A True Detroit “Comeback” Means Leaving No One Behind
A recent post making the urbanist rounds asks, “Is Detroit Really Making a Comeback?” The authors’ research, which was just published in the journal Cities, looks at employment, income, housing values, and other data to explore whether the resurgence evidenced by downtown/Midtown coffee shops and craft cocktail joints is real. Indicators of Ongoing Decline The […]
Job Security: Or How To Prepare For Jobs That Can’t Be Automated
It used to be that parents who wanted job security urged kids to get a degree with immediately practical applications—like Eboo Patel’s mother, who wanted him to major in business instead of sociology, as he recalls in this blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education. But now, more and more jobs that used to seem […]
Helping nonviolent offenders avoid prison will lift Michigan communities.
I’ve posted before about why we should try to reduce the number of Michiganders who end up in jail when an appropriate alternative can be found. The costs of imprisonment for the state, the unequal application of our justice system by race, high rates of recidivism, and the long-term effects on the imprisoned—difficulties finding employment, […]
Young adults want to live in vibrant cities. Michigan needs to offer them better options.
Last week the New York Times published an article investigating the question of whether we’ve hit “peak Millennial”—whether the influx of young adults that has been so pivotal to population growth in cities around America is about to end. This is an important question because of the strength of this trend over the past decade and its […]
Redesigning workforce development for the new economy
Last week my colleague Kim Trent wrote about the rapidity at which automation is changing the job market and the skills that employers are looking for. Hundreds of thousands of Michigan workers have reason to be concerned about whether the jobs they have now will exist in 20, ten, or even five years. For Michigan […]
Essential Art: Part Three
One of the skills that the Becoming Brilliant authors Roberta Michnick and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek focus on as critical to future success is that of confidence. You may think of confidence as something innate—you’re born smart, or good-looking, or good at sports, and you develop confidence as a result. You might conflate it with conversations about […]
Essential Art: Part Two
In my last post, I revisited some memories from my 8th grade art class with John Post, in the light of what we’ve been learning from Becoming Brilliant—a book about what skills our kids will need to be successful in the 21st century. I don’t believe that these skills (collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative […]
Essential Art: Part One
Readers of MFI will know we have all recently read (or in some cases, re-read) Becoming Brilliant, which makes a strong case that the skills our children will need to be successful in the future are much broader than those taught on a standardized test. Most professionals could probably reflect on these skills and identify […]
Visualizing the Megaregion (aka Detroit Matters)
In Michigan, collaboration across community borders has not been a recent strong suit. I’ve been at many a meeting where folks from the western part of the state claim to identify more with Chicago than with Detroit. And the fact is that a growing understanding of the function of the new economy, with cities as […]
Empowering immigrant leaders: A model from Nashville
Last week I wrote about how critical immigrant populations have been to those cities where a decades-long population decline has slowed or, in some cases, reversed. But fully harnessing the power of immigrants to contribute to the culture and economy involves integrating them into the community. As I suggested last week, one needed approach is […]