Ali Abazeed is Dearborn’s first public health director since the city shuttered its health department in 2011. Alejandro Ugalde Sandoval.
Modified Green Text Box with List
  • In 2021, heavy rains flooded Dearborn, leading Ali Abazeed, then a policy advisor at the NIH, to extend his stay and witness the devastation.
  • As Dearborn’s public health director, Abazeed aims to address the flood’s aftermath and long-standing urban planning issues affecting working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.
  • Abazeed has implemented significant public health measures, including air monitoring systems and Narcan distribution, while advocating for equitable city development and stricter pollution controls.

Ali Abazeed couldn’t believe the scene in front of him. It was the summer of 2021, and within 24 hours, eight inches of rain landed in the region, shuttering major freeways and submerging local homes and businesses.

As he made his way through Dearborn en route to his childhood home, heavy rainfall battered the streets and roof of his car. 

Abazeed, then a policy advisor at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., had arrived in his hometown earlier that day. He had only expected to be in town for a visit, but in the wake of the storm, he extended his stay.

The imagery of suffering neighbors and people’s living rooms and family memorabilia lying soaked on sidewalks lingers in his mind to this day. 

 “People lost everything,” Abazeed, 34, told Planet Detroit. “It was a summer unlike any summer I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

As the city’s first public health director since 2011, when the city closed its health department due to budget constraints, Abazeed says be aims to redress the aftermath of the floods but also decades of urban planning that have disadvantaged residents in Dearborn’s historically working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. 

With roughly 108,000 residents, Dearborn is the state’s sixth-largest city and home to one of the nation’s highest concentrations of Arab Americans. And it’s the only one outside of Detroit with its own health department. 

Housed on the second floor of the Dearborn Administrative Center in a cluster of gray cubicles, the department consists of Abazeed and a team of five trained epidemiologists and policy experts. 

In two years, the department has installed a citywide air monitoring system, distributed over 5,000 units of Narcan, increased enforcement of the city’s fugitive dust ordinance, and received more than $3 million in local, state and philanthropic grants.

Dearborn health is more than a job

One glance at Abazeed’s office, and one gets the sense that public health is more than a job for him.

Vintage drawings of microscopes and test tubes hang in one corner. Behind Abazeed’s desk, a blue and white banner with the department’s letterhead proudly proclaims, “We can do hard things.” 

Across the room is a calligraphy print of the modern Arabic word “public health,” created by local Palestinian-American artist and engineering professor Nihad Dukhan. An unopened box of Narcan sits in a corner. 

In front of his desk is a framed personal quote gifted to him by one of his students: “Be ruthless and tenacious motherf**kers.”

“For those of us who believe that we are working on behalf of people closest to the pain, we have to be ruthless and tenacious,” Abazeed said, explaining the quote. “The suffering is real, especially in Dearborn, especially in our south end, and especially in our east end. Making sure that we’re using the powers that we have to improve their condition, that’s the most important thing that we can do.”

Born to Syrian immigrants, Abazeed grew up the fifth-born of seven children in a working-class family in Dearborn’s east side. His father, a professor in Syria, was forced into exile due to his criticism of the government’s human rights record in the 1970s.

The family found temporary refuge in Lebanon and Algeria before migrating to the United States in the late 1980s, where Abazeed’s father worked for 25 years as a taxi driver in Detroit. Meanwhile, Abazeed’s mother raised his siblings while moonlighting as a cosmetologist.

Abazeed’s family planted roots in the city’s east side. It was there that Abazeed came of age among other working-class Arab-American families, most of Lebanese and Iraqi descent. But it was also where he began to tke notice of the disparities between his neighborhood and other parts of the city. 

“You recognize when you’re driving over to the Dairy Queen on the West End, that people there have nicer and bigger homes,” he said. “You notice driving over the roads, the car is not shaking as much because there’s fewer potholes, there’s fewer breaks in the streets. You notice that things are just by and large better where there are more resources, where there are more richer people.”

Then, Abazeed could not have envisioned a career in public health. Instead, like many children of immigrants, he chose a pathway to becoming a doctor.

“Both Ali and I were socialized in a community where if you cared about improving people’s lives and cared about people’s health, the way to do that is to pursue a career in medicine,” said Abbas Alawieh, a childhood friend of Abazeed, who attended the University of Michigan alongside him. 

As second-year students, both men developed a passion for epidemiology through an “Introduction to Public Health” course offered to undergraduates on the pre-med track. 

It was a “lightbulb moment,” Alawieh recalls. Concepts such as social determinants of health—which posits that where a person lives, works, and plays influences their health outcomes—became gospel. The course offered a way to describe the experiences and disparities they encountered in Dearborn. 

“That was a big realization for us,” Alawieh said. “That allowed us to critically assess how we were brought up in a community where rates of asthma were higher than in other communities, where most of us come from low-income backgrounds and were on Medicaid and food stamps.”

Abazeed couldn’t shake his newfound interest. By the time he graduated, he was a devotee of public health. Two semesters into a master’s program in neuroscience, he dropped out, halted his medical school applications and pivoted his focus toward public health.

