(upbeat music) - In a few days now, we're gonna all be Downtown for the NFL draft, 300,000 plus people coming.

Are we ready?

- We will be.

You know, we handled the Grand Prix, we handled Taylor Swift, but this is going to be- - Bigger than Taylor Swift?

- This is even bigger than Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift is pretty big.

- My goodness.

- But yeah, 300,000 people in Kansas City last year.

They're expecting at least that here.

And this city is gonna be jammed with visitors from around America for three days.

- We're within driving distance of what?

Six NFL cities?

- Well, that's right.

You know, I've been to the last two drafts in Las Vegas and in Kansas City, and the thousands of people who come from their own cities with their sports jerseys on.

It's a great atmosphere.

But when you're in Detroit, you could drive here really five hours from Buffalo, from Pittsburgh, from Cleveland, from Cincinnati, from Chicago, from Indianapolis.

And so they are projecting a large crowd coming to Detroit.

- So it's not a ticketed event, most of it, right?

So you have no way to know exactly how many people are gonna show up.

It's just based on what you've seen in other cities?

- So what you do, right, is they have something called an NFL OnePass, which everybody will be familiar with, but you get the app.

And the actual NFL draft zone will be fenced in, from basically from Hart Plaza up along Woodward, up to Campus Martius.

And the stands on TV, where the players go up when they're picked, that will be inside that fence.

That fence will probably hold 75,000 people.

- Wow.

- But the 300,000 people, I'm gonna say two out of three, three out of four people who come for the NFL draft, they won't actually be inside the draft fence itself.

They'll be out in Corktown, they'll be in Eastern Market, they'll be in Greektown, they'll be in the shops and the restaurants and the bars around Detroit.

- So most of us haven't been to one of these drafts.

You've been to a couple, and I think a lot of people in this area are still wondering what is this?

How would you describe what this event is?

- It is 300,000 NFL diehards who are convinced that this year's first round draft choice is going to take them on the Tom Brady track to success.

And they all show up happy, optimistic, and getting along with each other.

It really is a very enjoyable three days.

- So other than the actual draft picking that will go on, be televised, what are people doing here for three days?

- So the first night is the first round, so it's Thursday night, it starts at eight o'clock.

So you spend your afternoon in the city, doing whatever you're doing, bars, restaurants, and the like.

Friday is the second, third round starts at seven o'clock, and then Saturday starts at noon and goes all day.

Now, Friday afternoon, there's a Tiger game at one o'clock.

And how you kill time during the day has been an issue in other cities, but I think you're gonna see the crowds show up here early.

I think you're likely to see Comerica Park filled up for the one o'clock game for people who've always wanted to see that stadium and then come over.

It's gonna be- - And then places like this and other cultural centers around.

- Yeah, everything will be featured.

And I know it's not realistic to think that people are gonna head out to the remote areas, but you've got a lot of commercial districts who are plugging themselves, "Come see us while you're here."

And so it's gonna be interesting to see.

Will people go to the DIA?

I'm not sure whether a large number of NFL fans will, but you're gonna get a chance.

You can come here and see the first Model T if you happen to be a car buff.

But everybody's gonna be promoting the different things going on in Detroit.

And when you got 300,000 people who get up on Friday morning and don't have to go to the draft site till five o'clock at night, they've got all day to figure out what they'd like to do.

And the same thing on Saturday.

- So what's the impact of this event?

What do you anticipate?

What's your expectations?

- So the last time the city of Detroit was introduced to the national audience was in 2013, when we declared bankruptcy.

And that is a lot of people's last impression of us.

And this is a chance to reintroduce our city to America.

And as you know, everybody who comes here and visits now says, "Oh, my God, where did these buildings come from?

Oh, my God, you don't have any homeless encampments.

You don't have graffiti on your buildings.

There's all this activity.

The Riverfront is amazing."

And so what we want is a chance to show America that this is what Detroit is today, and maybe erase some of those unpleasant images from 10 years ago.

- So you think about 2006, we had the Super Bowl here, and a lot of smoke and mirrors activity trying to make the city look what it hoped to be but what it wasn't.

