Little Ghost fast casual burger restaurant in Ferndale.

Several years ago I was chatting with the owners of a Ferndale business about the party store next door that was winding down operations after decades of being open. I had never been a regular customer, but it was the closest place to buy beer, and I had hoped someone would acquire its packaged to-go liquor license, fix the place up a bit and upgrade its selection. After all, the store had prime Woodward Avenue frontage, and the neighborhood was underserved by good local retail.

I said as much to the men at the business that was remaining open, who seemed unconvinced. “There’s no parking,” one of them groused.

I pointed out the many curbside spaces directly out front along Woodward, and I brought up another party store a mile up the road with the same parking setup.

“Yeah, but they have parking in the rear,” the man said. And it’s true: The liquor store in question, which remains open to this day, boasts two or three parking spaces for customers in the alley behind the store. Somehow I doubt they make much of a difference, since it’s usually easy enough to find a parking spot directly in front of the store while zipping down Woodward.

My point in sharing this story is that Detroit — like many places in America, but especially in the Motor City — remains locked in a car-brained belief that the success of any commercial retail venture hinges on abundant parking spaces. There has been a major kerfuffle in Ferndale over Vester Flats, a mixed-use, multi-story residential building that is now taking shape on the site of a former large surface parking lot that sat empty most of the week. Two neighboring businesses sued the city over it, claiming among other things that the loss of parking would be devastating.

We remain stuck in a mentality that favors pockmarking our communities with vast, impermeable parking lots that sit empty for much of the time, look terrible and drain our cities of economic vitality and street life. It’s estimated there are eight parking spaces for every car in the U.S., and parking lots on average consume a third of all land area in American cities. It has been astounding to see how many people insist that doing away with a parking lot while adding density and more residents will mean the death of local businesses.

Which brings me to Little Ghost.

How’s the Burger?

Clearly this isn’t a restaurant review. (Yes, that subhead above is a nakedly attempt at getting clicks from the AI machines — SUE ME. I’m chasing fame and fortune here.) While my kids tell me it’s good, I’m not a burger guy. I probably groaned when I heard we were getting yet another burger joint, since I believe we need to consume far less beef if we have any hope of not cooking our planet to a crisp. Not that anyone asked.

Yet I’m happy Little Ghost is there. My wife and I both love seeing its purple neon sign glowing against the dark, tree-lined street, its smiley-faced burger ghost mascot and its walk-up take-out window, one of the few positive legacies of the pandemic for restaurants.

Little Ghost opened in August in what had been a nondescript insurance office where I rarely saw any actual people. It’s on the far end of a block shared with the First United Methodist Church, next to an open grassy lot where we used to buy our Christmas trees. The building itself is tiny, perhaps 500 square feet — and critically, there is no parking lot directly adjacent the store for customers. In fact, when the news broke that the owners of Detroit’s celebrated Grey Ghost were opening a hamburger outpost there, even I was initially skeptical they could make it work. Where would people park?

And yet, Little Ghost appears to be doing gangbuster business, with lines out the door many nights, people dining at picnic tables out front, and plenty of curbside parking. It’s the latest in new businesses opening off the beaten path in Ferndale.

The southern end of Woodward in Ferndale has long been the domain of car dealerships (read: parking lots), fast food drive-thrus and cemeteries. Now, suddenly, there is foot traffic on the street, a popular business integrated into the neighborhood. You could walk or bike to it if you wanted, and that’s what we love about it. It’s not a restaurant surrounded by a big empty parking lot when the lights aren’t on. It lends a sense of place to its immediate environment.

So, welcome to town, Little Ghost (order from them here). Your presence is a rejoinder to those who insist that removing parking will hurt business vitality, and I hope it is the start of more businesses in the area.

The latest local example may be Royal Oak, home to a growing number of mid-rise, mixed-use buildings and sleek multi-family developments. These new hotels, loft apartments and office buildings have sparked a predictable NIMBY reaction from people upset that their Royal Oak of old is being subsumed by tall buildings, bike lanes and multi-unit dwellings.

There is now an entire plank of candidates running for mayor and city commission in the Nov. 4 election under the “Save Royal Oak” banner. On their website, the candidates write that the city “is far more than just a downtown area on the southernmost edge of the city.

“It is a sprawling and thriving city of diverse neighborhoods made up of people who have invested in starting a life here, or raising a family here, of growing old in place here.” The site goes on to decry a city government in thrall to “big developer dreams and schemes, or various rezoning requests that defied appropriateness for the neighborhood being impacted.”

In other words: Keep Royal Oak 100% the way it is. No change, ever. The rhetoric on another site called Protect Royal Oak is even worse, alleging the city hired a consultant with a “radical agenda.”

Contrast those accusations with the city’s official statement after city commissioners in May unanimously adopted a draft master plan following more than two years of opening it up to community feedback:

“Royal Oak’s 2050 Master Plan envisions a city that is safe and easy to navigate, with quality neighborhoods, a vibrant downtown, walkable residential-commercial areas, and housing that meets current demand in a way that preserves the unique character of existing neighborhoods.”

In its master plan, city officials write that automobile-centric urban planning hurt the city’s historic charm and led to the decline of commercial districts. “This master plan envisions a Royal Oak that is safer and easier to navigate, with a more dynamic downtown whose vibrancy extends to additional, walkable Main Street districts more easily accessible from the city’s neighborhoods. It aims to elevate the quality of smaller, existing neighborhood commercial areas, provide housing that aligns with current demand in a thoughtful and predictable way, and achieve these goals while preserving the unique character of existing neighborhoods.”

The horror.

A tale of two cities

Photo via Creative Commons.

Royal Oak in some ways is a tale of two cities: its southern portion, defined by its downtown and the steadily urbanizing neighborhoods surrounding it, and a much more traditionally suburban northern half. The entire city, however, is zoned overwhelmingly for single-family housing .

One of the master plan’s stated goals is to provide more housing, both by diversifying dwelling types and increasing supply. And that’s an undeniable good thing. For example, housing prices in Austin, Texas mushroomed during the pandemic as demand skyrocketed but have dropped nearly 15% in three years as supply has risen, per CBS News:

A boom in building also boosted housing supply in those regions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for markets like Austin, Denver and Miami exploded, (Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel) added. Part of the reason construction in those cities took off, Krimmel added, was that the laws in their respective state make it easier to build during big influxes in demand.

“[Builders] we’re actually able to get things permitted, get shovels in the ground and get buildings built,” Krimmel said. 

Meanwhile, housing markets in the Midwest and Northeast remain squeezed by  tight inventory and high prices, CBS reported. Sound familiar?

According to Realtor.com, the median listing home price in Royal Oak was $375,000, which is flat year over year, while the median sale price was $365,000. That compares with $278,000 and $227,500, respectively, in Ferndale, where the median listing price was up 11.2% year over year.

Change and grow, or stagnate and decline?

The kind of multi-unit residential building some Royal Oak residents are afraid of, apparently.

Cities are organic entities; they change because they have to. They respond to demand, and people want different things from their cities as times change. The alternative to this adaptation is disinvestment, stagnation, decay, depopulation and slow death — something we should all be all too familiar with in this region.

Here in the Detroit area, where our housing stock is among the oldest in the nation, we need more housing to attract more residents, grow the population, boost economic vibrancy and increase our tax base.

But what’s most interesting to me in this battle to preserve the status quo of single-family housing, like the one in Ferndale before it, is why so many people are so resistant to change in any form.

It’s undeniable that Royal Oak, or Detroit or Ferndale, are much better places than they were 20 years ago, with new types of housing, new ways to get around town that don’t involve a car, more commercial business investment in the neighborhoods and greater vitality. And yet Ferndale just went through its own wrenching and narrow approval of ending single-family zoning hegemony. I still hear people gripe about what they see as the inevitability that multi-family condos or lofts will rise on their street and somehow ruin the neighborhood.

We’re afraid of progress

I’m focusing here on housing and cities, but the very American resistance to change has ramifications that echo well beyond those things. It’s at the heart of so many contentious, divisive issues today — think immigration, climate change, clean energy, trans rights, gay marriage (again), and on and on. We’re a nation that once prided itself on inventing the future but is now actively afraid of it. We’re shutting the door on people who don’t look or behave like we do. In so doing, we shut the door on ourselves. In our fear, we act is if we can freeze things in amber — “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” as the convicted felon-in-chief once famously said about COVID-19.

