You go to the Democratic meetings, they are so angry about Trump and the Republicans, go to the Republican meetings, they are so angry with the Democrats that are ruining America.

You go to my meetings and they're talking about, why can't you fix the breakwall in the harbor?

Because it's messing up our beach and nobody at the state will fix it.

And I'll say, let's talk, what we do to fix the harbor.

And they're like, where can I sign up?

[music] Mayor, thanks for joining me today.

When was the last time you were in Detroit?

Well, on TV with Beverly Hills Cop all the time.

-Right, right.

-You can't get away from that.

And I love it.

I mean... So I've been in journalism 15 years, but my first job was working for, at that point, the only independent governor in the country.

I saw you, Chafee, I saw that, yeah.

So I was curious what it's been like to be an independent mayor.

I mean, you start as a write in candidate.

Have you felt, and let's dig in, right?

So that's turkey simple.

From the Avalon Bakery in town, turkey and cheese.

Yes, this is a big deal, I love them.

This is tuna salad.

As an independent, have you really felt unshackled?

Like, you can govern in a way that partizan politicians can't?

Well, so, of course, mayors in Michigan are nonpartisan.

So it wasn't that I made any different, decision that anybody else made.

But you see this everywhere, in most big cities, the mayor's a Democrat, and either the governor or one of the statehouses, is Republican.

And so most mayors in this country work across party lines.

They have to because, the public doesn't want to hear the garbage, doesn't get picked up, Democrat or Republican, you got to get it picked up.

So... But in my case, it was even more so my dad was a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, you know, Thanksgiving dinners at our house were lots of debate, but it was fun.

But, I got elected in the beginning, it wasn't as much, Republican or Democrat, but when I ran in 2013, half the street lights in the city were out.

We had the highest homicide rate in the country.

We had the highest unemployment rate in the country, had 47,000 abandoned houses and all that the mayor and the council were doing was fighting with each other.

And the politics of the city was black versus white, city versus suburbs.

You got re-elected by blaming somebody else.

And so when I ran in 2013, there hadn't been a white candidate for mayor in 40 years.

And at first people didn't really think I had much of a chance.

But, I just went house to house every night, just sitting and talking with folks.

And, when you break bread with people, as you know, you get to know them, everything divides us fades in the background.

And I ended up winning the election, it wasn't that close.

And I've governed in a way that said, we embraced help from JPMorgan Chase.

You know, they put $200 million in this city.

I wasn't afraid of Jamie Dimon and the bankers.

We embraced everybody who wanted to help the city.

And, I think the city's better for it.

So have you been surprised at just how much you've been able to recover?

I ran the largest hospital system, in the area at the time, the Detroit Medical Center, eight hospitals.

In the nine years I was running the hospital system, we grew tremendously from 11,000 employees to 14,000 employees in the city of Detroit.

I knew the potential of this city to grow.

I had the largest employer in the city that was headed for bankruptcy.

And so what's happened is, what I had hoped to happen.

I sat down with Mary Barra, General Motors, sat down with Bill Ford, I sat down with Sergio Marchionne when he was running Fiat Chrysler.

And I said, I've got 50,000 people, most of whom have high school degrees, who want to work hard.

I need manufacturing in the city.

The next time you cite a new supplier plan, have them call me first.

And they all agreed.

And so when Flex-N-Gate came in to make a new plant for Ford trucks.

I sat down, I said, I got vacant land.

I'm going to speed up your permit.

We got people ready to work.

We'll treat you fairly on the taxes.

And they hired 500 people.

And then Lear came in with 700 in their seating plant.

Ultimately, we landed a 5000 employee, Jeep assembly plant, and it's now been, you know, really $10 billion in new investments.

But it was just the assets were always here.

The riverfront, was an asset that was always here.

It was just a matter of getting people to work together.

Did you do it differently then the kind of cliché notion of gentrification?

Because I don't think you would say you threw money at these problems.

There was more strategy behind it in your mind?

Well, there certainly was strategy behind it.

And we knew what we were trying to do.

The Detroit riverfront was an asset.

If you had been sitting here with me on this site ten years ago, the park was closed because of contaminated soil, and it was basically abandoned industrial land.

And on that, we built this spectacular park and we've moved all the way down the riverfront.

We have a riverfront conservancy it's been a terrific partner.

But now we have one of the finest river walks in America, and it's become the central identity of this city.

The Detroit I grew up in, we didn't know we had a riverfront.

It was cement silos and abandoned factories.

That's the way Detroit developed.

And so, I really, as a kid who grew up here, I remember what the city was like.

I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do.

I wanted to make the riverfront special.

