Coleman Young Airport Runway Expansion
While walking down Lyford Street in East Detroit, the sounds of nature are occasionally broken by the droning of small aircraft flying low over the neighborhood. They are homing in on nearby Coleman Young International Airport, a grandiose name for a minor public airfield nestled between neighborhoods on French and Conner streets.
Detroit City Airport was never especially big, starting off as a grass airstrip in 1927 before adding terminals and modern runways through the 1930’s. Most of the commercial passenger airlines left for other fields such as the current Wayne County Metropolitan Airport in 1946 and 1947, but Detroit City found a niche in serving the private and corporate-owned aircraft of wealthy residents and businesses.
Over the last 30 years the airport has expanded and upgraded several times in an effort to bring back a commercial passenger airline. In 1987, Southwest Airlines began offering flights, but were limited to using smaller planes due to the airport’s short runways. To alleviate these conditions, the city embarked on an expansion plan in 1988 which would cut into the nearby neighborhood and involve buying and tearing down over 100 homes to make way for a safety buffer. At the time, the buyout process was expected to take no more than 18 months.
Purchasing of the property within the safety buffer began in 1994, when the city council authorized the spending of $17 million dollars to condemn, buy and clear hundreds of residential lots between French and Glibo streets in five phases. Despite earlier promises, the buyout process was slow and spotty – some houses were purchased and torn down immediately, while others were purchased but not torn down for months or even years.
Residents who had not been bought out gradually found themselves surrounded by vacant homes that had. Scrappers stripped the vacant houses of their valuables, leaving behind windowless shells that attracted squatters and firebugs. City services also declined, as roads were “temporarily” closed and then left that way. Streets crumbled into disrepair, grass grew over sidewalks, and trash – boats, tires, lawn clippings - began piling up in vacant lots. As the neighborhood fell apart, the buyout offers the city offered residents fell as well, leading some to believe that the city was deliberately slowing the process to drive down property values.
Fourteen years after the project was announced, the expansion plan has been shelved. Southwest Airlines discontinued services at the airport in 1993, and other commercial carriers operated for only a year or two before leaving, the last in 2000. The city buyout of the neighborhood continues, but with no immediate plans to expand the airport, there is no sense of urgency: over 200 parcels have yet to be purchased, a situation complicated by lack of funds and land speculators snatching up property at tax auctions and demanding high prices.
Most of the blocks between French and Gilbo streets are empty now, as the remaining houses have been abandoned, torn down by the city, or burned. In the summer, grass in the vacant lots grows up to waist high, covering up fire hydrants and playground equipment. Here and there a few houses are still occupied, but with each passing year the number falls as people move away.
The blight introduced by the buyout scheme has spread beyond the condemned blocks and into the rest of the neighborhood. 16 blocks and hundreds of houses have disappeared over the last 10 years, with most remaining residents clustering along the nearest major roads, Van Dyke and McNichols. Nearby Lynch Elementary School closed in 2004 because of declining enrollment, though the neighborhood churches are still hanging on.
Also directly affected by planned airport expansion plan was a local steel company that had set up shop in a former Chrysler plant on French Road in 1984. Though profitable, the company was unable to expand its operations or construct new buildings due to its location being inside the path of the proposed airport expansion. Merkur Steel eventually went out of business and filed a lawsuit against the city for “inverse condemnation,” arguing that “that over a period of ten years, the city took steps to inhibit plaintiff's expansion of its business because the city wanted to expand the airport without having to legally and formally acquire plaintiff's property.” The courts agreed, awarding the company over $15 million dollars in damages and lost revenue in 2005.