I believe there are many factors that contribute to our fear of change — racism, homophobia and xenophobia chief among them, though I also think the decline of both the news media and reading also play major roles.

I believe this fear is at the heart of why the United States, long considered the globe’s leading economic superpower and exemplary democracy, is turning inward, away from the rest of the world. “America First,” or whatever.

As a nation, the United States used to be a progressive leader, an innovative, technological powerhouse. The place where ambitious people from around the world wanted to come learn, work, experiment and invent the future.

Now, we’re like the people who move to pristine countryside and believe they should be able to shut the door to anyone else, arguing they would spoil their view.

We’re afraid of trying new things, and we’d rather stick our heads in the sand and cling to a status quo that isn’t working.

A multi-unit apartment building in Ferndale. The horror.

We live in distressing, dispiriting times, with no shortage of things to fret: climate change, the rise of AI, the return of the twice-impeached, convicted felon orange guy, etcetera. It’s one of the reasons I am grateful to live in Ferndale, which serves as a kind of bulwark against the encroaching madness and enshittification. We’re hardly perfect, but at least we’ve got bike lanes and walkability, an LGBTQ community center, the Rust Belt Market, local breweries, and so on.

So it was especially disappointing to see that for a noisy subset of residents, the biggest threat to Ferndale is apparently the specter of suburban-style single-family residential zoning losing its primacy.

The Ferndale City Council last month moved to eliminate single-family zoning as the exclusive residential development pattern in a narrow 3-2 vote that will open the door to allowing triplexes and quadplexes with a special land use permit. Accessory dwelling units will also be allowed on properties with a single-family unit or duplex. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that NIMBYism, opposition to change of any kind and toxic misinformation appears alive and well in our fair city, to hear the commentary from opponents.

First, a little background.

A complicated housing market

The city has been working on rewriting the zoning ordinance since May 2023, relying on public input through Plan Ferndale, the city’s adopted master land use plan from 2022, and input from four community sessions from summer 2023. The Plan Ferndale process ranked affordable housing as the top development priority for the city, and the new zoning allowances are an attempt to increase housing types, create more equitable housing policy and boost affordability.

Housing unaffordability has become a major problem nationwide, and the causes — and potential fixes — are complex.

One key contributor is a lack of supply due to a slowdown in housing construction that traces back at least to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. Local data on housing starts backs that up. There were just 4,541 housing permits of all kinds issued in 2023 for the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metropolitan statistical area, down from a recent high of 17,399 in 2004, according to the Census Building Permits Survey. It was the lowest number since 2012.

Other contributing factors include rising interest rates and higher costs of building materials and labor, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that have complicated developers’ ability to profitably build anything but high-end luxury homes.

As a result, housing costs have soared. A 2024 statewide housing survey by the University of Michigan and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority found that 51% of renters in 2022 were housing-cost burdened, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing. Among homeowners, 24% with mortgages and 14% without mortgages were housing cost-burdened.

One resident who spoke during public comment said she moved to Ferndale five years ago after buying a home and estimated she would spend an extra $987 a month on her mortgage if she purchased it today, based on higher taxes, higher interest rates and other factors.

The median sale price for homes in Ferndale in December 2024 was $251,204, or $208 per square foot, up 4.7% since December 2023, according to Rocket Homes.

Meanwhile, Ferndale’s population is at a low ebb. Ferndale peaked in population in the 1960 Census at 31,347. It’s now estimated at 19,083. At 10,160 households, it equates to about 1.9 people per household — a change many attribute to the city’s long-running status as a magnet for young singles and the loss of families who want larger, more modern homes than are typically available in Ferndale.

Misinformation takes root

The 3-2 vote to relax single-family zoning came after extended debate by council members and public comment period. I watched the replay of the meeting so you don’t have to. There was plenty of paranoia, misinformation and near-hysteria on display.

Residents blamed the housing shortage on “opportunistic and greedy developers,” who supposedly scheme to keep some housing uninhabited (though no one bothered to explain how this is a problem in Ferndale, where I am not aware of the presence of uninhabited homes at any significant scale). Others condemned the proposal as a “corporate land grab” or voiced concerns about how the city’s aging infrastructure would support new development. Dubious allegations of racism flew.

Others seemed to equate the idea of allowing for higher density with residents losing their homes so that fourplexes can be built in their place.

The negativity continued afterward on the Fabulous Ferndale Forum on Facebook; I won’t link to it because that group is a worsening cesspool of griping and misinformation.

There are two ironies underlying the impassioned NIMBY resistance to ending single-family zoning.

A duplex in Ferndale.

First, Ferndale already has a number of triplex and quadplex units, though none that have been built in recent years. Council member Greg Pawlica said the last triplex or quadplex built in any of the city’s residential-zoned neighborhoods was 1965 on Central Street.

“This fear that some 1840s robber baron Snidely Whiplash is gonna swoop in and buy up huge swaths of single-family homes and knock them down and build quadplexes towering over their homes is unfounded,” Pawlica said. He noted that the new zoning rules restrict the heights of triplexes and quads. “This idea that a massive multi-unit structure can be built next to a single home is also unfounded.”

Secondly, the elimination of single-family zoning is not likely to have a dramatic effect on Ferndale’s housing mix or affordability on its own any time soon, given the complex issues facing the housing market at large and the city’s relative lack of vacant properties on which to build. That’s similar to what’s happened in Minneapolis, which famously eliminated single-family zoning in 2019 but hasn’t seen a dramatic uptick in new housing construction.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do. Southeast Michigan’s population is expected to grow between 2010 and 2040, thanks mostly to seniors rather than new residents (one reason for the inclusion of ADUs,) while young people who are attracted by Ferndale’s quality of life are put off by rents approaching $2,000.  

Pawlica said Ferndale since 2010 has gained more than 1,000 housing units but lost nearly 900 people.

“You either have to provide what the population is wanting or you will continue to lose population,” he said.

Manhattan’s famous gridlock.

Let me start with a general positive observation that, as a resident Ferndalean, I love how easy it’s becoming to get around town and run errands by bicycle. Thanks to our well-developed network of bike lanes, I have multiple options to ride safely, protected to varying degrees from automobile traffic, wherever I am headed. I work from home and am without access to a vehicle during the daytime, so I appreciate this facet of living here all the more. It’s pleasant and fun and it feels good and it helps to keep me sane. 

So please indulge me as I compare our Fabulous Ferndale to the Big Apple and the City of Light. I promise it’s in service of a larger point.

First, New York City. The announcement by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul that she would be indefinitely postponing congestion pricing, the plan to begin charging drivers who enter Manhattan south of 60th Street that had been years in the making, was a major bummer. If you’ve been to Manhattan on a weekday, you know that its streets are basically a parking lot cacophony, a Frogger-like obstacle course for crossing on foot. Traffic scarcely moves, and blaring horns echo off the buildings. If you need to get somewhere, it’s best to either walk or descend to the subway, where you take your chances with the aging system’s unreliable service (more on that below). 

On the other hand, you might be aware that Times Square has been closed to cars since 2009. Or that 14th Street is closed off to all vehicles except buses and bicycles for most of the day. Both of those initiatives today are widely considered successful.

Both of those initiatives share many of the same goals as congestion pricing program: ease gridlock, lower greenhouse gas emissions (all those idling vehicles!) and improve quality of life for New Yorkers. Toll revenue, estimated at $1 billion a year, was supposed to fund $15 billion in badly needed repairs, modernizations and upgrades to the city’s mass transit systems. Now that funding is in jeopardy.

From The New York Times: 

This program was mandated by the New York State Legislature in 2019 following delays during the so-called transit Summer of Hell. Four years of study and analysis followed before it received federal approval. Hundreds of public forums were held and 100,000 public comments were submitted. The M.T.A. has already spent over $500 million building out the infrastructure. Now this suspension gives critics the chance to upend the whole undertaking.

Hochul is rightly taking fire for this gutless move, which is widely seen as caving to political pressure from suburbanites, the governor of New Jersey (who has sued to stop the program), and influential Democrats in Congress, including minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, who reportedly urged her to pause the program because it imperiled several Democrat candidates running for closely contested seats this November. Her rationale was that she feared it would hurt a city still struggling to recover economically from the pandemic.

Backlash against change

Regardless, this development got me thinking about similar proposals to offer alternatives to car dominance and do less harm to the climate. About the successes and failures of urbanism, which is increasingly intertwined with climate action, across the planet. And how discouraging it is that changes like this — small when measured against the scale of what is needed to prevent the planet from becoming a Hieronymus Bosch triptych — are meeting with such intense pushback. 