I wanted to rebuild our manufacturing roots.

Wanted to get the abandoned houses down in the neighborhoods, which we did.

We built a billion and a half in affordable housing, in the last six years.

There are no tent cities in the city of Detroit.

But you and I are going to go over to the area by the train station.

When Bill Ford announced he was going to renovate that train station, rents in the neighborhood jumped enormously overnight.

There was a real risk that people had been there for 20, 30 years, were going to be pushed out.

We went and built 2000 new affordable housing units in the neighborhood, so I said, you might not be able to stay in the same place you were, but you're going to be able to stay in your same neighborhood.

And that's what Detroit has embraced.

We have not pushed anybody out for this development.

But when you have as many people as we did leave, there was plenty of room for people to come in.

When Detroit went into bankruptcy in 2013, the abandoned train station was on the cover of most newspapers and magazines as a symbol of Detroit's decline.

My mom, when she was in nursing school in Cincinnati, my father was in law school in Detroit.

Every Friday she would take the train and my father would pick her up when they were dating.

And that's the story of generation after generation.

This train station meant so much to people.

So when it shut down in 88, and then all the windows were smashed out, covered with graffiti, threats to demolish it, for a lot of long time Detroiters, this building was a symbol of Detroit's collapse.

And so I was obsessed, from my first day as mayor, that I was going to get it restored.

Because whatever else we did, you drive in the freeway, you see this train station, it is our symbol.

But not just for symbolism, right?

For workforce development.

This represents the rebirth of the city in different ways.

For me as a kid who grew up here, it's something that I always, wanted to see come back.

And, yeah, it's probably more than you want to know, but Bill Ford's family came from Ireland and settled in this area in the 1800s.

My family came from Ireland and settled in this area in the 1800s.

My great grandfather shoed horses, his built cars.

Which accounts for the differences in our family's fortunes over the years.

But there was something inside Bill that said, I want to return to Corktown, where my family first came to Detroit and be part of the rebirth.

And so it was a great business decision for Ford.

But it was also, I think, a very personal thing.

And this was in Bill's words, the Ellis Island of No question about it.

the city, in the state, in the Midwest.

The number of people who told me the first time I ever saw Detroit was in these halls where they came out from the train, whether they came up from the south, or they came from other parts of the country.

So you're a baseball fan, but Al Kaline was a huge star here.

The night we had the event for a dinner at the train station, he called and said, can I get a ticket?

And I said, I'm sure we can find a ticket for you.

Why?

He said, as a 19 year old kid coming from Baltimore, he took the train and his first view of Detroit was the train station.

It meant so much and he wanted to come back.

That's the story of black, brown, white, generation after generation.

This was the Ellis Island for Detroit.

And the vision of this is not merely a museum or venue, although that would be, enticing enough it's to restore the trains operation here, a hotel, workforce, right?

So this is viewed as a holistic -Oh, no.

You got -project.

a thousand employees have already moved in, in here.

The startups are next door.

But what it's done is spread development all down the Michigan Avenue quarter.

New hotels, new apartments.

We've built a lot of affordable apartments to make sure the people who were here before continue to stay in the neighborhood.

And we're about to, start on a, professional soccer stadium down the street.

All of it has been triggered, by what's happened to the train station.

The conundrum with the movement for affordable housing is that you're going to keep playing whack-a-mole, you know, with prices.

We have a principle that no one gets pushed out to bring new people in.

So, How do you enforce that principle?

So, 200,000 people left the city of Detroit in the ten years before I got elected.

I got elected by the people who stayed, not the people who left.

And the people who stayed, we're an 83% black city, votes for a guy who looks like me, it's because they trust me to make sure the people who stayed, were going to be watched out for.

And so I have been obsessive about this.

And so it's a lot of boring things.

But, for example, what happens in most major cities is the way affordable housing in this country is done is basically through federal tax credits.

It's subsidize the apartments rents for 30 years.

And when the 30 years runs out, the owner then turns the property to market rate, kicks the longtime tenants out, and brings in a bunch of wealthy people.

I sat down with every one of our long time affordable housing operators and I said, if you try to flip this to market rate, you will have no help for me.

You will have no help on tax breaks.

You will have no help on permits.

You will have no help on anything.

On the other hand, if you want to re-up for another 30 years, I have a whole series of incentives here for you.

We've had 8000 units come up, all 8000 got renewed for another 30 years, but it meant a building by building, agreement.

And so we have not had the conversion from low income to market rate, and then we're building like mad.

So, last year, the Census Bureau and I are finally in agreement on numbers.

But, 7000 more Detroiters were in the city last year.

