodus of office workers from Detroit has spilled over into more daytime business for suburban restaurants, according to city planners in some towns, including Royal Oak, where a week of public meetings begins Monday to plan the city’s future.

In Pontiac, a mayor finishing his first year in office says people will always want to gather in groups, whether for work or play. That echoes many academics who’ve said that a century-long trend will continue to see rural areas lose population as cities, around the world, keeping growing up and out. On Friday, Pontiac broke ground on a skatepark, replacing an antiquated skateboarding site nearby. It's part of a citywide plan to enhance youth facilities, keeping a campaign promise of Mayor Tim Greimel. Kids will gather, so let's give them good activities, Greimel said.

"There's always going to be an interest in having in-person interactions, in our downtown as well as in our parks," Greimel said, after hefting a clod of dirt for the ground-breaking. Across from the park, Pontiac plans to repurpose a 1920s elementary school as a youth activities center, he said.

"I think some doomsayers are premature to sound the death knell of downtowns. People getting out to be with other people is still the future," Greimel said. In fact, it took intensive networking, some of it face to face, to lure support for the skatepark from Pontiac City Council, the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation and a batch of small but vital individual and corporate donors. The new skatepark is to open in late summer at Pontiac's historic Oakland Park, which is surrounded by houses built in the 1920s by GM to house workers building what was then GM's newest and wildly popular model – the Pontiac.

On Monday, Royal Oak starts a week of “charrettes.” That's the chic word for group meetings aimed at gauging public as well as expert opinions on how a city should view its future in a new master plan. The process is required every five years under state law, and it's also occurring this spring in Birmingham. Royal Oak's downtown is well-positioned to benefit if many of its residents decide to continue working from home rather than commute to downtown Detroit, city planner Joe Murphy said.

As the weather warms, remote workers are finding comfortable spots to land with their laptop computers in Royal Oak's new downtown park, Murphy said. That puts a keyboard puncher in easy walking distance of coffee and bagel shops, fine dining or a take-out spot, even the library's squeaky-clean rest rooms.

"I think we're still a small, traditional downtown community, and I think we're going to hear that people love that," Murphy said.

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"But is our downtown going to have as many businesses as it used to have?" he said, referring to recent concern that "downtown San Francisco is emptying out." He added: "As much as we may not want to admit it, we're in competition with other communities." (For the schedule of Royal Oak's master plan meetings, visit www.planroyaloak.com)

Retail experts say that malls were dying decades before the pandemic. The question now is whether shoppers can be wooed back to downtown brick-and-mortar retailers, despite the ease of online buying. No one can be sure but a confirmed optimist is Cristina Sheppard-Decius, former head of Dearborn's downtown merchants group, now the executive director of the Birmingham Shopping District, which includes promoting the city's dining and services.

A shop with the right mix of goods, buttressed by friendly staff and a slick website, can thrive in the right location, said Sheppard-Decius, who chairs the Michigan Downtown Association. Sheppard-Decius said downtown commerce in Detroit's suburbs is getting back to normal but with some changes.

Outdoor dining has become permanent outside many restaurants, she said. As for working at home, she said she knows many people who are "craving to get back to the office." Yet, countless Michiganders seem to like working at home, especially if they can avoid paying a city income tax such as they incur when working in Detroit, Pontiac or any of about two dozen Michigan cities that charge income taxes, encouraging a shift "that could stay with us a long time,” she said.

Despite that disincentive, psychologists as well as economists say there are reasons why of all kinds of people, despite pandemic-jarred disruptions, either want to or should be near others to be their best. That can even include copying each other's skateboard moves while modeling purple hair and fake tattoos, as worn by Marijayne Renny of the Pontiac Skateboard Project – credited by her mayor as the prime networker and fundraiser behind Pontiac's skateboard-park-in-progress.

As Renny told the ground-breaking crowd of about 50, including a knot of young folks holding skateboards, "People will look at this project across the country to see how everybody worked so hard to make this happen."

Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Will Detroit go the way of San Francisco, with a downtown emptied out?