If we can’t enact a toll to help ease traffic congestion, reduce CO2 emissions and raise badly needed funds to encourage people to once again ride the subway, what hope do we possibly have against climate change? 

I think about this when I ride around Ferndale on my bike, using what is becoming a well-developed network of bike lanes blanketing our modestly sized city. 

A cyclist’s perspective of the Woodward Avenue bike lanes during afternoon rush hour.

I love the new Woodward Avenue bike lanes — they’re not perfect, but they absolutely serve their purpose. Just as important as their utility for mobility, I believe, is the statement they make to motorists traveling along Detroit’s de facto Main Street: Welcome to Ferndale. We do things a little differently here. Slow your roll, watch out for one another and have a good time.

And yet, most of the online chatter about the new setup is bitter complaints: 

It’s a waste of taxpayer money. I don’t see anyone riding in them. 

They’re as twisty as a slalom course. What a joke!

It’s confusing to park with them.

People are going to die being struck by drivers who can’t possibly watch for bicyclists among all their other responsibilities. 

Etcetera.

It’s not hard to imagine the pushback Ferndale City Council members, or the previous or current mayor, have faced over the Woodward bike lanes, but all credit to them for blocking out the haters and sticking with their conviction. I have been to enough local government meetings to basically pre-write the script for John Q. Taxpayer and his indignant and angry plea to stop wasting taxpayer money, we’re taxed enough already and we can’t afford anything nice. But our city officials absolutely did the right thing and put Ferndale on the right side of history.

New York’s congestion pricing may yet live; in fact I suspect there will be lawsuits to get the process unstuck and moving again. But this was an act of political cowardice, a complete and total capitulation, and for what? Charging drivers $15 to enter lower Manhattan will affect delivery vehicles, yes, and that may well have an adverse effect on the prices of goods and even restaurants. But it also applies to commuters and tourists who today arrive in Manhattan and quickly find themselves stuck in gridlock and ponying up exorbitant fees to park their cars for the day. 

Other cities take the lead

Pedestrians walking the streets in Paris.

The worst part about New York’s failure is that congestion pricing has been done successfully in other cities, including London, Stockholm, Milan and Singapore, and proved popular.

In Paris, the city has increased parking fees for SUVs, done away with parking spaces altogether, added hundreds of miles of bike lanes, permanently closed streets in front of schools and banned automobile traffic altogether from wide swaths of the city. As a result, whole neighborhoods in the central city are now quiet, as bicycle traffic replaces cars, the streets full of life. I have no doubt the added foot traffic has delivered an economic jolt to businesses, including many that likely feared they would suffer from the loss of cars and parking spaces. 

These are cities, incidentally, that also have excellent and well-maintained public transit systems, plus comprehensive rail service to other cities and nations. By contrast, the U.S. has millions of miles of crumbling roads. And we have Amtrak, which in Michigan shares tracks with freight operators and frequently is forced to stop to let an oncoming freight train pass. Our bicycling infrastructure, at least, is coming along — provided you live in a progressive city — but by many measures, the rest of the developed world is leaving us in the dust. 

On one of the Ferndale Facebook groups I saw a thread where people were losing it over a proposal to redevelop a vacant single-family bungalow in my neighborhood into an eight-unit residential building, despite being right across the street from a much larger apartment complex. The supposed added traffic and lack of adequate parking devoted to the project, people said, made it critical to convey opposition to the Planning Commission. It will lead to zoning changes, and kill the character of the neighborhood, they said. 

This is what you find on our online communities — NextDoor is no better — that is, when you get past the incessant bitching about the bike lanes. The status quo must be maintained, no matter how indefensible. 

My point here is we’ve become a nation of turtles, held hostage to our own petty grievances, trapped in our dreadful routines and unable to imagine a better world. What happened to our ability to dream? Why are we so scared of change? Do we fear we will lose the financial and material assets, however meager, we’ve worked so hard to cobble together? Or are we so spiteful we simply cannot accept Black and brown people, or the poor, gaining a leg up? 

Have we collectively given up hope? 

What does it say about us as a civilization — especially our ability to face the existential challenges we face on a crowded, warming planet — when the idea of making it easier and safer to ride a bike, or charge vehicles more proportionately for the many damages they inflict on society, provokes such uproar? 

America has lost the ability to dream big and do great things, and I frankly don’t know how we get it back. Maybe young people now coming of age, who are less interested in obtaining drivers licenses and who face major obstacles to home ownership, will take us in new directions, seeing no viable path forward in the status quo. Lord knows we need it. 

I recently heard an interview with Amy Dickinson, the retiring “Ask Amy” advice columnist, in which she explained her view on finding happiness. “You become a miniaturist,” she said, focusing on small things that bring you joy. 

Maybe that’s what I’m doing here. I’m incredibly grateful to live in Ferndale because of the changes it’s making — bike lanes but also being welcoming to LGBTQ people, embracing transit and growth, and enacting climate-friendly policies. I don’t take it for granted whatsoever.

But Ferndale is a 4-square-mile city of 19,000. Our nation really needs to see bold ideas like congestion pricing happen in places like New York, our biggest and best city, to truly begin changing mindsets. 

Creative Commons photos via Travis Rothwell and Gilbert Sopakuwa.

In late 1981 or early ’82, my friend Steve moved to my neighborhood in Ann Arbor from Southern California with his mom, two older brothers and their stack of punk rock LPs. We bonded over skateboarding and the pulse-quickening, aggressive sounds of those records, which we would thrash around and air-guitar along to using tennis rackets, being grade schoolers at the time.

The music was a revelation, a blast of righteous fury against a trickle-down world teetering on the cusp of nuclear annihilation. Soon I would trade in my copies of Back in Black, Foreigner 4 and Tattoo You for the likes of Jealous Again, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and Never Mind the Bollocks. A whole new world of possibilities had opened itself to me, and nothing would ever be the same.

I saw Black Flag several years later at what would turn out to be their second-to-last show before the band ceased to be a going concern. Much of what I remember of that show was like the reaction I had whenever I brought home a copy of any of their post-1981 releases: Why don’t they sound like Damaged anymore?

But I the more I sat with albums like Loose Nut, the more I became obsessed with Ginn’s combustible, crossed-wire jazz guitar attack and Henry’s go-for-broke dedication to character, the way he poured himself into the role and embodied the Black Flag aesthetic. Over the years, the band’s influence on countless other bands and genres became clear. I came to see that, in turning away from their hardcore roots in favor of following their muses, and in the band’s relentless determination and grimy work ethic, Black Flag both defined and transcended punk rock.

Here I rank Black Flag’s six LPs, from Damaged to In My Head, that mark their seminal core run. (No, I’m not counting the latest product branded under the Black Flag name and its embarrassing cover art. One day I may give it a spin, but I’m still not ready to be disappointed. If I’m wrong about this, let me know in the comments.)

Anyway. The process of weeding out:

6. Family Man, 1984

I know, I know: shocking that I ranked the half-spoken word, half-instrumental Family Man, an outlier in the catalog released in 1984, dead last. If I’m honest, I had never even listened to this LP until decades after it came out. But that doesn’t mean it’s without its virtues.

The A side reflects the fact that by this point, Henry had been busy filling journals while out on endless tours and had established himself on the spoken word and poetry circuits in L.A. Which is inspiring; we’re talking about a guy who just a few years earlier was scooping ice cream for a living. In fact, Family Man marks Rollins’ birth as a renaissance man. He has gone on to author several books on his 2.13.61 Publications imprint, been a bandleader (Rollins Band), a prolific spoken-word artist, film actor, television host, voiceover artist, and radio host.

I like his poems, particularly “Family Man,” a caustic condemnation of suburban normalcy and “Hollywood Diaries,” a macabre tale of a man who chops off his arms and sends it with a box of chocolates to the object of his affection that might be about ambition. Even “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking” is entertaining, even if it sounds more like song lyrics in their musicality and repetition.

Side A closes with “Armageddon Man,” which is also a line from the latter poem, and is the only track featuring all four members of the band performing. It’s essentially an extended instrumental built on a riff with Henry reciting one of his spoken word pieces over top, perhaps improvising some of it, foreshadowing what he would do a few years later with Rollins Band. Critics may complain about its length, clocking in at longer than 9 minutes, but I find it an interesting and successful union of the album’s dual concepts, with both Rollins and Ginn indulging their more experimental urges.

