Note about continuity error: 

Last week's readers of Chapter 1 will be under the impression that this is Dave's first community meeting about the development, having read about it on a flier while in line at the bakery.  However, this chapter, Chapter 2, makes reference to previous meetings that Dave and other characters were present at. Accordingly, the paragraph at the bakery in Chapter 1 will be revised so that Dave is reminded about the meeting by Shelly, who pushes him to go. His primary motivation is still the free pizza. 

This type of revision will hopefully not be a regular occurrence. Please carry on!

It was 5:20 p.m. The clear blue sky of the March day had melted all of yesterday’s snow, leaving only damp curbs and white salt-stained sidewalks along Springwood Avenue in South Detroit. Heather pulled her American-made SUV into an empty parking space in front of Salerno's Pizzeria, got out of the car, and walked past an unkempt middle-aged man, taken to be homeless, standing about ten feet away from the entrance. 

The man looked her way as she walked briskly up to the door, but he didn't say anything; he certainly wasn’t about to ask her for money. Heather, a professionally dressed Black woman in her fifties, had the look of a person who was aware of, and comfortable in, her surroundings, and her avoidance of eye contact therefore clearly communicated that she was not interested in being bothered.

She found the manager of the restaurant and followed him up the stairs to the banquet hall, which was really just a converted apartment. Drywall patches and electrical conduit crisscrossed the low ceiling, and harsh fluorescent cleaning lights showed faded patches and stains on the old purple carpet. But it was a good space for meetings, with a new, automatic projector screen, and acoustically separated from the restaurant below.

Having found the space to be in order and recapped the pizza selection with the manager, Heather walked back downstairs and out to her car. She reached in her pocket for her keys. The trunk of the SUV opened to reveal several milk crates stuffed with electrical equipment, posters, and other odds and ends. 

The unkempt man hailed her from the sidewalk, “Need any help, Miss?” 

“Oh no, thank you,” Heather called back. What she needed was some quiet time before the presentation. She moved the things onto the curb, then closed the liftgate and locked the car. 

In the meantime, the man had walked up to her. “Here, Miss, let me just help you get these to the restaurant. Is that where you’re going?”

Sensing that this was the only way he would leave her alone, Heather accepted the help, and she and the man carried the items to the foot of the staircase inside the restaurant. He then resumed his post. “I’ll keep an eye on your car for you,” he said.

“Oh you don’t have to do that, please,” she said, then opened her purse and gave him two dollars.

“Thank you very much, Miss!” the man said, and then walked off, which Heather was grateful for. She went upstairs, took off her coat, and checked the time. It was 5:32. 

In the momentary emptiness of the room, Heather heard the muffled din of traffic and peered out the window. A low sun cast a glare over her eyes, but the warmth of it after the long winter was refreshing. She looked down at the streetscape from her perch. It seemed like half the buildings were vacant, and the sidewalks were that desolate sort that people don’t stroll down without a purpose. Was this street really ready for a major, multi-million dollar investment? Would she recoup what she put in? 

She should. The signs were all there. The closest neighborhood to the north, across the highway, had already been gentrified, and the nation’s oldest car company would soon be moving its new electric car division into the historic train station just a mile up the road. 

She thought of other neighborhoods in the city that were being developed, and in each neighborhood what some of the catalysts were. It was generally the small players, the business owners and bright community personalities, who made those neighborhoods destinations again, while large projects like hers came around only when the space in the old existing buildings had been rented. 

But in this case, the higher-ups at the South Detroit Business Association, a co-developer on this project, had felt that a major project was what the community needed to attract the next level of business and residential investment. So here she was, the lucky test pilot, with a sizable chunk of her life savings on the line. If they couldn't lease this thing at the projected rent, it was capable of bleeding a lot of money for a long time. 

She heard two jocular voices coming up the staircase. Looking back, she closed the blinds to combat the glare, then walked towards them. 

“Hello,” chimed Wesley, coming into view, with a voice that was musical and soft even when pushed to sound business-like. Roger, next to him, waved at Heather.

“Hi Wesley! Hi Roger!” replied Heather. “Thanks for coming. Y’all ready for tonight?”

“Yup,” said Wesley, as though he did not have a care in the world.

Roger, a quieter person with more nervous energy than Wesley, was nonetheless smiling.

Heather, in turn, smiled. This was the third meeting she had conducted with these two helping out. And at each meeting, no matter how ugly things got, they always remained upbeat and optimistic about the project. 