That means I need 3500 more housing units or somebody gets pushed out.

We built 3500 more housing units.

We're building another 3500 more housing units this year.

You have to build the overall units faster than your people are moving in, or you will have the problem of Austin.

You'll have the problem of Los Angeles.

You'll have the problem of Miami, you know, all of the cities.

And so I have a city council that's unified.

Every single housing project gets approved quickly.

And they get built.

One of the things that you did upon, taking office was commit to, and on its face, this sounds wrong, but the demolition.

Right.

At one point Detroit had a million aid.

It went down over 50 years to 700,000.

But literally the ten years before I came in, they dropped 200,000.

When the streetlights were out, the cops weren't showing up.

Families, largely families with school age children, moved out in massive numbers, and they didn't take their houses with them.

And so I came in, we had 47,000 abandoned houses, today we have 2000.

Now I've knocked down 30,000, but I've also auctioned off 15,000 for families who moved in and fix them up, because a lot of people didn't leave because the house couldn't be saved.

A lot of people left because the burned out house next to them made their neighborhood too dangerous, and they just walked away.

But if you knock down the burned out house next door, you can auction that brick house and somebody will come in and will fix it up.

And so on average, we've got 2000 vacant houses a year being renovated and families moving in.

And that's part of why we haven't had a gentrification issue.

I had all these good vacant houses able to absorb, a lot of families.

But when you do that, the property values in the neighborhood go up and we've got neighborhoods, literally ten years ago, that neighborhood average sale was 10 or 20,000.

It's now 120,000.

When it was 10 or 20,000, you wouldn't put $50,000 into a house to fix it up.

When it's 120,000 now you will.

And so what you've seen happen over time is the houses that are worse and worse are now profitable to fix.

And that's, been most exciting thing, pretty much, the great majority neighborhoods in the city have seen their property values triple in the last 12 years.

And the increase in wealth among Detroit homeowners, from the increase in their home values has been a very rewarding thing.

What percent that was like houses that were foreclosed on?

Well, pretty much all of them end up getting foreclosed, but most of them left ahead of time.

So the foreclosure process takes three years.

You had people in neighborhoods with $150,000 mortgage in 2008.

Then in 2010, their house was worth 60, they left.

They just fed, they weren't going to keep paying.

They flat out left.

And so you had thousands and thousands of people who left because they were underwater in the mortgage.

Those houses were in good shape.

They were the key to how we rebuilt.

They may not have been foreclosed on until a year or two later because the taxes, hadn't run out.

You get three years.

The taxes were not the issue.

The issue was police didn't come when you called 911.

The schools were failing, the streetlights were out, the parks were overgrown.

And families, just wanted to move.

And an interesting thing happened in the Great Recession.

Some of the suburbs around here that had been highly resistant, maybe to people of color moving in.

When their property values collapsed, you saw a huge increase in African-American and Latino ownership in the suburbs, or at least rentals in the suburbs if not ownership.

And so the 200,000 people who left in the decade I got here were overwhelmingly, black and brown families with school aged children.

That's who was moving out of Detroit.

I just got finished being with, one of your fellow mayors, Mayor Suarez.

And, you know, he could not be more bullish -about AI -Right, right, right, right.

and Waymo is operating there.

I am far more dubious and, I don't want to say innately Luddite, but I know that's a perspective you relate to because of the man and woman made machinery that emanates from this beautiful place.

I'm not all convinced that we've set sort of an accountability for these companies that, you know, if you're going to integrate AI in your business model, you can't, eliminate your workforce.

The economy's changing and there are people in this country in areas that are going to embrace the change and benefit from it, and there are people that are going to get run over by it.

So my great grandfather, in the late 1800s, ran a blacksmith shop where he shoed horses about two miles from where we're sitting.

He was put out of business by Henry Ford and the model-t.

He went to work for Henry Ford at a higher standard wage than he ever had, running his own blacksmith shop.

Had he been in a blacksmith shop in Ames, Iowa, and been put out of business, he'd probably been working on a farm for wages.

And I keep explaining to folks we have got to join the tech economy here and attract it.

We're not going to be Silicon Valley, with the center of cryptocurrency.

But there's going to be a huge amount of AI manufacturing coming.

What's the most natural place to be a center of AI manufacturing?

Let's talk about the place that knows the most about manufacturing.

So we are seriously thinking through what it means to build the economy of the future.

And Michigan right now leads the country in young people under 30 leaving the state.

The kids do not see enough opportunity here.

They're going to Miami, they're going to Austin.