As for the instrumentals, you’ll have to be a fan of Ginn’s frenetic 12-tone playing style (if you’re not, I don’t know why you’re reading this). But as instrumental jamming goes, these tracks generally deliver, and they definitely showcase how good the Kira Roessler-Bill Stevenson rhythm section was.

Technically, Family Man is the first release to feature Kira on bass, though it’s probably safe to say most fans got their introduction to her playing in the more conventional Slip It In, which arrived a few months later in late 1984. But she earns her keep here, landing co-writing credits on two of the instrumentals and instantly locking in with Stevenson’s breakneck style.

Kira supplies some supple basslines on “Account for What?”, which sounds like prog jazz, while “Long Lost Dog of It,” which opens side B, is an abstract meditation that fades out just as it sounds like it might be gaining lift. Both “I Won’t Stick Any of You Unless and Until I Can Stick All of You!” and “The Pups are Doggin’ It” skate by on high-tempo, punky grooves and give Stevenson a platform to shine.

Most punk rockers in 1984 hated this release, which makes it punk AF in my book.

5. Loose Nut, 1985

Released in 1985, Loose Nut contains one of my favorite verses in all of Black Flag’s cannon and one that pretty well sums up their ethos: “I smash my fists / Into the wall / I can feel it / When I close my eyes.” It’s simple, declarative and visceral, and it exemplifies their strength in writing vividly economic songs exploring inner conflict.

It makes me uncomfortable rating this album so low, but they’ve all got to slot somewhere, and so here we are.

Loose Nut is a fine album, and I have little bad to say about it except that there are others I rate a little more highly — and also, it lacks any genuine Greg Ginn guitar feakouts. That said, it’s one of the band’s more consistent offerings front to end, an album full of mid-tempo rockers, some quite heavy, and some that perhaps get too repetitive and would’ve benefitted from a shorter song length. In the end, it comes across as Black Flag’s most straight-ahead rock album.

With its lyrics about being a “radical partyin’ machine,” “Annihilate This Week” continues the legacy of humorous songs a la “TV Party” and “Slip It In.” The title track is a highlight, blasting out of the gate with a punishing sonic assault and lyrics that split the difference between psychosis and horniness: “Loose nut in my head / a bolt of lightning between my legs / I can’t think straight my mind’s a mess / I only see straight when I’m being led.”

The band’s songwriting chops were in full display on Loose Nut, and the album benefits from the contributions of members not named Greg Ginn. Rollins chips in with some of the album’s finest and most adventurous tracks (“Sinking,” “I’m the One”), Kira gets her first co-writing credit for the up-tempo “Best One Yet” and the album closes with the stunning “Now She’s Black,” written by Stevenson. Some have compared it to something you might hear from ALL-era Descendents, and I can see that, and would love to hear them cover it, but Ginn’s doom-metal riffing and Henry’s scorched-earth vocal performance stamp it as the band’s own. It’s a killer track, a strong album-ender.

Another strong track, “Modern Man,” is an adaptation of a song co-written by former bassist Chuck Dukowski, this time from his days in ’70s sludge-rock band Würm. It’s one of the many songs Black Flag had been playing for a while; check out the version on the bootleg The Complete 1982 Demos with Dukowski playing bass.

Loose Nut was recorded during the same sessions at Total Access Recording that resulted in the instrumental The Process of Weeding Out EP and parts of In My Head.

4. My War, 1984

Ginn managed to push Dukowski out of Black Flag before the recording sessions began for My War (while somehow convincing him to become the band’s manager and stick around SST to book tours for its bands). Which brings us to Dale Nixon, the infamous pseudonym Ginn used on the album credits to disguise the fact he played bass on the band’s long-delayed and heavily anticipated follow-up to Damaged.

My War (whose title track was written by Dukowski) is easily the band’s rawest release, both in production and its spare musical sound. It was intensely polarizing at the time of its release because of songs that stretched well past the standard 1- or 2-minute mark established by its predecessor, because it had guitar solos, and especially because of side two, which contains three songs that each stretch past 6 minutes. Indeed, it would be difficult to slam dance to much of My War, and the album was anathema to many of the combat-boots set. It was a sign that, in the two-plus years since Damaged, when the band was legally barred from releasing new material under the Black Flag name, much had changed for the band. They had grown disillusioned with hardcore punk and its violence and rigid orthodoxy and were exploring new influences, including heavy metal and even jazz.

Today, the album is regarded as being hugely influential by bands like Mudhoney and The Melvins and the entire grunge oeuvre. Some have come to see it as the band’s finest recording.

I don’t, largely because of Ginn’s rather rote follow-the-lead-guitar bass playing and the lack of an ensemble feel. The band sounds a little thin without Dukowski’s powerful, industrial-strength bass playing and Dez Cadena’s rhythm guitar. In fact, The Complete 1982 Demos, a bootleg recorded with both Dukowski and Cadena that contains early versions of several My War songs, captures a superior version of this transition era of Black Flag.

That said, My War contains some truly killer tracks, led by the Dukowski-penned “I Love You,” which features another excellent breakneck Ginn intro, and the Rollins-penned “Forever Time” and its lyrics, “I feel I’m some kind of death machine / With skin and muscles and a heart that pumps my blood / Time, time, time, time.” The latter showcases Ginn’s growing fascination with stop-start dynamics and shifting time signatures.

Henry is in fine form throughout, and was steadily growing into his role not just as the frontman, but embodiment of the Black Flag persona itself. Even though he was mostly singing Ginn’s lyrics, which dealt with self-hatred, frustration, dysfunction and violence, Rollins makes the songs his own. He’s an open wound, menacing but ultimately vulnerable and pleading for help. Meanwhile, Ginn’s guitar playing here is gaining new swagger, especially on the Sabbath-esque riff at the heart of “Beat My Head Against the Wall” and the dissonant noise of “The Swinging Man,” which marks the band’s first foray into free jazz dissonance (with bonus points to Stevenson’s excellent drumming).

I can’t write about My War without mentioning the iconic Raymond Pettibon cover art. I have long believed NASA should stuff a copy into one of those unmanned probes we fill with artifacts of human civilization and launch into deep space in the hopes it is one day discovered by some alien race. What in the world would they make of it?

3. In My Head

I could almost make the case for In My Head as my favorite Flag release. I consider it psychedelic metal in sound — heavy, dark and atonal, still sounding like nothing else after all these years.

Its primary flaw is that it suffers from Ginn’s tinny, cold production, which sounds like he put thick pillows over all the mics. Henry’s vocals are buried in the mix, and Stevenson’s drums sound like they’re coming from the other room — kind of like the production David Bowie gave to Raw Power by The Stooges. It’s fun to imagine this album getting a proper remix, but this is Greg Ginn we’re talking about — stubborn gatekeeper to a vast SST catalog full of increasingly hard-to-find gems that he refuses, for whatever reason, to reissue or sell off rights.

The story goes that In My Head had its genesis as Ginn’s first instrumental solo release, but Rollins began scratching out lyrics while hanging out during the band’s marathon practice sessions, so instead it became the band’s swan song. (The excellent podcast You Don’t Know Mojack presents compelling evidence that by this time, Ginn had a plan to wind down the band as a going interest; the Metal Matters episode on this album is also quite good.) Ginn would fire Stevenson soon after the album’s release, replaced for the tour by Anthony Martinez. Kira, who would appear on the 1986 live album Who’s Got the 10-1/2? with Martinez on drums (it was recorded in late ’85), would depart soon after to finish her degree at UCLA, bringing this era of the band, and its strongest rhythm section, to a close.

Musically, In My Head is a fascinating and boundary-pushing mélange. With its mathematic harmonic scales offset by Rollins’ seething chorus, “Black Love” is creepy, off kilter and menacing. “White Hot” sounds perpetually on the verge of stumbling over its own top-heavy stop-start rhythm and Ginn’s molasses-thick riffing. Rollins is once again in feral form, singing “I wanna be that bullet that goes ripping through your skull” on the title track, and sounding positively creepy on “Crazy Girl” when he sings “My target is your eyes.”

Less acknowledged are the songs that close out side two on the LP version. “Drinking and Driving,” “Retired at 21” and the driving “Society’s Tease”— are effortless-sounding rave-ups that see the band exploring novel facets of non-hardcore punk rock. The album’s closer, the terrific, skittering “It’s All Up to You,” is one of the rare examples of a Black Flag song that fades out at the end, appropriately sending the band off into infamy. (The CD versions add the trippy “I Can See You” and “You Let Me Down.”)