She was also feeling confident about tonight, but it was an earned confidence. Unlike these two, young twenty-somethings on salary, Heather had skin in the game with this project, and she had worked hard to steer things to get to where they stood tonight. At this point, anything the public had input on, which had simply been the opportunity to support or oppose a petition for a zoning height variance, was a done deal. So she had every right to feel relaxed and optimistic, like this was a victory lap of sorts. After all, by all measures it had been a very successful public input process. But still, no matter how hard Heather and her team worked to make the project a success, they always got some nasty comments at these meetings. And it’s always the developers who are the enemy, Heather thought to herself. Nobody busts the architect's chops (forgetting, for the moment, that she had worked Wesley's boss over pretty hard on the fee). 

They got to work setting up for the meeting. Roger set up the video camera, Wesley meticulously hung the posters from previous meetings, and the restaurant staff set up the food. At one point Dan, the contractor, came in, talking loudly on the phone; he waved at Heather and went off into a corner to carry on the conversation. Heather was just glad he had made it at all. He had not always been reliable, especially for meetings where he was peripheral. But Heather had insisted that he be there to be a face for construction activities in the community. 

Suddenly there was a loud slamming sound, and shuffling, all accompanied by even louder talking, coming from the foot of the staircase. It was the first guest, and Heather was pretty sure she knew who it was.

Heather quickly surveyed the room. The chairs and food were all set up, as were all the electronics for carrying on and recording the meeting. Wesley and Roger were huddled over the laptop, going over their presentations, and Dan was still in the corner, now finished with his phone call but texting furiously. Satisfied, she turned her attention to being the master of ceremonies for the night. 

The owner of the voice came into view, a white woman, Heather's age, wearing a tie-dyed baseball cap and a worn-out dark-green windbreaker.

“I told you, I’m going to a meeting tonight… I don’t know, late!” the woman said, sounding like she was done with the conversation, but then staying on the line. “I love you too,” she said quickly but kindly, and put her phone in her pocket. She smiled at Heather, and it was a big smile: the kind you might give someone before pushing them out of an airplane.

“Hello, Shelly,” Heather replied. “Glad you could make it.”

“Oh I bet you are. So I suppose this is all for show then?” retorted Shelly, gesturing around the room. “You're not actually going to listen to anything the public wants, right?”

Heather's throat instantly tightened, and her chest felt heavy. She tried to be aware of these feelings in an effort to stay mindful and in control. Shelly had to be handled very delicately. If you got defensive, she dug in. The best thing to do was let her get what she wanted to say out, and move on. Shelly rarely had any follow up. So Heather parried with Shelly the best she could.

“Well, we are here to present the final design after having taken input from the community,” Heather responded flatly. 

“Ha!” said Shelly, and looked around for an audience that was not present. “So who was it who said that we wanted a four-story monstrosity built on the street? Oh yeah, that's right. You got the variance over the public’s objections.”

Heather thought for a moment again about what the right thing to say was. What she wanted to point out was that, despite Shelly taking up the majority of the air in the room at these community meetings, she was not, in fact, “the public.” Various community and business groups in the area had all supported it. She also found herself looking down on Shelly, who for all her fanaticism for Detroit, had only lived in the city for 15 years, whereas Heather had been born and raised five miles from where they were standing and had spent her entire professional life dedicated to rebuilding the city that she grew up in.

“Well, I'm sorry you feel so strongly about it. Hopefully what you hear tonight will help,” Heather said and excused herself to greet the other guests, who were now arriving in two’s and three’s. She then spotted Jacky Vasquez in the clump of people by the entrance, and they made eye contact. 

“Hi Heather, how are you?” asked a cheerful Jacky, breaking free. 

“Hi Jacky! Oh it's good to see you,” Heather said, and opened her arms for a hug. “I hope you're not having any second thoughts about the zoning variance!” she joked. She then instantly kicked herself for a joke that didn't even really make any sense, since the councilwoman had no say over zoning variances.

But Jacky just laughed. “No, are you kidding? I love it! I can't wait to hear what the final plan is!”

“Well, we’ll see. Hopefully it goes over well,” said Heather, allowing herself to be candid. Jacky gave her a reassuring smile, then excused herself. 

At that precise moment, our friend Dave from Chapter 1 made his entrance, not that anyone except us was waiting for him. 