And so I have a whole team now, the same team that 2014 sat down and said, we're going to be the best place in the country for new auto plants, is now saying, we're going to be the best place in the country for tech companies.

What do you need?

They need data warehouses.

They need talent, we're building the University of Michigan AI grad school right down the street.

They're going to need a solid energy grid to power these data warehouses.

These are things I'm going to be dealing with in the governor's campaign.

But we have to be competitive.

What about the fact that the computer, as yet, has not been proven to have empathy for... Neither do robots.

You want to go into our factories?

Yeah.

Okay, the factories have built robotics.

Now, it's still got 4000 people working in the GM plant.

Even with all those, robotics.

In some ways, this is going to sound strange, but the reason I've been able to land ten auto plants in the last ten years is in part because of productivity.

Mexico had a huge wage advantage and has a huge wage advantage.

But when you need half as many people in the factory.

Now, transportation costs become a bigger factor and the like.

A big part of why we're winning is that a factory with 500 people in robotics, we can land a factory with 1500 people that know robotics, might be sitting in Shenzhen, China, or might be sitting in, some place in Mexico.

And so Detroit's benefit enormously in the last decade.

2600 people working in the Amazon distribution center, that place has four stories of robotics.

And yet 2600 people are still working there.

There is an economic future for technology and people to work side by side.

What have you accomplished in Detroit that you want to bring to the whole of Michigan?

And what have you not been able to accomplish?

Because it would take someone being in the governor's office to accomplish that.

What I haven't accomplished is fix the schools, because in Michigan, the schools are not under the mayor.

They're under the state and elected school boards.

And Michigan is 44th in America in reading, 60% of fourth graders across state of Michigan do not read at grade level.

And it's been going down for 25 years across Democratic and Republican administrations.

And my biggest frustration, the biggest thing holding back the city of Detroit today is the performance of the Detroit Public Schools.

But that's true in a lot of communities in this state.

And fixing the school system is priority.

The thing that I've accomplished, and I think you'll find this as you talk to people.

In 2013, if you got re-elected in Detroit in the old days, if you got elected, a councilman is going bad.

You got elected because you were the most skilled at telling people why it's somebody else's fault.

Whoever was the best at blaming somebody else's condition got elected.

I said, we're not doing any of this us versus them blame stuff.

In 12 years I have not vetoed an act of city council.

But what I'm most proud of is I'm watching the people campaigning to succeed me.

Nobody's running us versus them campaign.

Nobody's running a racially divisive campaign.

It's about unity.

It's about building on the progress, taking it farther and covering more neighborhoods.

The state of Michigan right now is an absolute gridlock between the Republicans and the Democrats.

They're more interested in fighting with each other.

Than they are in getting anything done.

We're a month past the state deadline for passing a budget.

And they don't have a budget for the schools that are going to start in four weeks.

I need to get to Lansing and bring the same kind of politics that says, let's get people to sit down and solve their differences.

And, most people in this state, they don't want to hear the Democratic versus Republican bickering.

It must be somewhat exhilarating to be running this candidacy, your gubernatorial candidacy, as an independent.

It is.

Exhilarating, and most politicians wake up, they make donor calls.

They're not thrilled about the state of things.

-Yeah.

-You can do things differently.

How does that impact your ability to govern on day one?

I'm seeing this over and over wherever I go in the state.

I'll go to a farming community and they'll say, we've been forgotten.

Nobody here is doing anything about our problems.

What is the mayor of Detroit know about us?

And I said, you want to know what I know about people who feel forgotten?

Let me tell you about the mom who had two kids on a street with four abandoned houses, no street light, no park, and the ambulance doesn't show up.

Okay, that's a family's been forgotten.

We didn't spend time whining about feeling forgotten.

We got to work and solved the problem.

Let's talk about your problems.

And people are like, oh, maybe there's more in common between the farming community and, the city of Detroit.

But I'm up in a little town called Lexington, and that's thousand people an hour north of Port Huron.

100 people show up at a bar on a Tuesday night, to hear me.

The local grocery store, takes down the specials and you has a sign up all week.

Welcome to Lexington, Mike Duggan.

And so I'm talking to folks about their problems, which are very different than others.

And they start to feel like, I'm going to talk about solutions, I'm not going to give them like, talking points out of a poll.

And after about 45 minutes, they relax, they're laughing.

And I say to them, let me ask you as an honest question, how many of you would have shown up here tonight if I were running for governor as a Democrat?

And about a third of the hands in the room went up, and they looked at each other and they started laughing.

Even in a small town where they all know their neighbors, if it was political, they would have been divided.

They couldn't have had the conversation.

You could feel the relief that we can talk about things.