If the band had run out of gas by this point, there was no sign of it on this record.

2. Slip It In, 1984

Slip It In is a sleeper in the Black Flag catalog, the album where the direction laid out just months earlier with the release of My War met with a rapidly improving musical dexterity — thanks in no small part to the arrival of Kira on bass. Musically, the band never sounded more potent.

The band around this time was listening to a lot of Ronnie James Dio, which is fun to think about, as are the tales about Rollins and Stevenson going for adrenaline-fueled runs together in the middle of the night during breaks at the recording studio. Naturally, Slip It In reflects an increased metal influence, especially on the demented album closer “You’re Not Evil,” with its background screams and whispers and Henry’s growls countering Ginn’s psychotic pull-cord arpeggios on the chorus, and the killer riffing and drumming of “Wound Up.”

One of the band’s most diverse albums stylistically, it contains echoes of the sludge of My War (“Rat’s Eyes”) and the last gasps of its hardcore roots (the relentless “My Ghetto” and the classic “Black Coffee”), part summation of where the band has been, part restless exploration, and all flex. With its gong intro and prog leanings, “Obliteration” underlines Ginn’s growing interest in instrumental music, and Henry by now was starting to take a more active role in writing lyrics, contributing the standout “The Bars” (with a Dukowski co-writing credit), perhaps the album’s best track. Kira is a revelation on bass, supplying slippery (sorry) intros and adding a dynamic new sophistication to the band.

I’ve gone this far without discussing the title track, which was problematic in its day (Kira herself has spoken about her own conflicted feelings about it as the group’s lone female member) and is only more so today in the #metoo era. Then again, maybe it’s about morning-after regret. Like the album cover, it’s clumsy and misogynistic, but also knowingly juvenile, meant as a joke in the vein of “TV Party.”

As an album opener, it’s also pretty hard to beat.

Ginn’s entry into the song sounds like the soundtrack to a spectacular car chase scene and channels the incendiary lead-in to “Rise Above.” He’s neither the cleanest nor most technical of virtuosos — a musician friend of mine once called Ginn as “the best bad guitarist” — but he’s a man with a vision and ideas and a sound all his own. Meanwhile, Henry and guest vocalist Suzi Gardner, who would later help launch the band L7, really go there, so to speak, and deliver a scorching piece of completely juvenile performance art caught on wax.

1. Damaged, 1981

In the interests of tension and surprise, I’d love to rank Slip It In or In My Head No. 1 on this list. These days I listen to them more, and the later albums like those ones were certainly more musically adventurous and varied. But in the end I cannot deny the gravitational pull of Damaged, the album that lit the fuse and cemented Black Flag’s status as legends.

Damaged is easily the best album to emerge from the ‘80s hardcore movement, a grenade blast of rebellion, angst and self-loathing conveyed in economical, pulse-quickening 2-minute songs. It stands head and shoulders above its peers because the band was just too talented, too well-rehearsed (Black Flag set a demanding practice schedule) and too invested in the project to let its songs become formulaic and rigid like so much of the hardcore genre.

Much of the album is comprised of songs like “Police Story” and “Depression” that had become standards by the time the band finally recorded its first full-length. It’s fleshed out with a few standout contributions from bassist Dukowski, including a remake of the song “Padded Cell” from his old ‘70s sludge rock band Würm, and a smattering of new songs. It was also the first recording to feature Rollins, formerly of the short-lived Washington D.C. hardcore band State of Alert, with former vocalist Dez Cadena moving to rhythm guitar and the indomitable Robo manning the drums.

This version of Greg Ginn’s band was a powerful one. Rollins, who joined the band mid-tour shortly before it hit the studio to record this album, lends a new ferocity and feral energy, even if his vocal range is less dynamic than previous frontmen Ron Reyes and Keith Morris. Dukowski brings a kind of caustic aesthetic to the bass that suits the material and perfectly complements Ginn’s meltdown playing style. His bass playing on the slow-to-fast intro to “No More” is a prime example.

The tracks “Rise Above” and “Police Story” were the closest Black Flag ever got to being political but retain a timeless quality. There are even “hits” in the form of “Six Pack” and “TV Party,” which contains now-outdated references to ‘80s shows like Dallas and Dynasty. What’s more, the seeds of the Sabbath-y sludgecore found on side two of My War were planted here on the tracks “Room 13” and “Damaged I.”

Taken in full, it’s a genre- and era-defining album that was totally at odds stylistically and temperamentally with the dawn of the Reagan ‘80s. Damaged constantly veers between the precipices of blowing up and melting down.

Damaged ignited a bitter legal battle with the label Unicorn, a division of MCA Records, after it objected to the “anti-parent” content of the record that would drain the band’s already barren coffers and briefly land Ginn and Dukowski in jail. It also prevented the band from releasing any new music under the Black Flag name until late in 1983, when Unicorn went bankrupt.

The following year, in 1984, the dam burst open. The band would never sound the same.

Editor’s note: BlueSky user @bettybarcode pointed out that, despite long-held conventional wisdom, Woodward was not in fact home to the first concrete-paved mile of roadway in all the U.S.A. I’ve updated the post, mea culpa.

Woodward Avenue, the iconic thoroughfare known as M1 that helped birth the automobile era and is today home to the daylong classic-car traffic jam known as the Dream Cruise, has been narrowed from four to three lanes in both directions in Ferndale through the addition of sometimes-protected bike lanes.

From a symbolic perspective, this is a revolution. And as is the case whenever the status quo is threatened, there has been plenty of grumbling from the Extremely Online, pro-car set. And yet! Somehow we’re all still here.

Life proceeds as before.

Unfinished bike lanes

While the dust continues to settle, it’s worth noting that the project, which has blessed motorists with smooth new pavement to go with nifty two-way curbside bike lanes on both sides of Woodward, is not yet complete.

“The project is scheduled to be completed in 2024, as originally intended,” Diane Cross, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, told me. “Due to some unforeseen issues, permanent pavement markings and some additional signing will be completed in 2024. This remaining work does not increase the project costs.”

That includes some long stretches where the bike lanes are clearly marked with dotted lines and demarcated with painted islands or divider lines, but no bollards. Those will also be installed in spring, Cross said.

Much of the controversy, if you want to call it that, stems from the lengthy construction project, which had both north- and southbound sides narrowed to two lanes for months during the fall (after all, there’s nothing like being stuck behind the wheel to make people extra grumpy) and due to the disjointed nature of the bike lanes in Ferndale and neighboring Pleasant Ridge. But the two are separate projects.

How the bike lanes were funded

At $9 million, Ferndale’s project is by far the more substantial of the two. The funding includes $5.6 million from MDOT for resurfacing, more than $1.17 million from the city from gasoline tax revenue earmarked for public transportation, $139,500 from the Pleasant Ridge DDA, and more than $2 million in Transportation Alternatives Program grant funding awarded to the two cities (a portion of this project includes bike lanes on southbound Woodward in Pleasant Ridge).

The Pleasant Ridge cycle track is limited to northbound Woodward, from Sylvan to I-696 and splitting off onto Main Street leading to downtown Royal Oak. It’s funded by more than $1.3 million in federal TAP grants, with local matching funds from the city’s DDA district property tax revenue. Unlike Ferndale’s bike lanes, the cycle track is built with pavers at sidewalk level and is further separated from the roadway by streetscaping, including many newly planted trees, and by parking spots.

Unfortunately, the nature of the separate projects and other logistics means the bike lanes between the freeway and Eight Mile Road are not contiguous on either side of Woodward. Pleasant Ridge’s project leaves a gap between roughly Sylvan and Oakridge Streets, while on the southbound side, there are bike lanes starting at 696 but ending as the roadway narrows and not starting again in earnest until Maplehurst Street.

“We had to route the southbound cycle track through the alley between Maplehurst and Oxford due to traffic capacity/operations,” Cross said in an email. “We would have needed to widen SB from Oxford to Woodland to not have any adverse traffic impacts, which was beyond the scope of work (and would have added significant cost).

“Four southbound lanes are needed from where the service drive merges at Oakland Park to 1,500 feet south of Oakland Park. With the required 500-foot lane reduction taper, the cycle track was able to ‘resume’ on Woodward at Maplehurst.”

So there’s your lesson in modern traffic engineering. I will say that when the orange construction barrels finally cleared, and Woodward went from two lanes to three, the first thing I noticed was that people were once again speeding. Even with one fewer lanes to drive in, motorists still have plenty of room to operate their vehicles and drive faster than the posted 35 mph speed limit.