How much of that's going on this time?

- So I was on Roger Penske's host committee in 2006, where we went down Woodward and painted fake storefronts on empty buildings so that people wouldn't know that our main corridor was largely empty.

And it was the force of Roger's personality, basically, in 2006 that had this city in a good place.

This time, go down Woodward any Saturday morning now, and it's jammed.

And the shops are all open and people are living here that weren't living here.

Of course, 18 years ago you had almost nobody living Downtown.

It's a whole different city.

Now, we're fixing broken sidewalk slabs and replacing out-of-date streetlight poles and the like to make sure that it's really beautiful, but actually, you look at what's happened over the riverfront in the last 10 years, and if we get good weather, I think people across America are gonna be stunned at what USA today calls the finest river walk in America.

- So you're not having to fake it this time?

- Nah, nah.

It's good.

- So in terms of where these people, all of these visitors, where they'll stay, will they'll dine, do we have that capacity or we expect to see people all over metro Detroit?

- Oh sure.

When Taylor Swift was here last year, you had all the hotel rooms up to Troy were filled for that weekend.

And so we'll fill the hotel rooms throughout the Tri-County area.

And that's a great thing for everybody.

And then it'll be a question of what folks do for the day.

And we've done a, you know, I think a really good job of engaging Detroit businesses in making sure they'll be able to benefit.

- So you think about the Super Bowl 2006, it's now 2024, we've got this event last that's what, 18 years?

These 18 years, of course, some remarkable transformation in Detroit, but, of course, not where we wanna be entirely yet.

I mean, where are we in terms of the city's comeback?

If that was the beginning, are we at the midpoint here with this event or past the midpoint in your mind?

Do we have as far to go as we've come?

- So, you know, this city has lost population since 1957.

It's been a 65-year decline, and we're probably 8 or 10 years on the upside, so I won't tell you we're halfway there.

But when a friend of mine sent me a copy of the San Diego Union Tribune paper with the headline that San Diego was proud to be second to Detroit, it increased in home sale prices in America.

We're in a very different place than we were.

And so our neighborhoods are coming back.

We are leading the country in the growth of the prices of the homes throughout our neighborhoods, throughout the city.

A lot of our commercial corridors now, if you look at what's happened on Livernois, you look at what's happened on Kercheval and Van Dyke, East Warren and the like, it's spreading, but we're changing the arc of history here.

And it's going the right direction.

- Well, there's always friction between Downtown and the neighborhoods in terms of people's expectations, and, you know, where researchers should go, etc.

How will this event impact the neighborhoods?

- Yeah, I don't know this event will impact the neighborhoods.

What this event will do is change the image of Detroit nationally.

We have a lot of neighborhoods with the block clubs, they're doing a phenomenal job, and they're extremely proud.

And they resent the fact that their progress has been dismissed when they have beautiful gardens, beautiful parks, houses, vacant houses filled with families moving in.

But when you have friends come in from out of town, you wanna show off your city.

And, you know, right now, people come in from out town, they take them to the Motown Museum, they take them to the Riverfront, they walk through Downtown.

And I think the great majority of Detroiters are very proud of what is going on.

- There has been a COVID impact on the progress of the city's comeback and on Downtown activity, etc.

Will this do anything to jumpstart that to get us beyond all of the COVID pullbacks that we saw?

- You know, COVID has cut two ways.

We probably still have half the offices not filled during the day.

But what we've seen is huge increases in new housing.

And so you've got people living Downtown, we just, you know, had a 22-story apartment building opened over on the old Joe Louis site that you have people living down here now, it's a neighborhood.

And the Detroit you and I remember, people drove in at 8:30 in the morning, by 5:30 at night, the streets were empty.

Now it's just the opposite.

We're a little bit light during the day, but nights and weekends, there are big crowds here.

And so it's a different kind of Downtown.

Our revenues are doing extremely well.

We have less tax revenues from people working during the today, we have more income tax revenues from people living here.

So it's cut both ways.

- But that's a lot of empty office space and more emptying, you know, every week, with leases expiring, not being renewed.

