Quotes of the Day

In late March a star urban planner named Toni Griffin will begin a new assignment. She'll help lead what might be the most ambitious urban makeover in American history — the downsizing of Detroit, a city built to accommodate a population more than twice its current size. At a recent panel convened by TIME and the Brookings Institution, Mayor Dave Bing made clear what many had suspected — that he intends to shrink the city, which cannot afford to serve dying neighborhoods.

There is something else that the city cannot afford: Griffin's salary. The 45-year-old comes to the Motor City with a considerable national reputation. Enter Rip Rapson, president of the $3.1 billion Kresge Foundation. While Griffin will work inside the city's planning department, she won't be on the public payroll. Her salary, plus the cost of assembling a team of consultants, is covered by Kresge.

Philanthropic dollars are seeding the reinvention of Detroit. Demographer Kurt Metzger heads up Data Driven Detroit (DDD), an agency that just completed a plot-by-plot analysis of the city's 139-square-mile footprint, without which Griffin would be flying blind. DDD is backed by $1.85 million from the Kresge and Skillman foundations. Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for the Detroit public schools, draws one-third of his $425,000 salary from an alliance of philanthropies led by the Eli Broad Foundation. And if all goes according to plan, Detroit will break ground this year on a trolley line connecting downtown with an Amtrak station 3.5 miles (5.6 km) north. The project's seed money is a $35 million grant from Kresge.

"The foundations are making investments to augment the capacity of government," says Bruce Katz, founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. "They're pooling funds to take on a monumental task, which is, How do you begin to change the trajectory of an entire metropolitan economy?"

These are heady days in Detroit. After decades of false starts, the city is finally starting to see movement. Major efforts are under way to consolidate neighborhoods (one-third of Detroit's residential parcels are vacant lots or empty homes), close failing schools (one-third of Detroit children attend schools that rank among the state's bottom 5%), invest in new-economy job creation (one-quarter of Detroiters are officially unemployed) and improve its woeful public-transportation system.

Detroit can't possibly accomplish all these goals on its own. Nor can the philanthropies. Even if the dozen or so major foundations currently active in Detroit were to pitch in a billion dollars over the next decade — which is possible — it wouldn't begin to fill the bucket. But Rapson believes the right private dollars in the right public places can get things rolling. It's a delicate game. The philanthropies, says Rapson, need to show "a sense of long-term politics that understands how incredibly divisive this work can be if it's done without sensitivity and skill."

Just how divisive it can be was on vivid display last week. There was an uproar over Bing's emerging plan to relocate residents — the weekly Michigan Citizen likened it to a "modern day 'Trail of Tears' for Detroiters" — and an equally unfavorable response to Bobb's $81,000 raise in the second year of his contract, most of which is paid for by foundation money. The school board is so incensed that it has filed a lawsuit.

"I know there is discomfort in terms of the cuts being made at the city level and in the schools," says Bing. "And then [Bobb] gets a major increase. That was very unfortunate, to have that come into the conversation."

Still, says Bing, "I think the city and philanthropy organizations will continue working together." Charles Pugh, recently elected president of the Detroit city council, is blunter. "Detroit is the textbook case of a city that needs this kind of assistance," he says, "and we welcome it with open arms. I'm jumping up and down."

• David Whitford
• Private donors are backing the mayor's plan to shutter neighborhoods and relocate residents. How philanthropy is remaking the city