For most times of the day, anyway, two lanes through Ferndale was plenty, and as much as drivers may have grumbled, it was nice to see people minding the speed limit for once.

A compromise, but well worth it

A rendering of the Pleasant Ridge cycle track as seen from above.

Plenty of people have commented about the slalom-like nature of Ferndale’s bike lanes, which follow the contours of the curb indentations that were formerly reserved for curbside (car) parking. True, they’re not as nice as the sidewalk-level cyce tracks Pleasant Ridge has built, or that the city of Detroit installed along Livernois just south of Eight Mile.

The bike lanes we have were a compromise, done to coincide with the state’s planned resurfacing of Woodward and much cheaper than rebuilding the sidewalks and streetscaping to accommodate a similar cycle track. Hopefully that comes sometime in the not-so-distant future.

For now, we have new bike lanes that mostly connect Eight Mile all the way to I-696. I see them as a huge positive, offering a much improved north-south bicycle route through our fair Ferndusky and shortened pedestrian crossings at the few crosswalks we do have along Woodward. I have no doubt they will prove popular, see plenty of use and be an economic boon to our city, just as the bike lanes on other Ferndale streets have been.

I’m eager to use them (so far I’ve run in them, but I haven’t yet used my bike there), but I think I’ll hold off on reviewing them for their usability and safety until they’re truly, officially completed this spring. There figures to be a learning curve for both users and motorists, but so far, aside from the occasional car or delivery truck parked in the bike lanes, most drivers seem to be staying out of them and parking in the new spaces as intended.

For those who continue to complain about the bike lanes, I don’t know what to say. Perhaps you’d be happier if Woodward looked more like it does in, say, Bloomfield Hills — a straight-up divided highway that gashes through town and invites high speeds, with no sidewalks and no pedestrian crossings anywhere.

No thanks.

What if I told you that I moved there from New York City and discovered there were actually strong parallels between the two otherwise very different places?

Recently I had an exchange on Twitter with someone who had pooh-poohed the idea of Mackinac as a so-called “urbanist paradise.” He explained that he dismissed the place as an “inauthentic tourist trap.” Many people similarly view Mackinac as being overrun with summer tourists (aka “fudgies”), more like a Disney theme park version of an urbanist’s dream than anything worthy of studying for lessons on placemaking and designing more human-scaled, less carbon-intensive communities.

But why not?

There is little doubt that much of the popularity of Mackinac — aside from its considerable natural beauty, of course — stems from the fact that it presents a rare opportunity to leave cars, and all the ills and headaches they bring, behind. Remember how quiet things were during COVID lockdowns? How the sound of traffic just … vanished? That’s sort of what it’s like spending the night on Mackinac.

Mackinac is the only city in the US that has banned all cars and I’ve never wanted to visit a small town more pic.twitter.com/cz91M6e60v

— Sam (@samwightt) June 22, 2023

(Interestingly, several popular tourist destinations in the U.S. are walkable places that are closed to cars, raising questions about whether that is part of their core appeal. But that’s another topic.)

I spent five seasons working on Mackinac Island, so I know what it’s like living there (the long, isolated winters notwithstanding). The Twitter exchange, and a subsequent DM conversation with a friend about how life on the island compares with big-city living, validated what I’ve long thought about the life I lived on Mackinac.

Big Apple to Mackinac

I was in my 20s when I stepped off the Arnold Transit Co. (R.I.P.) ferry one day in April to begin a seasonal job on Mackinac Island tending bar in the dining room of a waterfront hotel. I had fled New York City, where I had gone broke and been mired in a deep mental funk, and was looking for some levity and a chance to reset my life and get back on my feet financially. I had signed a contract to work for six months through the end of the season in October, working six nights a week behind the bar, with my housing comped as a perk of being a manager.

To say I experienced culture shock going from the still-sketchy Brooklyn of the ’90s to Mackinac Island, a Victorian-themed island of some 500 year-round residents located off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, its cultural touchstone, is a big understatement.

It was cold, barely yet springtime in temperament and weeks before the start of the tourist season. The trees were still leafing out after the frigid winter and most of the businesses were still sprucing themselves up, fixing things damaged over a winter of dormancy and building up their inventories in preparation to open. And Lord, it was quiet — eerily quiet by comparison, with the thrum of car traffic, rumble of subways and masses of messy humanity replaced by the sounds of horse hooves on pavement and the occasional horn blast from ferry boats hauling day-trip laborers, cargo freight and smatterings of hardy visitors. I had to suppress some initial panic, fearing I had signed myself up for a summer in a backwater.

What had I done?

Density and mobility, Victorian-style

Turns out there was no need to worry. Within days, I was subsumed with work preparing the sumptuous gardens, moving furniture and doing minor handyman work inside the hotel, and my apprehension about the jarring change of scenery, culture and pace of life quickly faded into memory. There was plenty of work to be done to open the old hotel after the long winter, and hard work proved to be a healing tonic for me. So did the island’s pristine physical beauty and bracing air. Plus, I had quickly fallen in with some peers; when you’re isolated in a remote place with few others, you depend on each other for company and entertainment, and I needed that, too.

In time, the hotel opened its doors for business and the tourist season began in earnest. I quickly found other parallels between NYC and Mackinac Island (don’t laugh).

Here was a compact central business district, small though it may be, that was jam-packed with people. Much of Mackinac’s downtown is comprised of long, rowhouse-style buildings with businesses on the first floor and residential units above. You go for entire blocks without seeing a break in the buildings, each one pressed up tightly to the next. Aside from bike rental shops, there is nary a parking lot to be found.

Main Street on a busy summer afternoon is a riot of people on foot, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages or drays. The street activity can be hectic. Visitors often mistake the lack of cars for a lack of traffic, but serious accidents are rare.

Living quarters are also compact, with many seasonal employees housed in second-floor condos, row houses or purpose-built apartments. The summer population of the island balloons only to a few thousand with the arrival of seasonal workers, but the living density of those people is relatively high in the central business district, especially when you factor in the many hotels and inns. And yet, three quarters of the island remains undevelopable state parkland.

Bikes as utility

Then there are the bicycles, which may seem like the most obvious point of comparison but are also in some ways the least obvious. Because you quickly learn, when you come to the island to work, that you will want a bike not only to get around, but to haul things.

Mackinac might be a seasonal tourist destination, but it’s a real community all the same, with seasonal and year-round residents who have needs like groceries and toiletries and hardware and clothing. There’s a flourishing economy there, based on tourism and hospitality but also supporting jobs in construction, carpentry, horse-grooming, landscaping, logistics, and marine trades. Whether you buy the things you need on the island or from the mainland, you have to get it all back to your living quarters on the island sans car. And that means either loading it onto a horse-drawn carriage or dray, or the basket of your bike.

So it’s not hard to imagine how Mackinac can be a physically demanding place to live. Sure, some people choose to go the horse-and-carriage route, but that gets expensive, and even then, people do plenty of walking, biking, or both. At some point, brawn inevitably factors into hauling things. Also: There are serious hills to contend with.

Yes, it’s difficul tat times — lung bursting and thigh-burning — but I loved it. Much like living in New York, you almost can’t help but get in decent shape simply through all the walking and biking you do. The last time I checked, Americans could stand to get a little healthier.

At no point whatsoever did I miss cars or wish I had one. Riding your bicycle everywhere is a blast, and surprisingly utilitarian. Although collisions occasionally happen, I never saw any kind of serious injuries from one or road rage break out between cyclists. It’s a reminder of the toll car dependency plays on our mental and physical well being.

In the end, while I loved many things about the lifestyle there — especially the lack of cars — I moved on from Mackinac Island. But there will always be a part of me that longs to return to that lifestyle, and wonders why more places couldn’t simply choose to copy it. New York City is already doing just that with its congestion pricing plan for motorists.

But Mackinac Island is a reminder that the benefits of urbanism can be shared by communities of all sizes and types, and without sacrificing what makes them unique.

Creative Commons photos via Jasperdo (x2)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about neighborhood businesses. It’s partly a reflection of my station in life: As a father who fields unsolicited mailers from AARP, I no longer care much about being where the action is, and I’m usually content to stay put. I’m interested in ways to improve the neighborhood where I work (from home) and spend so much time, and I’m firmly on record as being sick to death of driving. To paraphrase a fellow Ferndalean friend, “Let the people who don’t live in Ferndale have the downtown, we’ll go to the local places.”