The Olympia-related companies last month said that, you know, they're pulling back on two office buildings, and not starting that project, at least until next year.

What do you do with all that empty space?

- So again, Olympia's doing what's smart, what's happening every place all over the country.

They had a plan for 10 buildings, 2 of which were office buildings.

Right now there's no demand for office buildings the way people are working from home, and so they're accelerating the hotels and the apartments and they're pushing the office buildings back.

I'm talking to two or three other owners of office buildings who are talking about converting them to residential.

Now, we've seen that before.

We had the hammer building up on Woodward, that was the carpenter's office building got converted to residential five years or so ago.

Of course the David Whitney was an office building, got converted to residential.

So Detroit's been ahead of the curve.

Now Chicago, New York and a lot of the others are moving the same direction.

But I feel good about the fact that, yeah, there's no doubt about it, nobody's gonna build office at the moment.

But if we can get more people living here, that's actually strong for the city long term.

- But you need offices and you need workers Downtown, you need that commerce and that activity.

Do we think the change we saw, because of the COVID and the work-at-home environment we're in now, is that long term, is that going to change over time?

Or is this a new normal for Detroit?

- You know, I think people are gonna come back and have, maybe, two people out of three still there.

You got people working three days a week, four days a week in the office and the rest from home.

Most employers are concluding you can't really build a culture with everybody on Zoom.

And so you're ending up with hybrid models.

And so our question long term is how does Detroit compete for those companies that want to have that kind of team environment?

And I actually think the single biggest factor is gonna be the University of Michigan grad school that's being built right now on Grand River.

Because you're gonna have one of the finest grad schools in America producing grads in artificial intelligence and climate change and software technology and mobility and the like.

Which is then gonna allow not just Stephen Ross, but Dan Gilbert and everybody else, Bill Ford, to say, "I can now bring more office workers in because I've got the talent pool here."

And so over the next two or three years, I think you're gonna see us land major national companies who want to come here, where housing is affordable in Detroit, where it's not in some other hotspots in the country, where you don't have traffic jams to deal with here.

And so I think the combination of the University of Michigan, what's happening at the train station and Newlab next door, I think ultimately we'll have a big hand in filling up those office buildings.

- What sort of demand are you seeing from investors, people who want to come in here, build things, do business in Detroit?

- Housing and hotels and manufacturing of course.

- Are we still under hotelled?

- It depends on who you ask, but yeah, there's certainly a lot of interest in hotels.

Of course right now the neighborhood advisory committee just voted unanimously to support the convention hotel next to Huntington Place, which will give us a high-end convention hotel attached.

To compete for many of the major conventions, you actually have to have a conventional hotel attached to the convention center.

That's gonna be, I think, a great thing.

So we know there's interest in hotels.

Right next door to where we are.

Fortescue is building a battery assembly plant.

We continue to have high demand for manufacturing plants in the city of Detroit.

And that's exciting.

And it's been housing.

And so it's, basically, everything but office is going very well.

- So how close are we getting to Detroit being a market rate investment, where people can come in here and put money in the ground and not need tax subsidies from the city, tax breaks from the state, where rents and lease payments will pay for the investment?

- So it's a project-by-project basis.

So the Sterling Group just built that 20-story apartment building next to the convention center in the old Joe Louis site with no tax incentives.

But they're renting out their top floor for $4,000 a month, and it's all market rate.

Amazon built a 4 million square foot plant out in the fairgrounds with no tax incentives.

But if you want to have buildings where you're gonna set aside a portion for people of lower income, 'cause we believe people of all incomes should live in all neighborhoods, you're going to have to have tax breaks, otherwise the numbers don't work, and they just won't build.

So I think you're gonna see the same thing.

Market rate projects by and large can get done without tax breaks.

But if you want to have housing set aside on an affordable basis, we're gonna need those tax breaks.

- So Ford motor companies, central depot complex, their innovation center over there in Corktown coming online in a few weeks.

- Right, June 6th, yeah.

- In a few weeks.

What do you expect from that?

- It's already amazing.

Of course, you just drive down Michigan Avenue, as you know, and the transformative effect has already happened with the Godfrey and the new hotels and housing and the like.