Heather greeted him, “Hello, thanks so much for coming. Please help yourself to pizza and sit anywhere you like,” said Heather.

Dave thanked her and somewhat tactlessly squeezed through some folks talking at the door, then made a beeline straight towards the pizza. 

Heather looked at her watch. 6:05. Time to bite the bullet.

Heather disliked public speaking. She had always felt more comfortable one-on-one, and she disliked community meetings to talk about her development projects even more. It wasn't that the public was unintelligent–people did generally have good ideas, things she would certainly want to see if she lived there. The problem was, the public had fundamentally no idea about the details of the project. They couldn't see the it teetering on the brink of financial viability, every square foot clawed from the zoning area restrictions another dollar in rent to offset costs. Having the public weigh in on the design when they had no idea about the financial structure or implications of the decisions they promoted reminded Heather of everything that conservatives criticized liberals about, focusing on wants instead of needs, cutting checks left and right with borrowed money. She pulled her mind back. All she needed to do was keep this meeting on the rails. She walked up to the podium.

“Hello everyone, thank you all for coming. My name is Heather Freedman, and my team and I are here today to present the final design for this development project.

“Many of you were at previous community meetings where we heard input about the use, look, size, and affordability of the project. Now we are going to divide the presentation and talk about each of these aspects. First off will be Roger from the South Detroit Business Association, talking about the functional needs of the community, based on our research and what we heard. Roger?”

“Thanks Heather,” said Roger. “Hi, I'm Roger VanGeenplek. So, before we started this project, my organization did a market analysis. And what we found was this. Next slide.”

Two bar charts appeared on the projector screen, one above the other. The top one had about a dozen big colorful bars on it, whereas the bottom one looked like it was missing half its teeth. Dave guessed the bottom one was where he lived.

“The top chart shows a normal distribution of different types of commercial spaces, like restaurants, clothes stores, and pharmacies, in a healthy, fully built-out commercial street. The bottom chart shows what the distribution in South Detroit is.”

Roger paused and took a deep breath. Every time he did this, he got better at saying it more succinctly. “The main thing we see from this chart is that we don’t need any more restaurants and bars. But we do need more places to get everyday goods, like clothing stores and pharmacies. We are also light on office space. Next slide.”

Several pictures of people talking to each other came on the screen, all taken at previous community meetings. Shelly’s tie-dye hat was visible in two of the images.

Roger continued. “The market analysis squared with the feedback we got at our first community meeting about this project, that we did not need any more food establishments but rather retail spaces and general-purpose office spaces. We used all of that input to decide to develop this building with retail space on the ground floor, and not invest the additional infrastructure needed for restaurants and food service.

Dave looked down in frustration. The way he remembered it, it had mostly been Shelly saying that they did not need more food service places in the area, and her motives were questionable since she owned the only bakery in the neighborhood. In fact, while there were a lot of restaurants, they were all serving the same greasy food. There had been a number of people, himself included, who had argued that there was actually an acute need for a place like a deli to get healthy meals.

Roger then turned and looked at the screen. “Now we’ll move on to the residential distribution,” he said, and motioned for Wesley to advance the slide again.

An image of charts came up, similar to the first slide. And again, the bottom one looked like it had been chewed up by a dog.

“Furthermore, we surveyed the residential units available, compared them to an average benchmark, and found that there were not enough studio and one-bedroom units. So we developed a plan for mostly studio and one-bedroom units.”

Next, Wesley came up to talk about the aesthetics of the project. He referred to the posters around the room, showing different types of architectural styles, which at previous meetings the public had put gold stars on, indicating what design styles were most popular. In unveiling the final design, he discussed how the design was inspired by this direction from the public. 

While Wesley talked, Heather tried to calculate how much the premium materials, plaza, and other amenities that the public asked for had added to the project, in absolute terms as well as per-square-foot costs. The numbers had been changing so much with inflation and new subcontractors coming and going. And then again, it was hard to point to a pedestrian plaza as only a cost, because putting in the plaza had allowed them extra square footage, which brought in income to offset financing the plaza and more. Still, just to put a number on it, probably $150,000 between the concrete, pavers, lighting, and plants. 

Wesley concluded, and Heather went back up to the podium to explain the affordable aspect of the project.

She described how the project had been awarded federal money so that 30% of the units could be priced at “affordable” rates. As usual, when she defined “affordable,” she had to explain that it was simply a rental figure based on a calculation. Unfortunately, the calculation looked at a large region when defining affordable, including Detroit’s wealthy suburbs in determining what the average income was. Therefore, even the “affordable” apartment rental rates were far more expensive than what this community was used to seeing on Craigslist.