I’ve always loved neighborhood businesses. I believe they add immeasurable value, identity and sense of place. They personalize a community, like a little surprise you discover when you’re exploring some unfamiliar new city on foot.

But these days they’re almost nonexistent around metro Detroit.

The southern end of Ferndale where I live is dominated by car dealerships, fast food and cemeteries. I can walk or bike to the downtown, and it’s a pleasant stroll through the neighborhood and quiet, low-speed streets, but it’s a mile away. The areas near me zoned for commercial or mixed use have generally been slow to revitalize themselves.

Last month, Dessert Oasis opened a new store in an old warehouse on Hilton Street, a mixed-use light industrial-commercial strip lined by low-slung, often vacant and windowless brick and cinderblock buildings. As a public eating and gathering place, Dessert Oasis is the first of its kind in this corner of Ferndale.

A note here that this probably didn’t come about purely by happenstance. In 2016, the city put Hilton on a road diet, lowered the speed limit and put in dedicated bike lanes. Since then, offices, small businesses and artist studios have slowly been reclaiming the old buildings — no coincidence, I believe.

This is Dessert Oasis’ bakery headquarters, and fourth location. It’s a clean, airy space, with light streaming into a room filled with tables, chairs and a few couches and love seats — great for gathering in a group. High-top window seats provide a view of activity on the street and give a feel for the rhythm of the neighborhood. You see plenty of people out walking their dogs (the cafe is two blocks from a popular dog park — a smart move by the owners), and I am continually astonished by the proliferation of baby carriages in Ferndale, a place that not so long ago was closing and consolidating schools because the town had filled with young people who had no children.

Businesses like this one — opening in long-ignored districts outside the downtown — are becoming more common in Ferndale. Livernois Avenue, which also has bike lanes (protected, no less), is playing host to an increasing number of them, and there’s a cluster of small businesses on Woodward Heights (yep, bike lanes) that have established the neighborhood as a kind of in-the-know food and drink destination.

I wholeheartedly welcome the trend and encourage other cities to follow suit. I see old commercial spaces all the time that have fallen into disrepair that make me wish someone would fix up and open a restaurant, or a bar, or maybe a bakery where you can pick up a nice loaf of bread and some good coffee.

Always thought this building would make a great neighborhood corner bar. But given that’s barely a thing in Detroit, I doubt it could happen. Neighbors would squawk, zoning likely prohibits it, etc. It looks there’s an artist in there now, at least. pic.twitter.com/exAF1j24yh

— Sven Gustafson (@sveng) February 13, 2023

Outside of Hamtramck, Wyandotte and a few neighborhoods in Detroit where old neighborhood stores or bars survive, it’s not easy to find this kind of mom-and-pop commerce around here, especially in the suburbs. (Yes, the ones I’m describing in Ferndale aren’t technically integrated with residential neighborhoods, like they are in places like Chicago or Madison, Wisconsin, but I’ll take what we can get.) True mixed-use residential zoning here is exceedingly rare.

At some point, we collectively decided to strictly separate our work, entertainment, leisure and home lives from one another. But in a post-pandemic world in which so many of us are working from home, that kind of rigid physical segmentation no longer makes much sense.

Putting on my Jane Jacobs cap for a second, vibrant urban neighborhoods — the kinds this state desperately needs to cultivate to reverse its brain drain — are about much more than simply housing. And frankly, if we have any hope of reining in climate change, we will have to acknowledge the inefficiency and massive carbon footprint of living in places that force you to get in a car to run even the simplest of errands.

Businesses are often viewed as nuisances in the U.S., as noisy or garish places that generate traffic or unwelcome activity that should be relegated to their own devoted districts. Who can fault this when you think of them in terms of the godawful vistas of road signs and traffic signals lining wide, car-choked roads that make up so much of this country? No one wants that kind of thing on their block.

But having commerce in your neighborhood should become the goal, not something to discourage. They add a place to go and spend time, in the case of a bar or coffee shop, or they provide an opportunity to pick up essentials — a carton of milk, loaf of bread, or a light bulb — without having to resort to your vehicle to get you there. They get people out on the street, encourage exercise and build community. You get to know the people who dry clean your shirts. You get to know your neighbors, because you actually cross paths with them.

Lord knows we could all use opportunities to do just that.

Springtime in Detroit: The snow has melted, revealing festering mounds of decaying litter blown up along freeway embankments and against chain-link fences. The road surfaces are crumbling, thanks to winters that increasingly ping-pong between freeze and thaw.

At the grueling end of a long, gloomy winter, it feels like everyone out on the roads is in a foul mood. People honk more, ride your rear bumper, pass you on narrow, low-speed streets where there’s not really room for passing. As Bill McGraw noted in the Freep, there is an “increasing number of yahoos who treat expressway driving like a real-life video game, tailgating, speeding, weaving in and out and periodically firing guns.” The ever-present sound of snarling muscle-car engines begins to sound simply like an expression of white male rage.

As in many other locations, road rage here is tactile and has been noticeable worse since the pandemic briefly shut down road traffic and offered us a taste of an alternate world we have largely failed, outside of remote work, to embrace. It feels hostile out there. Mean.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, thanks to being the father of two boys with soccer and ninja classes and an ailing father and family issues that need doing, and it’s not bringing me joy. Being so dependent on my car is slowly bleeding any remaining optimism I had about this place and its future. Case in point: Today I took note of a rehabilitation project under way on Lake Frances in Palmer Park, which aims to dredge and clean the pond and stabilize its banks with new native plantings. Neat! Then I took notice of how the parking lot next to it was festooned with litter following a weekend of nice weather, because there’s nothing like going to the park for some badly needed fresh air and greenery and leaving your shit everywhere.

Maybe, I think, what I’m seeing when I’m behind the wheel is the real Detroit, the product of our cultural identity as the Motor City. We staked our identity on the automobile and we’ll go down with the automobile.

The craziest part of it to me? We chose this lifestyle, and we continue to choose it.

A four-wheeled culture war

Cars — sorry, trucks and SUVs — are getting bigger and heavier. I see so many Yukons, Navigators, Expeditions, Grand Wagoneers, Escalades and behemoth pickup trucks rumbling along on our oversaturated roads and crowding our parking lots.

Your know it’s Spring in your Detroit neighborhood when this donuts shit starts up again. Last year one road near me was a drag track most the summer. pic.twitter.com/tRA0wCEeXN

— Daily Detroit (@TheDailyDetroit) April 7, 2023

There’s a tug of war happening between the status quo and any hint of new. Any tangible signs of progress in Detroit come marred with an asterisk: swaths of land devoted to automobiles. Downtown and the District Detroit lower Cass Corridor are defined as much (or more) by parking lots as by actual businesses, housing, offices or entertainment establishments. I recently went out to dinner at a newish eatery that had opened in a formerly derelict neighborhood, and I felt excited — until I realized that directly across the street, nearly the entire block was taken up by pockmarked unpaved parking lots surrounded by chain link fences, turning half the neighborhood into a dreary dead zone.

People bitch endlessly — a noisy minority, perhaps — about the proliferation of protected bike lanes as an affront to their God-given right not to have to share the road with other modes of transportation. You don’t have to look hard to find examples of motorists threatening cyclists. I’m actually starting to get nervous about how these yahoos will react to the Woodward Avenue road diet in Ferndale and the bike lanes it will bring. They’ll complain bitterly if they don’t see the bike lanes filled from the get-go with cyclists. Driving through the construction zone, which is restricting the number of open travel lanes, already feels like a scene from “Mad Max.”

And in a case of people voting with their feet (or more accurately, their Tahoes), the places in metro Detroit with the highest population growth continue to be godawful car-dependent exurbs like Macomb and Lyon Townships.

You could accuse me of becoming obsessed with the negative side of auto dependency, and you’d have a fair point. But once your eyes are opened to the huge bill we pay for car dependency, you cannot unsee it. And the debt we are amassing — financial but also in poor health and the ugly mindset I’ve described above — is only growing larger.

There’s a gym I go to on the days of the week when I drive my son 25 minutes away for indoor soccer practices. (The location hardly matters; the fact is so much of Detroit is just like it.) Driving down the main drag, I marvel at the proportion of businesses — new and used car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, rental agencies, parts stores — that relate directly to the automobile. How do we unravel this absolute economic dependency, as will inevitably happen one way or another? Then, I arrive at a massive parking lot and look around at the nearest thing that catches my eye: a big strip mall set behind its own sea of parking that must be nearly a quarter of a mile away.