But you're, basically, bringing 5,000 people into Corktown.

2,500 working for Ford, another 2,500 working for the startups affiliated with Ford.

And that's created huge demand for housing.

And because of that, we've got several hundred housing units being built, many of them affordable 'cause somebody's gonna have to be able to work in these areas.

It's been transformative.

What happened to Corktown in five years is incredible.

- And, of course, that's the other end of the place we're in now.

I mean, this is where it started, and that's now gonna be the electric car automative, you know, vehicle center of this industry.

I mean, there's a lot of synergy between, you know, past and present With automakers.

- Right.

We're sitting in the Piquette plant, where Henry Ford's team built the Model Ts by hand- - [Nolan] And several of them behind us.

- before they moved to the assembly line in Highland Park, where he changed the world with the $5 workday.

But just on this block on Piquette, which most Detroiters don't even know it's here, next door, the old Studebaker Service Center is being rebuilt by Platform as a group of apartment buildings beautifully being done right now.

On the other side, the Fisher 21 plant, which built bodies for GM cars, is now being built by Fortescue as a battery manufacturing site, across the street, the Fisher 21 plant, that big ugly white building you see at 94 and 75, been vacant for 40 years, Greg Jackson and Richard Hosey are turning it into apartments with an affordable component.

That's just on this block.

Hundreds of apartments, hundreds of manufacturing jobs.

Before, the only thing on this block was the old Model Ts.

And it's very exciting.

- One of the things we haven't talked about much lately is transit.

Mass transit has been a challenge for this area.

For two decades or more we've been trying to come up with an answer to that.

With the change in the work environment, fewer people commuting to work Downtown, fewer people commuting at all, staying in their homes, how has that changed the outlook for mass transit and how do we need to rethink what that's going to look like?

- So we need to think about two things.

One is, I don't know when robotaxis will be here, but every time somebody has laughed at Elon Musk, he's somehow gone and accomplished it.

And I don't know whether it'd be 5 years, 10 years from now, but there's gonna be a point at which you're gonna have more cost-effective point-to-point transportation.

The thing about public transit is it goes in a straight line.

If you live along Woodward and you work on Woodward, a good bus system, a good rail system is great.

If you've got to connect, now you better make darn sure that connection is coming soon 'cause people aren't gonna stand out 15, 20 minutes waiting for a connection.

So I think the answer in the short run is we need to dramatically increase the bus frequency, I think what's called bus rapid transit, which is a way of getting on and off the buses quickly without having paper exchanges or slowing down to drop money in the fair box is a step in the right direction.

So we need to dramatically upgrade the quality of the bus service.

And I think that, ultimately, will be a bridge.

And I know people don't want to hear this, but, you know, I think, ultimately, you're gonna see robotaxis being a significant part of the transit option in this country.

- Without knowing what that transit future's gonna look like, transportation future's gonna look like, does it make sense then now to pour billions of dollars into a system that might work for today but might be obsolete in a decade?

- And so those are the things we're looking at.

If you started to build fixed rail lines now, it would take you 10, 15 years to get them done.

And again, Detroit isn't like Chicago or New York with high rises that run down the street, we are far more spread out.

So it's more of a challenge to build a fixed line that serves a huge number of people.

And that's why I do think first-class bus service for this region makes the most sense.

And, you know, we had a proposal on Lansing for Wayne County, Oakland County and Washtenaw to come together, got blocked by the legislature, but we would've dramatically enhanced the frequency of the bus service.

Maybe we'll come back to that.

Macomb County is not expressing any interest in being a part of that.

But a dramatic increase in the quality of the bus service, I think, is an important next step over the next five years.

- Got 300,000 people coming in here, a lot of them from out of town, every single one of them probably asking the same question, is Detroit safe?

Is Detroit safe?

- So the numbers last year, of course, you saw Chief White at the National Conference on Public Safety, where he was the one selected to introduce President Biden because we had the fewest homicides since the 1960s.

We're down another 30% through today in 2024 in homicide shootings and carjackings.

The city is definitely headed the right direction.

