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As a battleground for larger issues playing out around the city, few neighborhoods illustrate the forces at work better than Islandview. Developers are steadily renovating houses and apartments, leading to charges that gentrification is -- or will, eventually -- force out longtime, lower-income residents.
The row houses in question, at Kercheval and Field. (Photo: Google Maps)
A rent strike by a tenants union there was recently covered in Deadline Detroit. Now comes John Carlisle at the Freep with a deep dive into a scrap between the Charlevoix Village Association and one of the developers, Astral Weeks, targeted by that tenants union. Like most of Carlisle's work, the piece is lengthy and complex, but here's the nut of it:
This past winter, years of mutual suspicion, economic resentment and racial tensions came to be embodied in a battle over a little row house in the city’s Islandview neighborhood that was slated for redevelopment.
Ever since Detroit's fortunes began to change after years of decline, there’s been a persistent narrative that contrasts the revival of downtown and Midtown with the neighborhoods. It’s a split often cast as New Detroit versus Old Detroit, the favored against the forgotten; a fight between the privileged and the poor, who wind up outnumbered in their neighborhoods by outsiders who drive them out.
That’s why this small neighborhood association came to an obscure city government meeting on a cold weekday morning in January for what they assumed was a doomed effort to protest a tax break requested by the developer of that little row house. It might be just one small building, they say. But this is how it starts.
The CVA takes a hard line. The fight, over that building, at Kercheval and Field Street, was so important to the group that its representative told City Council they would rather it stand vacant and boarded than be renovated into apartments well out of reach of longtime residents, even with two set aside as affordable housing.
So far, the hard line is having mixed results. But they succeeded in at least delaying the townhouse project.
It's a long read, but a thorough look at the issue, and worth your time.
