Jack Lessenberry is a writer for the Metro Times in Detroit, a professor of journalism at Wayne State University, and has a show on Michigan Radio. Last week, he wrote an entry on his blog about city planning that caught our eye, and we wanted to share part of it with our readers:

Warren would not exist without the city of Detroit, nor would Sterling Heights or Wixom. Auburn Hills is a combination of bedroom community and industrial park for both Pontiac and Detroit.

These communities could certainly benefit from experts who can tell them just where to put a small park or a bit of green space.

Yet what is really needed is some kind of master urban development plan for the entire metropolitan area. This would be written and developed by somebody who sees the area as a whole.

Someone, that is, who knows that we are a region, not merely a bunch of places trying to selfishly ignore the fact that everyone in any metropolitan area is in this together.

Running any kind of a regional master plan would take metropolitan government at some level, or at least close coordination and cooperation by the commissioners of at least three counties.

Yet we need this desperately.

Jack's onto something here.

This goes back to what the Living in Michigan campaign has been talking about for months now.

Here we are in Michigan with all these wonderful community development organizations doing great work throughout the state. We have so many, in fact, that we're able to fill the Lansing Center for three days every year, giving our state the largest affordable housing conference in the country. Yet, Michigan is ranked 48th in the country on a per capita basis for its state revenue support of affordable housing.

While the community development and affordable housing industries in our state have accomplished a lot over the years, we can't jump-start Michigan's economy without cooperation and coordination from our elected officials.

Jack sums it up nicely:

Birmingham will never live up to its full potential as long as slums that look like something out of central America exist within ten miles of its elegant townhouses and bistros.

No man is an island entire of itself, John Donne famously said. No community in Michigan is either, even Mackinac Island. We’re in this together, and ignoring that fact increasingly puts all of us in peril.

We are in this together, but we need leadership from state government to support innovative efforts like the Living in Michigan campaign to help put us on the right track.