Now, you saw at the Superbowl Victory Parade in Kansas City, half a million people on an absolute beautiful day, and two guys get into beef and start shooting each other.

And it does enormous damage to the city's image internationally.

But we've got an outstanding police department.

I think the folks who've been Downtown last year know that the Evolv weapons detectors have turned out to be an enormously good tool.

We're gonna have 60 of those weapons detectors around, and on the public streets, as everybody who has been down here knows, if you have a license to carry a concealed weapon, when you go through the detector, it'll show you have a gun, the officer will say, "Can I see your permit?"

You take out your CPL permit, you don't have a problem.

If you're carrying illegally, you're going to be arrested.

But we saw last year, we didn't see people carrying illegally.

We had 20 Evolvs on the street last summer, we will have 60 on the street for the NFL draft.

So I can't tell you that there won't be anybody stupid enough to do something, but the job the Detroit police are doing, it will minimize that chance.

- And for the people who live here day-to-day, you're saying the crime situation getting better.

That's not the story in a lot of other big cities.

What's Detroit done differently?

- Well, one, I believe we have the best police chief in America, and we have probably 30 or 40 of our senior management in the police department who have all gone through the Wayne State executive MBA program.

And that may sound obscure, but I realize that our top 40 management in the Detroit Police Department, 39 had criminal justice degrees and one guy had a chemistry degree.

That's not how you run a $300 million, 2,500-person organization.

And so we partnered with Wayne State and ran executive MBA program that says, "Here's how you manage HR, here's how you manage a budget, here's how you do strategic planning."

And now what you're seeing is our officers being deployed on the street with minimum staffings that are met every single day with rigorous metrics over response times.

If we have an officer that has an unusual number of assaults, they are pulled off, the videos from the body cams are reviewed.

It is a whole different level of a department.

And this last year, we've rolled out this community violence initiative with six activist groups of the neighborhood, and we're now eight, nine months into it, and we're seeing early returns with people from the neighborhood who are engaging with the groups who are maybe the angriest to talk about handling that anger in a way that doesn't involve settling your dispute with gunfire.

And those things appear to be working.

Now, we'll have a report card by the end of this summer, but over the last 9, 10 months, Detroit really has been leading America in the reduction in violence crimes.

- We're getting to the point where when people make a decision of where to buy a house, where to locate, where to send their kids to school, that Detroit is getting competitive, crime's not a factor, perhaps education's not a factor.

- Well, certainly we're having trouble getting parents with school-aged kids.

That's still a problem.

But beyond that, I mean, the reason you saw 23% increase in home sale prices in Detroit last year is because huge numbers of people are moving in that are driving up the demand.

Not as many families with school-aged children.

And I think Dr. Vitti has got the school district going the right direction, but that's probably the single biggest thing holding us back right now.

- So you've talked a lot about what's happened, you know, over the last 10, 15 years.

You look out the next 10, 15 years, what still needs to happen?

- Things that probably wouldn't be top of mind, but we got the carpenters, for example, to build a beautiful training center on I96.

There are hundreds of people being trained to build all these buildings coming out of Detroit.

We're very close to an agreement with the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers to build their training center in the city of Detroit.

So the electrical workers will be trained here.

We need to make sure we create career paths so that Detroiters can benefit financially from these opportunities.

We're working hard at that.

That's ultimately, we have to shift, we were, at one point, 40% of the city in poverty, now we're at 30%.

We need to be down dramatically lower than that.

And so as we continue to build, and there's gonna be another decade of building already on the books, we need to make sure, as Detroiters, we're benefiting from the jobs.

- You look at the job mix in the city and the opportunities in the city, are we at a place where no matter what your career ambitions are, no matter what you want to do, you can find opportunity in the city of Detroit?

- We're getting close to it.

And so when I started, we had large numbers of people with high school degrees who were unemployed.

And that's why I went so hard after the Jeep Plant, why I went so hard after GM building out Factory ZERO for the electric vehicles, why I went after Amazon, starts you out at $19 an hour with benefits.

And we've done it, made a real dent there.

But we also want the most talented kids growing up in Detroit to say, "I don't need to go to Atlanta or Los Angeles."

