This story is from Planet Detroit’s Neighborhood Reporting Lab, where community reporters write about health and climate issues in their neighborhood. Neighborhood Reporting Lab is supported by the Americana and Kresge Foundations.
Although Mary Wright doesn’t live near the Detroit River, her Boston Edison neighborhood still floods during heavy rain. While she may not face flooded basements like residents in Jefferson Chalmers, her neighborhood experiences chaos all the same.
Some of the flooding is caused by sewer drains that fail to collect enough rainwater, resulting in pools of water in nearby parks and alleys. Wright remains vigilant for weather alerts to prepare for the rain.
“As soon as we hear the rain, we need to move our car down the street,” Wright told Planet Detroit. “You’re moving cars at any time—1:00 am, 2:00 am, 3:00 am.”
If they don’t move fast enough, the water can rise high enough to seep into the bottom of their cars.
Wright has found that reporting these issues to the Detroit Water and Sewage Department doesn’t always lead to action, and she laments that residents are left responsible for monitoring the drains. Professional architect Lars Graebner of Volume One Studio has faced similar frustrations working with city departments.
Between 2008 and 2011, Graebner, who lives in the West Village neighborhood, worked with the city on flooding mitigation. Former Mayor David Bing had tasked him with redeveloping Detroit for its existing residents rather than trying to attract suburbanites.
Graebner and his colleagues took a new approach to redevelopment, which they detailed in their book Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City.
During months of research, Graebner discovered that lost rivers had been buried beneath the city for centuries. He proposed “daylighting” these rivers—uncovering them to restore their natural flow—and redeveloping the city to take advantage of Detroit’s geographical and topographical features.
However, when Mike Duggan became mayor in 2013, and Maurice Cox was appointed Detroit’s planning director, the administration’s vision for the city shifted.
“They were starting to discuss how to restructure the city, and there was another attempt… so [Mapping Detroit] was forgotten,” Graebner told Planet Detroit. “All that effort, and no one looked at it anymore.”
Graebner wasn’t the only one trying to address Detroit’s flooding problem. Architect Steven Vogel also explored daylighting as a solution. He proposed uncovering Bloody Run, a creek that once flowed for miles between farmland and the Detroit River but was buried in 1880 following a cholera outbreak.
Vogel’s study showed that daylighting the creek could reduce flooding on Detroit’s Lower East Side. However, with Detroit on the brink of bankruptcy, the plan’s cost was deemed too high.
Flooding has also had an economic impact. A trend of land abandonment follows the worst-hit areas, reducing property values and shrinking the city’s tax base. This loss of revenue hampers the city’s ability to maintain and upgrade water infrastructure, leaving residents and business owners to bear the costs when wastewater treatment plants overflow or pumping stations fail.
Addressing flooding in the metro area will require coordination between multiple city departments and collaboration with neighboring counties, whose waste is also processed in Detroit.
“To address this, we need collaboration between the sewer and water department, the planning department, housing, parks and recreation—everyone,” Graebner said.
He said that while development in Detroit has typically been focused on areas with high potential for commercial investment—Downtown, Corktown, Midtown, Kercheval, and Livernois—the city’s natural hydraulic systems should be considered. This prioritization of profit over ecological sustainability ultimately puts both at risk, as heavy rains cause widespread damage.
For now, as the city grapples with these challenges, residents like Mary Wright and her neighbors in Boston Edison will continue to move their cars whenever it rains.
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