Detroit's Push for Community Benefits:Locals in one of America's poorest cities are pioneering efforts to hold major developers to their promises.

• Author: Gunn, Erik

On the south edge of Detroit, the one-and-a-half-mile Ambassador Bridge rises 152 feet above the Detroit River. Here, the state of Michigan curls over a peninsula that juts out from the Canadian province of Ontario. The city of Windsor, Ontario, is on that peninsula, and, in a quirk of geography, in order to cross over from the United States to Canada, drivers must go south.

Ten thousand trucks and four thousand cars make that crossing daily on four lanes of highway. The only other passage here between the two countries is the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, thirty blocks east. The Ambassador Bridge is said to be the busiest international border crossing in North America; the tunnel is said to be the second busiest. For more than a decade, business interests and the governments of the United States and Canada have wanted to build a second bridge.

Unlike the Ambassador Bridge--a private span owned by billionaire Manuel Moroun of Grosse Pointe, Michigan--the new bridge, which is now being constructed, has long been conceived as a public-private partnership. By 2008, a site was chosen and a draft environmental impact statement drawn up for the project. Plans called for the bridge to cut through the Delray neighborhood south and west of both downtown Detroit and the Ambassador Bridge. There are acres of vacant land and scores of empty homes.

But hundreds of people still live there. Most are older and retired, and many live with health conditions including diabetes and lung ailments, says Simone Sagovac, who has spent nearly a decade helping community residents organize their response to the project. An early draft plan threatened a historic Hungarian church. After public objections, she explains, "all they did was kick it up to an old African American part of Delray"--where it encroached on the city's oldest Latin American church.

"What people recognized back then was, it's probably going to happen," Sagovac says. "There was probably no way to stop it, going up against two federal governments."

But still, over the course of nearly a decade, the Delray neighborhood's residents organized, paid visits to the state capitol in Lansing, collected information, and pleaded their case to planners and lawmakers. If the community would be irrevocably sundered by a new bridge, it was going to get something in return.

Across the United States, in neighborhood after neighborhood, major projects have come coupled with favors to make the deal more appealing: new jobs, a boost to the municipal tax base, or an infusion into local infrastructure. It's a trend that goes back to the early urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s, says John Goldstein, a retired union leader and community development activist who now lives in Newark, New Jersey, and works with neighborhood groups around the country.

"A big part of urban renewal was government investment," Goldstein says. "Developers and contractors realized there was a lot of money to be made in what was initially supposed to be the development of blighted areas. That was transformed into government subsidies."

Over time, he continues, the development of public projects "became, really, a process for transferring wealth--government resources--using tax money to pay for infrastructure and tax abatements." Public services like schools and transit were strained as the taxes that people paid to support them were "transferred to the benefit of developers."

But then, starting on the West Coast, community residents began...