Highland Park Shows What Can Happen…
The Detroit News
Maureen McDonald, April 1998
Looking around at more than 2,000 dignitaries and citizens assembled for the recent grand opening of Farmer Jack in Highland Park, Mayor Linsey Porter glowed brighter than a Florida sunrise.
He was standing on the podium, inside a fully stocked, $7 million, 60,000- square-foot grocery store. The store replaced a weed-covered lot in front of a shuttered Ford factory in a 2.9-square-mile town where unemployment hovers at 25 percent. Something miraculous was happening here.
“This is how Highland Park looks when it steps inside its own possibilities,” says Porter, who passes out water bottles, buttons, and ash trays with the motto, “Creating Possibilities.”
He defined possibilities as generating a vision of a thriving, dynamic community that was solidly anchored in reality – a vision he worked relentlessly to communicate and encouraged others to share.
In 1989, Porter, then Highland Park City Council president, and his wife, Patricia Reid-Porter, took a three-day, empowerment course called The Forum, offered by Landmark Education Corp. of San Francisco. Immediately, they started to see action steps to unite their community. Over the next nine years Porter brought Landmark seminars to Highland Park and helped enroll more than 1,500 people in the course.
“What we learned in The Forum is that our conversations create our world, the words we speak creates the future for ourselves,” Reid-Porter says. “We stopped dwelling on problems and started taking responsibility for getting things done.”
The town’s largest employer, Chrysler Corp., moved its corporate headquarters to Auburn Hills in 1994, taking with it an $8-million annual contribution to Highland Park’s tax revenues, a third of its income. The massive Ford structure was shuttered in 1972 and never utilized as anything more than a warehouse.
Porter, elected mayor in 1993, knew that the federal government wouldn’t come in and save the town, and that nothing could save a deepening sense of despair. He had seed money, having helped negotiate a $30-million compensation package from Chrysler to cushion the financial loss and bail the budget out of near-bankruptcy. It wasn’t enough.
If old Henry Ford could transform a farming community at the beginning of the century into a world-renowned factory paying an unprecedented $5 a day wages, then Porter at the end of the century could help it rebound.
The technology wasn’t something physical like moving assembly lines nor four-cylinder engines but honest, intelligent conversation shared with pride and respect. Both of the Porters took communication coaching from close friends locally and national leaders of Landmark Education. It’s the kind of training offered in 14 countries around the world, including community forums in urban areas and Indian reservations.
One of the promises of Landmark’s courses is for individuals to find themselves seeing and completing whatever stands in the way of that individual’s creativity, contribution, and self-expression. If Chrysler left 144 acres of property, Porter could stand back, analyze its merits and use his development team to tout the benefits of land accessible by railroad and two major freeways.
To encourage new employees to work in Highland Park, Porter had to do something about the state of its 1,000 abandoned housing units. He successfully encouraged the city’s citizens in 1996 to pay an extra mill in property tax to demolish those eyesores, which had become crime magnets and symbols of despair.
“The property millage did more than improve the housing stock. It sent a message to businesses that Highland Park was a viable community and that the citizens had pride in who they were, in their heritage. They wouldn’t let it go,” Reid-Porter says.
City officials started working on Farmer Jack to close its cramped, outdated store on Second Boulevard and relocate on the city’s new commercial strip at Manchester and Woodward.
“Everyone wants to come in and join something that’s on the way up. When you take care of your land, people are willing to support you,” Reid-Porter added.
To its credit, Farmer Jack did more than build a look-alike store from the suburbs. They took the location, set behind the first Ford factory and enhanced it by copying a nearly full-sized fresco of Diego Rivera’s factory scene for the main entrance, and installed a Model T on a ledge above the cash registers. The store stands as a tribute to the town as well as a convenient grocer.
By late fall, when the Farmer Jack opened in a 115,000-square-foot plaza, a 100,000-square-foot addition was on the drawing board. The state of Michigan had rebuilt the aging Davison Freeway through town. Two new apartment buildings sprung up west of the shopping area, and local real estate agents buzzed about housing prices in the historic district soaring 20 percent over the previous year.
What if more government and community leaders took courses such as The Forum which sparked new ways to communicate, to see past blight and seize new possibilities?
Perhaps the rest of us, looking proud at the growth spurt in Highland Park, might banish that tired phrase: “Isn’t it awful that core cities are dying because everyone with any income moved to the suburbs?”
Instead, each of us, as individuals, would ask, “How can I make a difference right here? What needs to be done and how can I contribute to making it happen?”
Reprinted from The Detroit News, Detroit, Michigan (USA), April 8, 1998.