Detroit. It’s a real city in the Midwest but also a one-word metaphor for what horrifies San Franciscans most. People have been warning for years that we’re in danger of someday becoming Detroit. The prediction has become a scary meme and a real dialogue among online chin scratchers.
The fear is not far-fetched. We’re a one-industry town, and we’ve staked our bloated budgets on the expectation that the tech gods will continue to rain riches on our tax rolls in perpetuity. So the parallels with automobile-dependent Detroit are obvious. And, recently, so are some of the degradations we’ve seen on our downtown streets.
But while the comparison is laughable when you consider San Francisco’s geographical advantages, it’s less of a stretch when you account for the real progress made of late by the actual Detroit. Could it be that we self-satisfied San Franciscans actually have some things to learn from Detroiters?
That was the question on my mind when I met recently with the city’s mayor, Mike Duggan, at The Standard’s offices. He had been on vacation in wine country and was doing what any politician with ambitions for higher office does before departing California: taking a few meetings, seeing a few sights and spreading the gospel of his town’s political and financial turnaround.
There’s something of a Tim Walz vibe about Duggan, and it’s not just their shared Midwestern-ness. Detroit’s mayor is also a paunchy, balding white man, who, at 66, is six years older than Walz. Duggan, too, has an air of having seen it all before — he has a background in county government and hospital administration — but with the spark of another act left in him.
Duggan has served as Detroit’s mayor for nearly 11 years, taking over when the city was in bankruptcy and under state control. He has succeeded as a pragmatic, empathetic yet forceful and business-friendly leader in a city that was ready for his style of governing. In short, he’s the very model of a not-particularly-ideological, get-shit-done politician. The kind of elected official, in other words, San Francisco hasn’t seen enough of recently.
Duggan told me that he and his wife had hired a driver to take them around town, a journey that included the Presidio, Pacific Heights and Chinatown. “I said, ‘OK, I also want to see the areas that they’re writing about,’ ” he told me, referring to the flood of national doom-loop stories that so irritate San Francisco boosters.
Circling the Tenderloin, “I got to see the issues that are generating the complaints,” he said. “But I have to tell you, the national publicity that you are getting is not fair to what’s going on here.” Most U.S. cities, he continued, “would give anything to have the kind of architecture, the wealth, the climate, the water and the attraction to young people of your tech industry.”
On behalf of my fellow citizens, I accepted Duggan’s flattery, which is old news to us (and which, notably, was uttered before Walz shouted out our virtues). What, I wanted to know, were his impressions of the grittier, more problematic parts of San Francisco? The parts that have been in a death spiral since Covid convinced employers that they could let workers call in from home indefinitely, taking their lunch money and their bar tabs with them.
Because Detroit’s central business district was hollowed out by a massive economic downturn that had nothing to do with a natural disaster or health crisis, Duggan’s city has been tackling this very same problem for 15 years.
Today in Detroit, the mayor told me, there are bigger crowds at night than during the day, with city dwellers and suburbanites enjoying nightlife and stadiums that house four professional sports teams. Developers began converting abandoned office buildings into residential towers years ago. Duggan name-checks projects off the top of his head, including the David Whitney Building apartments and the David Stott Building, a high-rise conversion. This nighttime-over-daytime theme is exactly what some downtown advocates hope San Francisco can emulate.
It was startling but refreshing to hear a mayor talk of his successes convincing billionaires to relocate to (instead of depart) the big city. He praised Quicken Loans boss Dan Gilbert, for example, who moved his suburban offices to central Detroit. “He did the math and realized that instead of being spread across multiple campuses, he could move into the city, buy the building and have everybody in one place cheaper than where he was.”
Stephen Ross, the billionaire developer of Hudson Yards in New York, is working on a project in Detroit — a particular point of pride for Duggan. And he singles out for praise a local banking executive, of all people. “We have a fella by the name of Gary Torgow” — chairman of Huntington National Bank — “who just built a 20-story apartment building on the riverfront that he’s leasing now, and next to it he’s building a 20-story JW Marriott on the riverfront.”
It will come as no surprise that Detroit has no “overpaid executive tax,” a measure that would fly in the face of Duggan’s attempt to attract business to his city. San Francisco’s 2-year-old measure potentially will be watered down by a ballot initiative in the fall, but it’s not going away.
Duggan said when he first took office he focused on getting stuff done over political bickering. “The people in the city wanted no part in divisive us-versus-them politics.” He knew, for example, that he needed a program to redeploy or destroy the 45,000 vacant homes Detroit had a decade ago. (More than 25,000 have been demolished, and 15,000 have been sold and renovated.) Residents told him they wanted more parks, so he built them.
He has focused on getting consensus from what had been a fractious City Council that had poor relations with the mayor’s office. (Sound familiar?) “I just relentlessly refused to engage in us-versus-them,” he said, repeating one of his favorite maxims. “I have not vetoed a City Council vote in 11 years.”
Even before the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision allowing municipalities to disband homeless encampments, Detroit had none — because, Duggan explained in almost befuddlingly plain language, they aren’t allowed.
“If you go into Detroit today, you will not see a tent anywhere in the city,” he said. “We have a very aggressive outreach team of compassionate folks. I mean, there’s a whole lot of reasons people won’t go to shelters. But in Detroit, our outreach folks will be with you every day. They know most by name. You can’t sleep across the sidewalk and block the public sidewalk. You can’t put up your tent at all. And we don’t have encampments.” (The fact that the Detroit weather isn’t ideal for rough sleeping might have something to do with this … but let’s give credit where it’s due.)
Detroit helps people find vacant apartments by maintaining a city-run database. Duggan said landlords have been willing to disclose when an apartment is available so long as the city manages the information. “It’s been a lot of work,” he said, adding that the city has “30 to 40 people who do nothing but track the latest vacancies” and help find homes for people who need them.
Duggan is up for reelection next year and hasn’t decided if he’ll run for a fourth term, though he pointedly told me he’s “too young to retire.” I got the sense he’d like to replace Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who terms out in 2026.
But Duggan will be in Detroit for a while yet. San Francisco’s elected officials — and aspiring elected officials — might do well to plan a Midwestern vacation and drop by to see him.