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 she doesn’t live near the Detroit River, Mary Wright’s neighborhood still floods when there is heavy rain. A resident of the Boston Edison neighborhood, Wright finds that while she may not arrive home to a flooded basement like those in Jefferson Chalmers, her neighborhood devolves into chaos all the same.
Some of the flooding is caused by sewer drains that don’t collect enough rainwater before unwanted pools of water form in nearby parks and alleys.
She stays vigilant for weather alerts to beat the impending downfall.
“Soon as we hear the rain, then we need to move our car down the street further,” Wright told Planet Detroit. “You’re moving cars anywhere, at any time; it could be 1:00 am, 2:00 am, 3:00 am.”
If they’re not quick enough, the water can get so high that it seeps into the bottom of the car. Wright laments that residents have become responsible for watching the drains.
While residents like Wright grapple with the immediate impacts of flooding in their neighborhoods, the broader challenge of mitigating these issues reveals a complex web of infrastructure shortcomings, historical decisions, and competing priorities within the city’s development strategies.
Professional architect Lars Gräbner of VolumeOne Studio has experienced those challenges of working with city departments.
Between 2008 and 2011, Gräbner, who lives in the West Village neighborhood with his wife, worked with the city on flooding mitigation. He was commissioned by former Mayor David Bing to develop ideas not for attracting suburbanites into the city but for redeveloping a city for people who already lived in Detroit.
Gräbner and his colleagues published his book Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City, aiming to create a new perspective on redevelopment,
He spent months examining public records and old maps and discovered that there were lost rivers buried underneath the city.
He recommended daylighting these rivers, a practice of reviving and returning buried streams. He also recommended maximizing redevelopment to take advantage of the city’s existing geographical and topographical features.
In 2013, the city had a new administration. Michael Duggan was elected Mayor, and soon after, Maurice Cox, the former city planner of New Orleans, was appointed to be the Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit.
Gräbner told Planet Detroit that the Duggan administration had new and different ideas on urban development.
“They were just starting to discuss how to restructure the city, there was another attempt…so [Mapping Detroit] was all the more forgotten,” he said. All of this effort nobody looked at anymore.”
Gräbner was not alone in trying to solve Detroit’s flooding issues. While his directive was urban development, architect Steven Vogel introduced another strategy for daylighting: opening a hidden creek called Bloody Run.
The creek, which once ran for miles between farmland and the Detroit River, now only exists between headstones in Elmwood Cemetery. The city diverted the creek because of an outbreak of Cholera in 1880.
When Vogel presented his plan, his study showed that daylighting the stream would directly impact the severity of flooding in Detroit’s Lower East Side communities.
But Detroit had just been forced into bankruptcy, and its high cost buried the plan.
When looking at a map of Detroit’s property values, a trend of land abandonment follows the areas where flooding is the worst in Metro Detroit. For the city, that results in a loss of tax revenue, which is needed to put more money into maintaining and updating the water infrastructure.
Each time the wastewater treatment facilities overflow or the pumping stations cease to work effectively, residents and business owners bear the cost.
Addressing flooding in the metro region will require cooperation from multiple city departments and collaboration with neighboring counties, whose waste is collected by plants in Detroit.
Development in Detroit has consistently been driven by an economy that focuses specifically on which commercial corridors are viable for investment: Downtown Detroit, Corktown, Midtown, Kercheval, and Livernois, the familiar hotspots for growth and business development.
This can run counter to the city’s natural hydrologic systems, which absorb water in a more environmentally sustainable manner. Ultimately, this can prioritize profit against ecological health, which in turn puts profit at risk in the damage that occurs throughout the region when heavy rain falls and streets and basements are flooded.
While the various departments within the city determine who is responsible for appropriately tackling flood mitigation tactics, people like Mary Wright and her neighbors in Boston Edison say they will have to continue to “move our cars whenever it rains up the block.”
Learn more
OPINION: How ghost streams and redlining’s legacy lead to unfairness in flood risk, in Detroit and elsewhere
Extreme weather events put pressure on cities like Detroit that have aging and undersized stormwater infrastructure, with low-income urban neighborhoods tending to suffer the most.
