Lansing, schmansing — move Michigan's capital back to Detroit | Opinion

It struck me again last week, as I drove around downtown Lansing looking for a parking lot I'd been told was right across from the Lansing State Journal, where I planned to work for the day: This is a sad little town.

I go to Lansing as infrequently as is possible for someone in my position, which turns out to be not very often at all. But I still remember the first time I traveled to the state capital, shortly after I joined the Free Press in 2012.

"Yeesh," I thought to myself. "These are the people who look down on Detroit?"

But it wasn't until Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's second inauguration that I had an important epiphany. My 12-year-old son wanted to see our statewide officials sworn in, so we piled into the car on a frigid January day and made the 90-minute trek to up I-96. We parked on a nearby side street, and walked about a block to the Capitol lawn, where what seemed like maybe 500 people had assembled. (Roughly .4% of the Lansing population!)

"If we did this in Detroit, we could get a thousand people, easy," I thought to myself.

That's when it hit me, sheer elegance in its simplicity: Move the capital to Detroit.

Back to Detroit, I should say — Detroit was Michigan's first territorial capital, for obvious reasons, then the first state capital, before relocating to Lansing in 1847 for what, frankly, are dumb reasons: No other state capital was so close to the state's borders, and 19th century Michiganders were worried about being too close to Canada. (Canada. Canada?) I'm not making any of this up; Michigan Radio reported all of it in 2017.

A couple of other cities — Ann Arbor, Jackson, Marshall, DeWitt — threw their hats in the ring, but Lansing's lowball offer won legislative approval, and the deal was clinched.

There are a lot of practical reasons to move the capital back to Detroit.

• Detroit is the state's most populous and important city, sited in the state's most highly and densely populated county.

• Outstate Michiganders like to sneer at Detroit's diminished population, but the Motor City is still more than three times larger than the state's second-largest city.

• Detroit drives a disproportionate amount of Michigan's economic activity.

• Lansing lawmakers have been too eager at times to wash their hands of Detroit (the phrase "Detroit fatigue," which is what lawmakers call it when they want to absolve themselves of caring about the state's principal city, drives me up the wall); moving the capital here would re-orient legislative priorities.

• But a move to Detroit wouldn't shut out the rest of the state — metro Detroiters hail from everywhere, and this city is more accessible than Lansing, with its inadequately marked one-way streets and hard-to-find parking lots. (Free Press politics editor Emily Lawler, a proud resident of the Capital City, informs me that Lansing got rid of most downtown one-way streets this spring. You could've fooled me.)

• Downtown Detroit is a place you can reasonably describe as “bustling.” Driving to Lansing last spring for a meeting, I asked Lawler where I ought to park. "You'll be able to find street parking in front of the Capitol," she told me. "Surely not," I thought, "you can't just drive right up to an important government building in a city’s downtown in the middle of the work day and find parking," except it turns out that you can.

• The Capitol building has a more robust security checkpoint now, I'm told, but the last time I visited, you could walk right in like it's a Meijer. I'm all for transparency and accessibility in the people's business, but these are wild times, and state lawmakers deserve as much security at work as the average mortgage telemarketer. In Detroit, we figured out how to accessibly secure our government buildings a long time ago.

• When you tell Lansing residents they live in a sad little town, they don't get offended, they shrug ruefully and look apologetic, because they know it's true.

• It's not that much farther for outstate lawmakers to drive: From Gogebic to Lansing is eight hours and 16 minutes. It’s just nine hours and seven minutes to Detroit.

• I've even got a site picked out: The old Wayne County Building. The county moved to the Guardian Building in 2009, the Wayne County Building has been totally vacant since early 2011, and it is both larger and empirically much, much cooler than the state Capitol, which is a pretty nice building but absolutely does not have statues with chariots racing along the top.

• We've got tons of office space in downtown Detroit, beautifully renovated over the last decade, and now too-often vacant thanks to the work-from-home craze, making this the most significant economic development deal Lansing could ever offer Detroit, which is, again, the state's principal city.

• On my last trip to Lansing, colleagues offered to take me out for Lansing tacos, which they felt obliged to warn me were not going to be very good. It frightened me, and in southwest Detroit, where I live, we have Mexicantown, with about the best tacos in the U.S. (Also, our neighborhoods have neighborhoods. Does Lansing have that?)

For what it's worth, I ran this idea past Whitmer at last spring’s Mackinac Policy Conference. She looked at me like I was crazy, quickly shot me down, and wisely declined to further engage with the question.

That's a governor who deserved to have a thousand people at her inauguration.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. She would prefer to never have to drive to Lansing again. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit should be Michigan's capital, not Lansing