Detroit Michigan

Top: Baker’s Keyboard Lounge is Detroit’s
oldest continuously operating jazz club.
Above: The Livernois corridor today.
future, it must find a way to turn around struggling
commercial corridors like Livernois in choice
neighborhoods such as these, where market
strength and social capacity already exist.
Summary of Recommendations
The panel organized its recommendations to the
city’s Rose fellowship team into five broad areas:
Create nodes: Concentrate development, economic
pursuits, and human activity in focused nodes
along the two-mile study area corridor, which by
comparison is four times longer than nearby Ferndale’s
thriving Nine Mile Road commercial center.
Change by design: Improve the built environment
and physical infrastructure along the corridor
with new designs that can address building
aesthetics, streetscape, traffic flow, parking,
pedestrian comfort, and safety.
Market and brand: Livernois’s old identify as the
“Avenue of Fashion” is only a memory and no
longer resonates with contemporary conditions
and opportunities. A new identity for Livernois
needs to be aggressively promoted and should
embrace its adjacent neighborhoods as well as
the avenue itself.
Build capacity: The strong social networks along
Livernois need support and mentoring to become
adept at bricks-and-mortar community development.
UDM is a sleeping giant on the corridor and
could hold a potential key to its economic revival
in part by refocusing its current community support
and engagement agenda and in part by embracing
local market and redesign opportunities.
Activate government: In contrast to its roles in
the sections of Detroit struggling with abandonment,
city government needs to act as a resource
for community-led initiatives and provide support
for small entrepreneurship along Livernois. Other
key roles will be to act as a partner with and as a
facilitator between the neighborhoods, corridor
businesses, and property owners and UDM.
12 A ULI Daniel Rose Fellowship Program City Study Visit Report