George Jackson’s resignation as head of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation was welcome news to Detroit preservationists.
Jackson’s personality, as much as his policy, long aggravated urbanists. The DEGC under Jackson, his critics claimed, really stood for “Demolish Everything, George Cries.”
Fair or not, Jackson liked to tell his detractors to become big-time developers or shut up about public policy decisions involving public real estate. That attitude is as much as anything else responsible for the criticism that his DEGC was more interested in placating developers than listening to public concerns.
But the problem with George Jackson wasn’t really George Jackson, so much as it was the culture of Detroit’s development bureaucracy in which Jackson first entered in 2002. That fact was apparent when reading about Jackson’s DEGC retirement.
Crain’s Detroit Business: He will remain with the economic development group as the president and CEO until March 31, when he will leave to form his own consulting firm.
There is no name for Jackson's new firm, and he won't identify any potential clients or projects he hopes to work on, but he did say he is working with several investors.
Jackson, though still the head of the quasi-public, non-profit Detroit Economic Growth Corporation for another couple months, is also working with investors to put together a venture that will interact with the development bureaucracy where he currently remains a major player.
Even Congress has rules that at least make it look like ex-lawmakers can’t immediately lobby their former colleagues. In Detroit, we don’t even feign the appearance of propriety.
Jackson’s transition from public development official in Detroit to Detroit developer isn’t unprecedented. In fact, it’s pretty much par for the course.
When Emmett Moten was Coleman Young’s development guy, he was involved in the controversial deal that gave Mike Ilitch the Fox Theater. Then we went to work for Ilitch’s Little Caesar’s chain. Then, with a tidy nest egg from the pizza rackets, returned to Detroit as developer of the Fort Shelby Hotel. Incidentally, former development official Moten fell behind on the Fort-Shelby's Section 108 loan from the city where he once worked, and this was treated as no a big deal.
New Mayor Mike Duggan’s own top development official, Thomas Lewand, has also played on both sides of the public real estate fence. According to Bodman Longley & Dahlin, Lewand’s now-former law firm: “[Lewand] has negotiated many public private partnerships between corporations and municipalities including a transaction among the Detroit Lions, Wayne County, and the City of Detroit for the construction of Ford Field.”
Bodman’s Detroit office happens to be at the very same Ford Field Lewand helped get built and his son, also named Tom Lewand, happens to be the Lions’ president.
Both are probably just coincidences. Or something.
In so much as Jackson’s post-DEGC plans show he’s no different than other development leaders around town, urbanists and preservationists shouldn’t expect his departure to matter much in the long run.
Public policy regarding publicly owned real estate will remain an insiders’ game controlled by a powerful few for their own benefit. It behooves the politicians and bureaucrats making the policy, as much as the developers and power brokers, to keep it that way.