Dave was again frustrated. He had personally known people to take advantage of this type of housing – people living on a low income, not because they were serving the community like teachers or police, but because they were holding down a part-time job at a coffee shop while they worked on growing their YouTube following, living in a swanky apartment at reduced rent to boot. He had asked about that at the last meeting and was told there would be stringent requirements in the applications. But this sounded like it was going to be just another hipster apartment building with boutique retail shops in it. Just more development. 

Everywhere in this whole country, Dave thought, it was all the same story. Detroit was, as best he could tell, one of the last places that the real estate boom had hit, one of the last places where ordinary people still owned the majority of the city (however, reader, I must for the sake of accuracy point out that Dave is forgetting about the Land Bank, a public agency in Detroit which owns about a third of the residential property; the city took this drastic measure to combat the vagrancy that was taken place in vacant, tax-delinquent homes in the city in the 2010’s). Dave didn't know what to think of all the tax dollars being shuffled around to fund this. Why was it necessary? Did we always need bigger and bigger projects, with bigger and bigger developers? Maybe we just had to keep things small to keep them local.

“And as far as the timeline,” continued Heather, “expect to see activity in the coming weeks, with full mobilization a month from now. Our contractor estimates eighteen months, give or take, for construction.” As she said this, Heather glanced at the contractor Dan, who was paying attention for once. He gave her a small nod.

“I'd like to conclude the presentation by thanking you all for helping guide this project to the point that it is today. And now we'll open the floor up for questions.” Several people, including Dave, raised their hands. Shelly just started talking.

“We don't need one- and two-bedrooms,” piped Shelly,  “those are for 20-year-olds. We need to be developing things for families who already live in our communities. And we don't need stores; we need better parks and schools! But what's the point? It's already permitted; it's a done deal!” 

“Thank you,” replied Heather politely, “but as you have seen, we received and incorporated a lot of feedback from the community in preparing this design.”

“Oh that's bull! It's the same old story, fancy new apartment buildings for newcomers, and developers sucking up all the money for themselves, while people in the community get squat!” shouted Shelly. 

At this point, Dave, who was tired of having his hand up, interjected. “Shelly, would you please sit down and raise your hand like everyone else?”

Shelly looked at Dave like she wanted to smack him.

“Okay,” said Heather, grateful for the support but wishing to regain control of the room, “Let's all try to raise our hands and take turns.”

That turned out to be the highlight of the fireworks show. Shelly had made her point, and nobody wanted to hear it again. 

One by one, people waited their turn, then stood up, said what they thought, and sat down. The tones were soft, and the comments were not aimed to reopen wounds. The plaza received positive comments, as did the idea of small businesses in the commercial spaces that hired locally and paid a living wage (which, Heather noted gratefully to herself, was simply a project goal and not something they were bound to provide by any of the lenders or city agencies). People also generally liked the use of brick and accent colors for a modern aesthetic that still fit within the traditional street. However, almost everybody expressed concern that the units were not affordable enough. 

Dave did not speak again, not so much for fear of Shelly’s wrath (though that was a factor), but more so because he was simply exhausted, and, on one point at least, Shelly was right: what was the point? It was already permitted.

And finally, just like that, the last member of the public with something to say had said it. Heather looked around, and let the silence of the room last just long enough to provide some closure before thanking the audience for coming. The meeting was over.

Wesley and Roger stayed to help break down the space while Heather was engaged by various people, including Jacky, who said she would follow up with Heather the next day. 

Finally, her car loaded up, she got on the road, relieved to have the last community meeting about the project behind her.

Hello reader, you have made it to the conclusion of another chapter. To provide a brief recap, this chapter sets up the local storyline, the second of three scales of political storylines in this book. The local storyline is about what public involvement in the most nuts-and-bolts decisions looks like today, how the public is involved in meetings and feedback to their local representatives. We will see how the characters involved in making the decisions at this scale, which will involve every character in this book directly, could work with the AI Elfy platform.

This chapter also introduces the character of Heather, who is a stand-in for a type of voter, as are many other characters in the book. Heather represents what you might call “The Establishment” thinking wing of the Democratic Party. You'll get to know Heather's counterpart, Dan, a conservative man, in the next chapter.