A modern vision of public health

When Abdullah Hammoud won his primary in August 2021, a few months shy of winning the Dearborn mayoral seat, he contacted Abazeed with a simple pitch. An epidemiologist by training, Hammoud dreamed of relaunching the public health department in his hometown.

“When I started thinking about who to recruit to launch this, I thought nobody better than Ali,” Hammoud told Planet Detroit.

Dearborn operated a health department until it shuttered in 2011 due to budgetary issues. Since then, the Wayne County Health Department has administered immunizations, health screenings and other patient services for the city.

Hammoud’s vision, however, was greater. He pictured a department that could improve city air quality, bring down asthma rates, and hold corporate polluters accountable. 

All Hammoud had to convince Abazeed to step away from a successful career at the NIH and come back home to Dearborn.

“Having a home with waterborne illnesses as a result of flooding, growing up in proximity to the city’s factory stacks…I suffered because of that.”

“I said, ‘Listen, it’s going to be a sandbox,'” Hammoud recalls. “We want to challenge the status quo of public health and its delivery. We want to execute what every government says it is trying to do, which is improve public health quality for the lives of its residents.”

At that point in time, Abazeed was four years into his NIH career. After completing master’s programs in public health and public policy, he became a presidential management fellow for the US Department of Health and Human Services. 

“I was in a job that I loved,” he said. “The NIH is such a great place to be. And people don’t really leave those jobs, let alone within five years.” 

But here was an opportunity, he thought, to ameliorate the systemic issues that marked his childhood. 

“Having a home with waterborne illnesses as a result of flooding, growing up in proximity to the city’s factory stacks…I suffered because of that,” Abazeed said.  

With Hammoud’s support, he saw a rare opportunity to imbue a population health impact perspective into municipal decision-making. If done correctly, Dearborn could become a model for cities across the nation. 

“When our economic development department receives $27 million in Community Development and Block Grant funds, they’re no longer thinking about just cost-benefit analysis. They’re thinking of a health impact assessment,” Abazeed said.

Living in the shadow of industry

On a recent drive through the city’s south end, Abazeed stops mid-conversation to point out a cloud of reddish smoke kicking off the back of a row of trailer trucks. 

“This is illegal,” he said. “Fugitive dust is a menace. These trucks are carrying mobile air pollution.”

Community activists have for years called on city officials to hold pollutant-emitting industries accountable.

The city reached a $1 million settlement with Pro V Enterprises last fall after suing the industrial scrapyard for allegedly violating the city’s fugitive dust ordinance. They restricted semi-trucks from driving through neighborhoods to curb air and noise pollution and revoked certificates of occupancy. 

At the time of the agreement, Abazeed said the settlement sent a message that community health and well-being trumps corporate interests.

Further into the city’s south end, a gaggle of children scribble in chalk on the sidewalks in front of Salina Elementary School. The school sits adjacent to the factory stacks of steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs. 

“This is criminal that you have students here lined up with a factory like that right there,” Abazeed said as he slowed the car near the school. “Someone, somewhere in time, decided that the people that will live in these communities, that their lives are cheaper than other people.”

‘Help the people closest to the pain’

Abazeed fielded skepticism from city officials and residents early in his tenure. The public health department started with no team and no budget. But Abazeed still believes in government officials’ ability to make change. 

For Abazeed, every step has mattered, whether it’s installing a Narcan vending machine at the city’s Amtrak station, offering baby formula during the 2022 shortage or welcoming over 100 fellows through an internship program with the University of Michigan. 

Amira Haidar was among the early students recruited to become a department fellow. A Dearborn native, she eagerly took on the chance to address the city’s environmental and community health needs.

“When we’re thinking about what the city of Dearborn is doing, we’re thinking about how we can tackle some of these things that people think are intractable. They’re not, it just takes will and effort.”

Like Abazeed, she fell in love with public health after taking an introductory course at Wayne State University and never looked back. Under his tutelage, the fellows had free rein to explore solutions to many of the city’s issues.

“We weren’t just looking at air quality, we were looking at green spaces, flooding infrastructure, substance use prevention,” Haidar, who is currently a Presidential Management Fellow at the NIH, said.

“We would be chatting with each other, bouncing ideas, using whiteboards to plan things, jump into meetings with stakeholders across the city and other community organizations.”

By the end of the summer, the fellows had brainstormed a portfolio of work. They would eventually go on to work at the EPA, the NIH, and county health departments. 

Though Abazeed could have never imagined being a public health official in his hometown, he said it’s an opportunity to “transform the way that people think about public health.”

In the coming months, the city will launch its first-ever community health needs assessment, collecting data to quantify health disparities within the city. Abazeed envisions a green belt between industry and the community down the road. And he hopes to see Dearborn implement the most robust fugitive dust ordinance in the country. 

“When we’re thinking about what the city of Dearborn is doing, we’re thinking about how we can tackle some of these things that people think are intractable,” Abazeed said. “They’re not, it just takes will and effort.”

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Ethan Bakuli is a Detroit-based freelance reporter. His work has appeared in Chalkbeat and USA Today, among other outlets.