Meet America's Most Effective Mayor: Detroit's Mike Duggan

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Spring 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

Doyle Johnson calls himself a professional opportunist. He’s preparing to take his 20th trip to China, where he scouts for goods he can sell either at his own retail store or to other merchants in Detroit. “I’m a capitalist,” he says, “and I’m going to buy low and sell high if I can.”

One place he never thought he’d apply that basic entrepreneurial wisdom was in his own hometown. Johnson moved to Detroit as a child in 1953 and still lives in the same neighborhood. His home is one of two left standing on a long block that’s been beaten down over the years by arson, squatters and drug dens. But what was once a no-go zone is starting to get cleaned up. Johnson has bought two empty lots adjacent to his house and plans on buying a couple more across the street. By putting up tiny houses, Johnson believes he can clean up on Airbnb when any of Detroit’s four professional sports teams are playing home games.

Real estate has proven to be a great investment in Detroit. Home prices have gone up faster in Detroit than in any other city over the past decade — more than in Tampa or Dallas or Phoenix. Property values are rising for a simple reason: For the first time since the 1950s, the population of Detroit is going up, not down. “The property values in this city have tripled over the last 10 years,” says Mayor Mike Duggan, “and that’s in every neighborhood.”
When Duggan took office in 2014, the city was shedding a thousand people a month. It’s still only about a third as populous as it was in its heyday, but the fact that it’s growing at all is something of a miracle.

A dozen years ago, Detroit was America’s most notorious symbol of urban decline. The city was dotted with massive ruins, the decline of the domestic auto industry leaving some of the nation’s largest factories empty and abandoned. Downtown was a ghost town. Around the city, there were 12,000 fires a year. During the Great Recession, the Obama administration stepped in to bail out American car companies, but Detroit’s finances remained so bad that the state installed an emergency manager to run them. Even as Duggan was campaigning for mayor in 2013, Detroit entered into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. “I was born here, I grew up here and for most of my life, everything has been taken from us,” Duggan says. “The auto plants closed and the jobs moved out.”

The improvements since then represent one of the greatest comeback stories of recent times. No one is claiming that Detroit is a paradise. A third of its residents still live in poverty; among its children, that number is closer to half. Still, Duggan came to office dealing with $18 billion in debt and now the city has $600 million in reserve funds. The city’s bonds were at junk status, but its ratings have increased 10 times in 10 years. Last year, the city saw its fewest homicides since 1965. Unemployment has dropped from 20 percent to below 5 percent. Duggan has torn down 45,000 abandoned homes, creating new opportunities not just for Detroit loyalists like Doyle Johnson, but investors from around the world.

Not long ago, it was almost impossible to give away property in Detroit, including downtown. Now the city is attracting billions of dollars in fresh investments. “We’re having a historic renaissance in this city,” says Jared Fleisher, vice president of government affairs at ROCK, a family office created by Dan Gilbert, founder of mortgage lender Rocket Companies. Gilbert and Rocket have contributed mightily to the city’s rebirth by moving workers in from the suburbs and buying up buildings downtown. “What changed, in substantial part, is that we had a mayor that the folks who were looking to invest in the city had confidence in.”
Duggan’s immediate predecessor, Dave Bing, got pushback when he talked about shrinking the footprint of the city. The previous mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was convicted on various charges including perjury, obstruction of justice and misuse of funds. Duggan has brought more than clean hands and optimism to the role. He’s the first to tell you that he doesn’t deserve all the credit for the turnaround that’s occurred on his watch, but Duggan was able to orchestrate plans that have drawn on varying coalitions of business leaders and foundations to make notable improvements across the city. He’s managed both to attract new companies and assure them the city could act as their employment agency. “We have a unique opportunity in the city of Detroit,” says Eric Larson, CEO of the Downtown Detroit Partnership, “with the right leadership to create what has become a national living laboratory for what’s possible in great American cities.”