So much wasted land, and so little there there. It’s simply lifelessness. No signs of actual people outside anywhere. This isn’t a place designed for people, but cars.

This is what we’ve built, and continue building.

Inflection point

If any place cries for some fresh ideas, for trying some different ways of doing things, it’s here. We have an aging housing stock, limited job prospects, a moonscape network of roads, a scarcity of walkable neighborhoods and downtowns, and woefully insufficient transit. Is it really any wonder people continue to leave for greener, more vibrant pastures?

I’m aware that the Detroit-based auto industry created vast wealth and played a leading role in creating the American middle class. But frankly, that was a long time ago. The record since the oil shock of the 1970s, at least, is a lot more checkered. Most auto plants have long since left Detroit proper, and many more today are built in low-wage, non-union Southern states than in Michigan or the industrial Midwest. The industry has left a lot of physical, toxic and psychic scars as it ebbed and fled Detroit for greener pastures, lower costs and tax incentives.

The shift from combustion power to electric vehicles will inflict further pain and consolidation — and even then, EVs are still cars, just quieter. None of these other problems I’ve described really go away.

And so, I’m left to wonder what to make of this place, and what path it will choose, at a time when so much is at an inflection point. At the end of one of the strangest winters I can recall, I’m feeling especially despondent about this place I call home.

Like a lot of Detroiters, I could use some hope.

Creative Commons photo by Heather Kaiser

Recently, I tweeted out a story that said Northville, an affluent suburb of Detroit, had voted to permanently make its downtown off-limits to cars. Very quickly, it became the most viral tweet I’ve ever sent. That says nothing particularly interesting about me; I merely passed along a story my father had sent me to the broader internet.

What it does say that is interesting is that there’s a huge and receptive audience for reclaiming our public spaces from the tyranny of the automobile — even here in the Motor City.

The almost entirely positive reaction suggests that people want more opportunities to live and move about outside of their cars — and be safe from being struck down by them. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that this is happening at a time when pedestrian fatalities are at a 40-year high, with 7,485 recorded in 2021.)

Echoing what several people said about their own communities, the tweet got me thinking: If Northville, a conservative-leaning bedroom community with a small, walkable downtown, can do it, what other local cities could muster the vision — and the courage — to make their central business districts pedestrian-only, off limits to cars, trucks and SUVs, here in this sprawling, car-dependent megalopolis?

Ferndale

In theory, Ferndale would seem to be a perfect candidate for a car-free downtown. It has a popular downtown and a progressive city government that has installed miles of protected bike lanes and pushed a road diet plan for Woodware Avenue that will see the busy thoroughfare go from four lanes in each direction to three, with broadened, landscaped sidewalks and bike lanes protected from traffic by a row of parking spaces.

Unfortunately, downtown Ferndale’s small size and orientation along two heavily-trafficked roads probably rules out a large-scale closure to vehicular traffic. Woodward is a state trunkline, meaning any closure would have to be approved by the Michigan Department of Transportation. Does anyone really think MDOT is going to approve closing it off to vehicles?

And would we even want to? Opponents of the road diet make the preposterous claim that it will funnel traffic into the adjacent neighborhoods as drivers look to bypass the congestion they believe will result from the narrowing of the road. It’s an absurd argument. Based on traffic volumes that the city carefully studied, Woodward will remain by far the fastest north-south route through the city, even as the road diet may force drivers to slow down during peak traffic times. But closing Woodward off altogether, at Nine Mile, would undeniably route all that traffic volume into the neighborhoods. It would be a nightmare. Much of the traffic on Woodward, after all, is simply passing through Ferndale, not stopping here. Where else would it go?

Nine Mile probably isn’t an option, either, as anyone who has spent time strolling it, or worked in the lobby of the public library, can attest. It attracts a surprisingly steady amount of crosstown traffic.

In the end, downtown Ferndale’s geography along these two busy thoroughfares probably ends the discussion. The best the city could hope for might be to close off parts of East and West Troy Streets — I’ll note there’s a pedestrian plaza right outside The Dot parking garage and its street-level storefronts, which is a neat kind of irony — and maybe Vester Street, where a multi-use residential building is proposed to be built on what is today a surface parking lot.

Bottom line? Ferndale is a relatively pedestrian-friendly oasis tightly constrained by car culture, with limited options. It would take some real creativity to envision a plan that would work.

Royal Oak

I’m not always sure what city leaders are thinking when it comes to downtown Royal Oak. In winter, plows leave big ridges of snow that block crosswalks at intersections, bicycling infrastructure is often no more than sharrows painted on the pavement, and the city’s new on-street parking system, which combines complicated digital parking meters with a new back-in parking scheme that leaves some streets looking like a car show, is widely loathed, including by business owners.

That said, I genuinely like downtown Royal Oak, despite the city’s often questionable stewardship of the place. The sidewalks are pleasant and bustling, there’s an appealing mix of stores to browse in, the weekly farmers market is a treasure and the redevelopment of its civic campus has added a wonderful new park to the mix. Crews recently installed median curbed islands on Main Street, which might help calm traffic and make crossing the four-lane street safer.

Royal Oak’s downtown is also much larger than Ferndale’s, and it isn’t as constrained by traffic-flow considerations. It’s hard to see the city interrupting north-south traffic on Main Street, but less so on Washington Avenue, which sees less traffic, or on Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In fact, the block of Fifth Avenue east of Washington is already closed to vehicular traffic. Why not add a few more blocks to make it more welcoming for pedestrians?

Detroit

Anyone who’s been downtown on a busy weekend night, when there are sporting events, live concerts and other events competing for attention, knows what a traffic-clogged hellscape it can be. Downtown Detroit would be improved immeasurably with fewer cars.

Detroit’s central business district has long been oriented to the automobile. Today, an astonishing 40% of the land downtown is devoted to parking, either for surface lots or massive high-rise parking decks. Entire blocks are essentially dead zones of parking. After the demise of the city’s streetcar system in the mid-1900s, the automobile became the primary means of accessing the central business district. The city’s painful decline, which started around the same time the streetcars stopped rolling, only increased the need to give people, many of whom didn’t live in the city, quick and easy access in and (especially) out of it. Finally, the CBD is quite literally circumscribed by sunken freeways on three sides.

Today, revitalization and gentrification (call it what you want) are converting much of the downtown building stock over to residential, adding a 24-hour component to a downtown that never had many residents, even during its industrial-era peak. That’s a good thing.

But Detroit remains heavily dependent on the disposable income of non-residents who come down to eat dinner, catch a Tigers game, see a show or festival, even do some retail shopping. True, those people could catch a bus, or ride the QLine, but they largely don’t. They pilot their Grand Wagoneers down I-75 and pay as much as $40 to park in the District Detroit an Olympia Entertainment-owned parking lot. Those people would revolt if suddenly the entire downtown was off limits to motor vehicles. So would big employers like General Motors, DTE and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, each of which have huge parking footprints in the area.

It would be better to take a cue from the pedestrian plaza that opened several years back at the foot of Woodward, where Dan Gilbert has installed year-round programming that links cleverly via landscaped pathway to Campus Martius. Maybe that’s a great place to start; why not close off Cadillac Square next? It already sees lots of programming, including the Christmas popup retail market. Harmonie Park/Paradise Valley and Capitol Park seem like other obvious candidates, with narrow streets that have limited value in moving traffic already.

But a wholesale conversion of downtown Detroit as a pedestrian oasis is simply not feasible without a much larger culture shift away from cars, trucks and SUVs. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Where else?

Someone responded that it seemed ironic that a small suburb like Northville could ban cars from its downtown, but the more I thought about it, maybe it’s actually easier for them than big cities like Detroit. There’s less critical mass of vehicles to contend with, only the opinions of local residents and the occasional out-of-town visitors. Northville got a head start banning cars during COVID, and downtown business owners and city officials apparently liked what they saw. If banning cars were bad for business, there’s no way the city would allow it to continue.

So what other Detroit-area downtowns, few and far between though they may be around here, are ripe for the picking?

Dearborn and Clawson are both limited for the same reasons as Ferndale. But what about Plymouth, which is already oriented around a central park and is situated along relatively lightly trafficked streets? Or Mount Clemens, or Utica? Could Rochester do it? What about tiny downtown Farmington, perched along a little-traveled section of Grand River Avenue? Birmingham, too, might present some good options.

What are your thoughts? Leave ‘em in the comments below.

Feature photo by Keith Ewing