I don't really agree with you on that one.

Let me tell you why.

And they can laugh.

And this is happening across the state.

It is so exhilarating.

You go to the Democratic meetings, they are so angry about Trump and the Republicans, go to the Republican meetings, they are so angry with the Democrats that are ruining America.

You go to my meetings and they're talking about, why can't you fix the breakwall in the harbor?

Because it's messing up our beach and nobody at the state will fix it.

And I'll say, let's talk, what we do to fix the harbor.

And they're like, where can I sign up?

Have you consulted with my old boss, Governor Chafee?

Is Jesse Ventura still with us?

I think he is.

I know Hulk Hogan died recently, but I think Governor Ventura.

But there are like three cases that come to mind of.. Angus King in Maine was very successful.

So in every one, we've had five states that have elected an independent governor since 1990.

And your boss was one of them.

In every case, either the Republican Party, went so far right, or the Democratic Party went so far left, they stood up on principle and said, I'm going to represent the people of the state.

And they did it at a time that was right for them in the state of Michigan right now, to your viewers who don't know what it's like to be in a purple state, every single election is contested.

We've already got TV ads running for the Congress races for November of next year, because we're the battleground.

And in Michigan, everything in Lansing is about, are the Republicans in control or are the Democrats in control?

People are sick of it.

We just had a week ago a bill to restrict students from using cell phones during class time that Governor Whitmer proposed in her state of the city.

All 53 Democrats opposed it when it came up for a vote, not because it wasn't a good bill, but because the sponsor was a Republican in a swing seat they wanted to win.

And so to deny one Republican Rep credit on a bill he worked on, they've decided that a million kids are going to go back to class with cell phones going, during instructional time.

This is what people are fed up with and want change.

And every time they do stupid stuff like this in Lansing, my donations go up, my volunteers go up, I get phone calls out of the blue, and, I think people see a path to a different kind of politics.

You had a role here in memorializing this, and Mr.

Ford I don't want to overplay that.

Bill Ford's staff felt very strongly that we should keep a small portion of the bricks the way they were for basically 40 years.

But, the whole building look just like this.

Basically six years ago.

On its own, this is, now it's a memory.

It's an artistic achievement in its own right.

I mean, people like, you know, it's colorful and the way that it's memorialized.

Yeah.

That's just the way it was.

And the air conditioning right now, I mean, and the way people can live and breathe and feel safe.

Yeah.

It's a special thing that you did.

Yeah.

Somehow when you think of the threats against, Governor Whitmer and the militarization or the the way that our politics has become kind of something more terrorizing than ever.

You think you might have the power to transform that, so that people treat each other with respect at the state and national political level, right?

I mean, that's a certain power that you think you can bring to it.

You know, you look at what happened to Governor Shapiro, you look at what happened in Minnesota.

I won't tell you there's never a mentally ill person, who's a threat.

But I tell you this, the us versus them, black versus white politics in Detroit is dramatically improved today.

There is a real, feeling of unity.

You might disagree on candidates, but people are united in bringing the city back.

And I think I can change that at the state level.

I don't know that I'm going to guarantee that nobody, is going to get angry.

But I think we can change the tone.

And if you were to come with me to my campaign events.

You would notice more smiles and less tension than any Republican or Democratic event.

That's just true.

Is that a yearning for the governor Romney, someone you know that had respect?

I don't mean the younger Romney, George.

You know, the certain because you were.

Governor Romney is from Detroit, yeah.

You were how old when he was governor?

So I would have been, I think 7 or 8 when he left.

So this is Mitt's father, who commanded a lot of respect across the parties.

That's the kind of governor you look to be?

I haven't thought about, I haven't thought about him.

I'm going to be the kind of governor, that I was a mayor, which is somebody who disagrees with me, I'm going to listen respectfully.

I'm going to tell him why I don't agree.

I'm going to let the people on the far right in the far left express their opinions, they're Americans.

Well, let me just ask you this then, from whom do you take inspiration in the history of our country?

I haven't thought about that.

Okay.

I take inspiration from the people I run into every day who say, I just put $50,000 into this house, and the place next door is a junkyard.

You have the responsibility to clean it up.

And I'm inspired by the person cleaning up their house, and I get somebody out the next day to fix it.

The bond is between me and the residents.

-I'm not so much a... -That's fair.

I mean, I'm a historian by training, so I have to ask.

But, thank you for having lunch with me, Mr.

Mayor.

Glad to have you here in Detroit, Alexander.

Thank you sir.

[music] Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus, Robert S. Kaplan Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, Draper Foundation, and Lawrence B. Benenson.