Detroit is facing critical choices about basic institutions that shape our lives. Development pressures pushing long-term residents out of homes, are accelerating as money flows into the city. Corporate interests are pressuring for everything from capturing library funds to large-scale developments of highly toxic concrete production plants. 

The City’s history of protecting people from corporate greed is not good. Just this past summer the City Council approved a $60 million tax break for Dan Gilbert and his Hudson project. This decision came after intense community outrage over yet another scheme to shift public money into the pockets of developers who promise much but deliver little. 

In late January, Bridge Detroit published an important article detailing the profits reaped by John Hantz through the sale of land on the east side. Hantz received almost 2000 lots from the city at bargain basement prices a decade ago.  He paid less than $450,000 for the package. He promised a massive effort to turn lots into tree farms, with wind turbines here and there. Now we learn he has quietly sold off just a few of these properties for $9.5 million.  

In addition to selling these lands for profit, he has been accumulating blight tickets on spaces he promised to restore. The Bridge Detroit analysis found nearly 200 tickets amounting to over $33,000 in fines. Of that total, the multi-millionaire had paid a little over $7,000. Anyone who travels through the east side neighborhood knows that in some areas the trees are doing well, in others they are struggling. 

When John Hantz acquired the land in 2013, he insisted he would not sell it for profit. But by 2019 that promise was already broken. Crain’s documented the sale of 147 parcels for an estimated $2.8 million. Some of those were part of a land swap, enabling Hantz to gather more land while enabling the city to complete the deal with Chrysler.

His pledges of job creation have completely evaporated. He had claimed he would provide hundreds of jobs with “reasonable salaries and benefits.”  Instead, in a cynical manipulation of people’s desire to contribute to the healthy development of the city, he pushed for volunteers to plant trees, gathering over 1,000 people in the spring of 2018. 

The important lesson in these examples is not that Hantz or Gilbert or other corporate interests use public desperation to make personal profits. That is to be expected. What is critical is that citizens in large numbers pointed this out time and again to our elected officials. Nearly 1,000 people turned out to warn against the City Council support for Hantz Farms. They organized for nearly two years to narrow his proposals from 10,000 lots down to less than 2,000. They insisted on community benefits legislation, only to have the City Council gut the effort to put constraints on developments that claim public money.

Now as we face a series of issues on housing, education, libraries, policing, and land use, the City Council would do well to consider who generally tells the truth about development and who generally lies.  Who uses their position to support the people, and who advances corporate interests.

In his call to defend our public libraries Russ Bellant, a strong community advocate, asks us to consider, “What are your standards of citizenship? Do you believe that Citizens should have the ultimate voice, the ultimate say on the running of our city?” This is our challenge today. Only by becoming more active and vigilant will we be able to "protect the power of the people against untrustworthy insiders.” Only our actions will create a city where people are valued, our lives protected.