When Mike Duggan took office as mayor of Detroit in 2014, the city stood on shaky ground. The core industry was fleeing, homelessness was skyrocketing and an iconic American town looked ragged around the edges.
It was, in other words, a little like present-day Los Angeles.
Duggan helped orchestrate a turnaround that now sees a lot of those problems reversed, one of the great urban comebacks of recent American history. So he seemed a good person to askfor thoughts about the Southland’s current challenges.
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“You have to face reality as it is and not as you wish it to be,” he says flatly when asked for his best advice for L.A.
In other words, you can’t pine for a past that’s fading but must deal with a present that’s changing — in Duggan’s case, not trying to reclaim every last manufacturing job but to lean into a new kind of job creation as his city did with mobility and other tech-minded enterprises.
And in Los Angeles’ case? Maybe not put all your hope in recapturing production jobs.
Because Duggan didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to: Film production in an age of cheaper costs elsewhere and a coming AI age of mounting movies in-screen means that restoring all those jobs on set is as unlikely as building all those cars again in the Motor City. That doesn’t mean all those efforts, like richer California tax credits, shouldn’t be undertaken, of course. Just that eggs have to be in other baskets.
Duggan was speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in support of Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central, a Peacock-streamed event that aired last June and is now up for best variety special (prerecorded) at this year’s Emmys. Detroit luminaries including Diana Ross, Jack White, Big Sean and Eminem (the last of whom helped curate the setlist to represent the city’s wide range of genres) all took the stage. (Jelly Roll and Melissa Etheridge were among those non-Michiganders who turned up.)
Taking place against the backdrop of the refurbished Michigan Central, the concert was a living model for how to turn around a city. Ford spent six years and some $1 billion to turn the once-proud train station, shuttered and blighted since 1988, into a shining new mobility-tech hub, in one of Duggan’s signature achievements.
And while Detroit’s comeback was not without controversy — including concerns over public-health effects from the city’s so-called blight destruction efforts and criticism for Duggan over cozy deals with developers — the official got high enough marks that he was elected to three terms and is now a frontrunner to replace Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as an independent candidate.
Duggan cautioned that he “doesn’t know enough about Los Angeles to give Karen Bass specific advice.” But he was comfortable speaking about his experience in Detroit, where he attracted hundreds of startups with various programs and incentives, earning the city praise as one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the world.
“I came in to a city that had a high percentage of unemployment but a large number of people with degrees who wanted to work,” he said. “And so we had to come in and say to [businesses,] ‘What are the factors that keep you away and let’s solve those factors.’”
He also said the city faced severe aftereffects from the Detroit Uprising of 1967, such as population loss, for decades. “And yet in so many nights of George Floyd protests in 2020, we didn’t have any violence,” he said.
Los Angeles would still seem to hold a shining spot in the national imagination as a place for transplants chasing their dreams, whether in Hollywood or elsewhere — it’s a far cry from 2000s-era Detroit by many measures. Still, that luster may be fading. The annual Los Angeles Quality of Life Index, led by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, last year found that quality-of-life perceptions among Angelenos were the lowest they’d been in nine years of the study.
Add to that the city’s massive budget shortfall and the 22 percent plunge in local production earlier this year, and the picture gets bleaker. (Production advocates have sometimes sounded the Detroit warning themselves.)
California-wide the picture isn’t much better. A study from the analytics firm Leger concluded that more than twice as many non-state residents believe the California “model” shouldn’t be copied compared to those who say it should. Some 77 percent of respondents also said they wouldn’t move to California — which partly explains why, after periods of explosive growth for much of its history, the California Department of Finance estimates essentially flat growth between now and 2030.
Others involved in the concert and larger Detroit resurrection say they also feel there are lessons for L.A. to learn from that city’s comeback.
“The template is ‘change people’s perceptions,’” says Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s longtime manager who’s from Detroit and who, with his client, had a hand in the Detroit turnaround. “But once people’s perceptions are changed you’ve got to find the people, the companies, the organizations, the government willing to support it.”
In Detroit, a slew of outfits played that role — including Ford, which in addition to backing the revitalization of the train station was also the key sponsor behind the concert — as did local business moguls like Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert. But which executives or companies will step into those shoes in Los Angeles remains to be seen; many of the legacy studios are in retrenchment mode while the tech-entertainment giants have yet to demonstrate major commitments to the city.
Jesse Collins, the accomplishedEmmys producer who was behind the Detroit concert and the recent BET Awards downtown (which took place in the shadow of the anti-ICE protests), says he believes he’s unlocked some of what made the Michigan miracle happen.
“I think we’re seeing that Detroit has such a strong sense of community — it doesn’t matter where you are financially, Detroiters stick together. They have a team mentality,” he said. “Post-fires [in Los Angeles], everyone pulled together. I think we’ve just got to find our community and not let the socioeconomic stuff drive a wedge.”
At the heart of the Los Angeles-future question is whether the city’s longstanding mythos, not to mention its teeming mix of people from diverse backgrounds, can overcome what seem like intractable economic and civic challenges.
A World Cup in 2026, a Super Bowl in 2027 and an Olympics in 2028 could help, events tailor-made to give Los Angeles a boost, though whether large-scale sporting events have a lingering effect on the lifeblood of a city has been a subject of debate among urban theorists. Experts from Atlanta, which hosted the Summer Games in 1996, have said that a long-term economic boost did not materialize and was not realistic to expect in the first place.
As a bigger city with a wider range of topography and industry, Los Angeles has more tools than either Atlanta or Detroit, of course, but also a potentially more complex set of housing, safety and environmental challenges thatcompound the company-town concerns. As Rosenberg says, “It’s not just ‘the city’s bankrupt and we don’t have enough money, how are we going to pull ourselves out of it.’ It’s a very different situation.”
But for all those challenges, Duggan remains optimistic. He said he believes that if Detroit could undergo a turnaround, Los Angeles could, too, and without falling nearly as far first. “When I was starting in Detroit, I would have given anything for the climate and the ocean and the economic base that Los Angeles has,” he said.