And so we need to land the tech companies of the future.

It's happening now at Newlab and at the Ford site, at the train station, It's happening now with a tech company like Majorel that hired 500 people that handle the interfaces you have on Twitter or Facebook.

We need to land a lot more of those companies so no matter what your dream is, you can pursue it in the city of Detroit.

- What role will the University of Michigan Innovation Center play in that?

- Huge.

I mean, the University at Michigan Innovation Center is going to be one of the top producers of that grad tech talent, and the incubator will be right next door.

Now, Wayne State has done a nice job of this with TechTown, but we want the founders, we want those 20-somethings who want to come out of a school and start their own companies.

Silicon Valley has benefited enormously, Austin, Texas is now benefiting enormously, Miami is benefiting enormously today.

We want Detroit to attract that same group.

And we think the U of M Center for Innovation is gonna be the driving force for that.

- When this comeback started in earnest 20 or so years ago, it was a fertile ground for entrepreneurs, people who didn't have a whole lot of resources could come here and get a start.

You didn't have to wait in line.

What's the entrepreneurial climate like today in Detroit?

- Oh yeah.

So Motor City Match by itself started 167 new companies in the city.

Overwhelmingly Detroiters and our folks compete for a grant because their business plan is so strong, but it's 167 times we pulled plywood off vacant storefronts on Kercheval, off of Warren, off of Livernois and started companies.

And you've had some national surveys that Detroit is the best place for entrepreneurs.

And I've had people who said, "I couldn't afford the rent in Chicago to start my company.

I can pursue my dream here in the city of Detroit.

It's a welcome environment, very supportive, and a lot of good, a lot of good city support."

- So over the next couple weeks, gonna be a lot of moving parts during that draft week.

A lot of things the city's gonna have to pull off.

Talk about the logistical challenge here, this on-the-ground event preparation and execution.

- It's monumental.

So we're gonna have to say to folks, "Here's how you work around."

The businesses have all been communicated to.

This is the strangest thing for me to say, but I'm saying to the businesses, "For a week or two there, you might want to have your workers work from home."

And they're all, you know, of course, they know how to do that now.

Those who have to be in the office, we made arrangements for them to get through the barriers and get to their parking locations.

But it's going to be two or three weeks of significant disruption Downtown, but also two or three weeks of excitement.

And I think most people are willing to put up with it.

- We've talked about Detroit's future, what about Mike Duggan's future?

What do you do next?

You're finishing up your third term next year, right?

You'll have to decide whether or not to run for re-election.

What's in your plans?

- You know, I'll make that decision this summer in an announcement this summer, but I never intended to be Mayor of Detroit.

You know, the city was in crisis, and I thought I could help.

And we'll sit down and evaluate what shape is the city in and what's the right decision to make.

And I'll make that this summer.

- You have the same feeling about the state of Michigan?

Could you help the state of Michigan?

- You know, I think if there is one thing that I have done that will be lasting in the city of Detroit is I've taken the us versus them politics out of the city.

It used to be Black versus white, city against the suburbs, city against Lansing, mayor against unions, everything was us versus them.

And you've seen, not just in the mayor's races, but the city council races, the council members who are succeeding are staying away from the us versus them rhetoric and bringing everybody in.

Then you get up to Lansing or, God forbid, Washington, and you watch the way the us versus them rhetoric is hurting this country.

And so the question would be, is there something that can be done?

But I'm speaking now probably at a national conference once a month of high-end business executives, they all wanna know the same thing.

How is Detroit coming back?

And I tell them, "We took the us versus them politics out of it."

And you should all be trying to encourage the parties to stop the animosity.

Don't tell them why you hate the other guy, tell them what you're gonna do for him.

- So what will determine whether you get in the governor's race?

- You know, we'll see.

We'll see.

- If you get in, can you win?

- You know, I don't worry about any of that stuff.

Right now, I'm focused on Detroit.

I'll make a decision this summer on whether to run for another term or not.

And once I make that decision, I'll decide from there what else I do.

- And we'll have you back to talk about it.

Thanks for your time today.

- For sure.