HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. – This content comes from Donald James, a senior writer with the Michigan Chronicle, as part of our partnership with the local news organization.
Perhaps the best way to describe Highland Park is to view the 2.97-square-mile city through polar-opposite lenses. In essence, the Highland Park story is a riveting tale of two very different cities: one filled with prosperity; the other gripped in the clutches of urban decline, blight, and systematic erosion of a once-hefty tax base and economy.
Once known nationally and internationally as “The City of Trees” and “A Model City,” Highland Park was home to award-winning schools, immaculate neighborhoods and streets, and large and majestic homes. Jobs were in abundance, thanks largely to two giant automotive entities: Ford Highland Park Assembly Plant and Chrysler Corporation’s World Headquarters. The city, at its peak, boasted a population of nearly 60,000 in the 1930s into the ‘40s.
Today, the city has a population of just under 9,000. The steady flight of people has left a number of streets in Highland Park, especially west of Woodward Avenue over to Hamilton Avenue and some points westward, with abandoned commercial and residential structures. In addition, the famed Ford Assembly Plant that manufactured millions of Model T cars and Chrysler’s World headquarters have long vacated Highland Park, leaving a tailwind that negatively impacted the city’s tax base, yearly budget, and overall economy. Most of the city’s schools have closed, including Highland Park High School, on Glendale Avenue and later on Woodward.
When Highland Park was incorporated as a city in 1918, it had been a farming and trading community since the early 1820s. By 1900, the population of Highland Park hovered around 450 but significantly increased in 1910 when Henry Ford opened his massive Ford Highland Park Assembly Plant on Woodward Avenue and Manchester Street.
In 1913, the plant began manufacturing Model T automobiles using its new assembly-line production invention. However, following Henry Ford’s global clarion call in 1914 announcing that his company was paying assembly workers $5 a day, thousands of people from the South and around the world poured into Highland Park, a city surrounded on three sides by Detroit. Every segment of Highland Park benefited from the city’s growing tax base due to the population boom, including city services, neighborhoods, retail businesses, and schools.
“The school system was probably one of the greatest in the country,” former Mayor Hubert Yopp, who graduated from Highland Park High School in 1962, told the Michigan Chronicle in a previous interview. “When you graduated from Highland Park High School, it was equal to having a couple years of college. And, if you graduated from the high school, you had two free years at the Highland Park Junior College, one of the nation’s first two-year institutions of higher learning.”
Much of Highland Park’s growth from the late 1960s through the ‘70s has been credited to Robert B. Blackwell, Michigan’s first Black mayor. He reportedly brought more than $42 million to the city in federal grants from HUD to spur urban projects and help Highland Park receive national recognition as “A Model City.”
Highland Park was rolling along and firing on all cylinders when a seismic economic shift rattled the city in the mid-1990s after Chrysler Corporation moved its World Headquarters north of the city to Auburn Hills. Chrysler’s Corporate Headquarters had been in Highland Park since 1925.
Financial experts and other stakeholders believe that when Chrysler moved from Highland Park, the city lost 25 percent of its tax base and 50 percent of its annual budget. It must also be mentioned that when Ford Motor Company stopped manufacturing its Model T in the spring of 1927 and eventually sold its Highland Park plant in the early 1980s, the city tax base and budget also took a hit but regrouped somewhat. Nevertheless, the Chrysler move was a huge blow to the city.
Highland Park did its best to compensate for the tremendous loss of Chrysler by constructing Oakland Park, a 150-acre, 2-million-square-foot brownfield redevelopment built in 1999. Oakland Park, erected on the grounds where Chrysler’s World Headquarters once stood, is now home to numerous businesses, including Reyes Coca-Cola Bottling, Penske Logistics, Yanfeng, Mobis, Modular Automotive Systems, Faurecia, Valeo, Magna, and Avancez, LLC.
Over the years, other companies and organizations with faithful longevity in the city, despite Highland Park’s ups and downs, have included Bill Snethkamp Chrysler-Dodge -Jeep, WHPR Radio (88.1)/TV 33 (a historic black-owned radio and television station), the Boys and Girls Club, the 100-plus-year old Becharas Bros. Coffee Company, Eastown Distributors, and more.