Duggan, short and sometimes sleepy-eyed, is not the sort of politician whose personality automatically fills up a room. Instead, he’s known as a problem solver. Duggan has had a long career in government, running the regional transit agency before serving as a deputy to longtime Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara and then being elected county prosecutor.

His next job might have been the most instructive. Duggan served as CEO of the Detroit Medical Center, the city’s major hospital system, which at one point needed a $50 million bailout from the state. Duggan brought it back into the black before it was sold to a Tennessee-based system. “I started attacking things that were driving people out of the city,” he recalls of his early days in the mayor’s office. “I had a plan, but it isn’t any different from what I did in the hospital system. We had to fix the emergency room and the MRI processes and the operating room and basic customer service.”
Duggan moved back into the city from suburban Livonia but filed as a candidate for mayor before meeting the residency requirement. Duggan, who is 66, was backed by the business community. But it was a sign of his support and reputation among residents that he was able to win easily even as a write-in candidate. He was the first white mayor elected in Detroit since 1969. “There’s probably no one else similarly situated in the white community to have become the white mayor after the succession of Black mayors than Duggan,” says the Rev. Horace Sheffield III, “and that’s because he’s worked with the Black community for many, many years.”

Duggan took care to foster good relations with the City Council, taking disputes behind closed doors. The result is that he has never vetoed a bill, which was a routine occurrence for past mayors. “I have had the opportunity to work with the mayor on many issues since I’ve been here,” says Fred Durhal III, a council member running to succeed Duggan this year. “Long gone are the days where you saw huge spats at the council table, and so there’s a different tone set, a different level of professionalism.”

Duggan also spent a lot of his early days in office cheerleading among city workers who’d become dispirited by pay cuts, pension cuts, furloughs and layoffs. He set them to work tackling some of the city’s most visible problems as a sign that government could get things done. Shedding billions in debt through bankruptcy allowed him to spend money on the basics.

When he came in, half the streetlights didn’t work or had been stolen, but Duggan quickly illuminated the city. During his first term, the number of parks that received routine maintenance ballooned from 25 to 275. A city of 139 square miles only had eight ambulances, but now response times have some real meaning. “Basic quality-of-life services that residents expect weren’t being met,” says City Council President Mary Sheffield, the reverend’s daughter and also a candidate to succeed Duggan this year. “With Duggan, he was very operational. He was data driven.”
Duggan is so interested in metrics that his cabinet meetings feature nearly as many charts as a scientific lab. Department heads have to report on monthly progress toward strategic goals the mayor has set. Duggan has the gift of seeing not only where agencies need improvement but how they interact with one another.

Workforce is one example. Detroit not only had the highest poverty rate of any major city, but also had the lowest residential employment rate. Duggan pushed to get more than 300 local agencies and nonprofits that provide workforce services to start pulling in the same direction. Still, residents faced many barriers to employment, including lack of driver’s licenses. The state could suspend licenses for people who had unpaid tickets. More than 75,000 Detroiters had suspended licenses — 18 percent of the adult population — which made it difficult for them to reach jobs that were mostly in the suburbs. Duggan allowed people who signed up for a workforce program to get their licenses back. About 5,000 people signed up the first month.

All told, Duggan’s workforce efforts have put more than 30,000 people to work. “We are a more affordable option than other cities and we have some really interesting companies who are here — obviously the next-generation mobility companies, health care, fintech [finance technology],” says Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber. “So it’s kind of a complete package if you want a good career and not just a job.”
Back in the ’90s, Eric Larson was trying to put together financing for a million-square-foot building that would be the first high rise to come out of the ground in downtown Detroit in decades. It wasn’t an easy sell. At one point, he went to the airport to greet a group of prospective investors who showed up with that week’s New York Times magazine, which carried a cover story about the city’s struggles called “The Tragedy of Detroit.”

Fast forward to today and the signs of vitality are all over the place. Just down the street from the Motown Museum, Henry Ford Hospital is undergoing a $3 billion renovation. Five miles away in Corktown, Michigan Central Station, which had been a graffiti-strewn eyesore for 30 years, has undergone a $950 million renovation that has turned it into an airy showplace, its ultimate use adapted from trains to tech companies. The riverfront has been converted from industrial yards and warehouses into a 3-mile chain of parks. At the city’s nadir, one response to debt that drew national attention was the potential sale of treasures from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Instead, the Van Goghs and Rembrandts are intact. One winter Wednesday morning, 700 schoolchildren flooded the museum, mostly disinterested in the older masterpieces but more engaged by a show of massive jewelry sculptures by local artist Tiff Massey.

There’s a Massey hanging at The Shepherd, an art gallery east of downtown. The gallery occupies a space that served for a century as a church before shutting down a decade ago. The gallery is at the center of a complex that now includes bars, restaurants, boutiques, a printing shop and an art studio that provides space for disabled artists. All this activity — The Shepherd drew thousands of people to its grand opening last May — has spurred renovation and construction of homes and apartments in an area that had been mostly vacant lots. “I’ve been here my whole life and Detroit definitely seems to be having a moment where we’re seeing great things,” says Shepherd co-owner Anthony Curis. “For me, it’s the first time that there’s enough progress that it seems sustainable.”
Duggan keeps a space heater in the corner of his office because City Hall isn’t heated on weekends. Its overall decor is pretty spare. Friendly handprints from his kids are propped near the windows, but Duggan doesn’t keep an “ego wall” of pictures showing him gripping and grinning with more famous politicians.

But Duggan did have a friend in the White House in Joe Biden. They hit it off when Biden came to town for the auto show as vice president. (“Apparently, he knows the best Italian restaurant in every city,” Duggan says.) As president, Biden told his National Economic Council director to seek advice from Duggan about blight removal funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), as well as other programs. Their relationship paid off with Detroit receiving $827 million in ARPA funds, making it the fifth largest recipient among cities.

Campaigning in Detroit last fall, Donald Trump said the whole country would end up like Detroit if Kamala Harris were elected, trading on the city’s old image of failure and decay. In March, Trump temporarily delayed some tariffs at the request of the Big Three domestic automakers. No matter Trump’s feelings about Detroit, his administration will not provide the bounty of extra funding to cities of the pandemic years. “We’ve got a status quo budget now,” says Council Member Durhal. “We’re starting to see some of the surpluses that we have now coming down a little bit, and revenues are going to remain flat.”

Even as Detroiters take pride in how their city has rebounded, some are worried about what will happen when Duggan leaves early next year. No one doubts that Duggan could win a fourth term, had he chosen to run again. Instead, he’s running for governor of Michigan next year, an effort he’s made tougher by choosing to run as an independent. In Detroit, Duggan’s demonstration of the importance and value of leadership makes people nervous about who or what will follow him. “It would be a tragedy if Detroit went back to its old ways of denial and overpromising and spendthrift spending,” says retired Judge Gerald Rosen, who oversaw the city’s bankruptcy.
None of the candidates running for mayor this year are running away from Duggan. He’s too popular and expectations have been reset within the city toward growth and competent government. Mostly what his would-be successors are talking about is making sure the newfound success gets spread out to more of the city, with improvements to the neighborhoods and their commercial corridors. “We all understand that Detroit has definitely revitalized and grown,” says Mary Sheffield, the council president, “but it hasn’t reached everywhere. Not everyone is benefiting and feeling the prosperity of Detroit.”

But even in some parts of town where change is not yet visible — where sidewalks remain crumbled and the only operating businesses seem to be fast-food restaurants and beauty salons — a lot is happening beneath the surface. There are long-neglected neighborhoods where every vacant lot and abandoned building has been purchased by private developers who are waiting for the right moment to move forward with improvement plans.

“The Chinese are buying up sight unseen because they see the potential,” Doyle Johnson says of his area, known as McDougall-Hunt. “I guarantee, you come back here in 10 years, it’ll be a different neighborhood.”