While Highland Park has had its share of problems over the last four decades, perhaps the most critical one has been the long battle with disputing water and sewerage bills to the tune of $55 million. Earlier this year, Highland Park City Council approved a conditional deal to settle the debt with the Great Lakes Water Authority, with state support to upgrade the city’s water infrastructure.
With the water issue seemingly settled, residents and stakeholders believe it’s time for Highland Park to move forward and empower the city across broad sectors. For that to happen, many agree that the city will need to better address such issues as public safety for citizens and businesses, and fight blight in more expedient and effective ways by redeveloping or demolishing dangerous and eyesore residential and commercial structures.
“We are in a great position to turn our city around but must increase our tax base. We lost a lot when Chrysler left the city,” Carlton Clyburn, Highland Park Director of Community and Economic Development and the former City Council President, told the Chronicle in an exclusive interview recently. “We have some great opportunities ahead of us and will be working with some great developers and other agencies to advance Highland Park.”
According to Wayne County’s Economic Development figures on its website, over $300 million in new commercial, industrial, and residential development has been invested in the city in the last decade, positioning Highland Park as a vibrant community for the future.
“This entire region, as a whole, is hot,” Clyburn said. “And we in Highland Park feel confident that when we start redeveloping and building new structures, people will come to this city because of where it sits and its proximity to what is happening near us in the Boston-Edison area and midtown and downtown Detroit. Everything around us is building up, and we will be included.”
“Without tax revenue, we can’t grow and develop our city the way we need to,” Mayor Glenda McDonald, elected in 2022, told the Chronicle before taking office. “We need property tax dollars from houses in our city that people need to buy. And we must create and expand more small businesses because they are the backbone of any city. Just as important, we have to be able to put people over politics.”
One of the many organizations putting people over politics in Highland Park is The Parker Pride Foundation.
“We are dedicated to ensuring that Highland Park will once again shine brightly,” Sydney Spight, founder and CEO of the Foundation, said. “We are bringing back community involvement by sponsoring more events for families. We are here to build a better community for the people who live in HP, whether they have been in the city for decades or just moved here.”
Another prominent voice and champion for Highland Park is Shamayim Harris, famously known as Mama Shu, founder and CEO of Avalon Village. After acquiring many blighted houses and debris-filled vacant lots on Avalon St. in Highland Park, Mama Shu created Avalon Village. The village’s mission is to serve youth and families through The Village Hall, The Homework House, Goddess Marketplace, the Imhotep STEAM Lab, the library, and outdoor lots creatively converted to hold community and cultural events.
“The idea of Avalon Village was to basically transform ‘blight to beauty’ and do my part as a citizen and help clean up the space that I wanted to stay in,” said Mama Shu, who was chosen as a 2023 CNN Hero Top 10 finalist because of her dedicated work at Avalon Village. “I wanted to make my street and Highland Park beautiful … I didn’t want to move away. I want to be right here in my own neighborhood, in my own city.”
Highland Park has also produced many other individuals of note, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson (iconic soul singer), Bobby Joe Hill (legendary NCAA basketball champion with Texas Western College), Hiram E. Jackson (CEO, Real Times Media, publisher of the Michigan Chronicle), Tim Meadows (actor), Telma Hopkins (actress, singer), Terry Duerod (former NBA player), The Trapp brothers (John and George both of whom played in the NBA), Reggie McKenzie (All Pro guard with the Buffalo Bills and Seattle Seahawks), Adele Mara (actress in the 1940s and ‘50s), and Bill Haley (guitarist, rock & roll pioneer).
For Highland Park to truly reinvent itself, many believe it will take a village of residents, community organizations, city, county, state, and federal elected and appointed officials, along with philanthropic-minded individuals and organizations, investors, and developers who see the bigger picture of why Highland Park must again become an empowered and prosperous city.
“Who knows, we might play some small part in the inevitable rebirth of the city, though I hesitate to say rebirth, for HP is not dead … it yet lives,” wrote Marsha Music, famed writer and historian born in Detroit but grew up in Highland Park. “There are still beautiful homes and dedicated homeowners and residents in Highland Park who await the day that the city’s decline will stop. I believe that day will come.”
The Michigan Chronicle is a historic Metro Detroit publication that covers the interests of the Black community. Learn more on their website here.