- 10 months, you have 10 months left in your term as mayor.

I can remember really clearly your announcement that you were gonna seek the role of mayor in 2013.

A lot has changed since then.

The city is a really, really different place.

At the same time, for some people, it's not as changed as we might hope it should be.

I wanna start with you just kind of giving us an overall picture of where you think things are in the city as you prepare to leave it for other things.

And talk about that gap that still exists, and what levers the mayor can or should be pulling to address those kinds of things as well as celebrate things like the draft and the Train Station.

- Well, those are things that we try to do every day.

Of course in 2014, when the ambulances didn't show up for an hour and half the street lights were out the children couldn't play in the park 'cause the grass wasn't cut all summer.

We had a 20% unemployment rate.

And it has been, every day, trying to create opportunities for all Detroiters.

So that's what we've been about.

Some of the things have been covered more visibly than others.

But if you were in our staff meetings, we are just as focused on the fact that we built a billion two in new affordable housing just in the last six years.

Every single one of those was a project that took a good deal of work, but we were very conscious of the fact of creating a city where there's room for everybody.

- What do you see as the opportunity for the next mayor to build on what's happening?

And what do you see as the challenges, the things that that person's gonna have to do more of or be more aggressive about to move things faster?

- You know, the only hesitation I had, and I by and large feel like I did what I came to do and 12 years was enough, is what is happening with the violence rate is remarkable.

I mean, almost 400 homicides the year before I ran down to 200 last year.

We're down again so far this year.

Boston last year had 28.

It is possible to get violence down.

We're using a number of the Boston tactics.

We've added a number of our own that other cities are copying.

But Boston got there through 20 years of sustained strategy.

And I'm hoping that whoever succeeds me sticks with the commitment we've made to the community policing, to the use of technology, to the use of the Community Violence Intervention Teams.

The strategies that we have put together are driving the violence down, but it needs to be continued for another 10 years.

I'd love to see the day when there's not 100 homicides in the City of Detroit.

And I do think I will live to see that day.

- I talk a lot about the really great things that are happening with investment and development in the city, and the need to connect that more directly with what's happening to people in other parts of the city.

Even just as a demonstration, to say, "This and this are related."

In other words, it's connected.

It's one city, not two.

How can you do that?

Is that possible?

- You know, I think the 600 Block Club presidents of the city would greatly disagree with what you just said.

- Would they?

Why?

- Absolutely.

Again, the property values across this city have tripled in the last 10 years.

- They've gone up.

I mean, they haven't gone up; they've tripled.

I mean, they've been leading America.

And that's because recovery has spread to every corner.

But I will take you down Kercheval near McClellan that was pretty much an abandoned zone 10 years ago that is now filled with shops and housing.

Take you down Rosa Parks which was the site of the violence in '67, and you'll see a church has now been renovated as a very active restaurant and community center.

We can go down McNichols near Livernois where five years ago, every one of those storefronts was covered by plywood.

- Was closed.

- Now, we have a new Merchant Bank.

We've got new housing going up because the adjoining neighborhoods are there.

Take you through neighborhood after neighborhood.

East Warren, go check out Warren near Cadieux and how that is as opposed to five years ago.

All the new housing and restaurants and they are driven by neighborhood groups, Block Clubs.

And we are seeing a neighborhood development like we haven't seen in decades.

And I do think people see that.

Has it gotten to every corner of the city?

No, but I never thought I'd see Dexter with what is happening there today which will be I think the next recovering corridor in the city.

And so, I'm really proud of what's happened.

We just opened over across from Clark Park, beautiful La Joya Gardens.

And that park is spectacular.

Again, that neighborhood.

I can go one after another.

So when you say...

Your neighborhood where you built on over in Tuxedo, I mean, did you ever think you'd see carpentry schools down the street?

- Absolutely not.

But then, of course, you hear from folks who are saying, "When is my turn?

"When is it gonna happen where I live?"

- Probably the neighborhood that said that to me the most was the Midwest neighborhood over near Tireman and Livernois when we put the Joe Louis Greenway through there and opened it.

And everybody along that Greenway is fixing up their house.

We actually have new houses being built in that neighborhood adjacent to the Greenway.

And that Greenway is winding through abandoned railroad track that had been covered with scrapped tires.

So again, I take issue with your statement that we aren't getting to neighborhoods.

I'm in these neighborhoods all the time with people who are very proud.

- The next mayor is gonna take office in the second year of the second Trump administration.

Things were really different for the last four years for Detroit.

Partially because of COVID, but also partially because of the relationship that you were able to take advantage of with the White House.

Talk a little bit about how that changes and what that means for leadership in the city in terms of maintaining that momentum.

- It just means that you have to run the city in a normal way.

We did not have problems when Trump was the president.

We were operating just fine.

I stayed off... - How did you make that possible?

- Again, we just did our jobs.

I stayed off his radar screens.

I didn't pick fights with him.

I didn't tweet and attack him.

My style is not calling attention to myself by picking partisan fights.

But we had, for example, demolition money that was awarded under Obama that continued through two years outta Trump.

We continued to manage it properly, and Trump didn't bother us at all.

Ben Carson, you know, was from the City of Detroit.

I had him and his wife Candy over to the Manoogian for dinner.

And we got funding to get lead outta houses in Southwest Detroit.

There are ways to build relationships with the other party.

Now Joe Biden, it was a one in a million relationship between me and him.

We're just very close personally.

And it paid off for us in a big way.

But we were doing just fine as a city before COVID hit under Trump.

- You don't worry about the money not being the same.

I mean there was a lot of money coming to Detroit in the last four years in particular.

- So most cities in America, when they got the American Rescue Plan money poured it into their General Fund to cover the deficits.

In Detroit, we weren't running deficits.

Even in COVID, we were running in the black.

So every dollar that we took in, we spent on things that would have 10 years of value.

We redid parks, we built rec centers, we took out the Packard Plant, for example, things that are gonna have long-term benefit.

So the city is not going to have to ratchet down.

And council was very responsible in all this understanding we're gonna use one-time money for one-time things.

There's a lot of cities in this country that are right now looking at deficits in the next year 'cause they didn't do that.

In the city of Detroit, we're looking at a city that's gonna be left with $500 or $600 million in rainy day funds and reserves and a balanced budget.

- So you're not worried about some of the other initiatives from Washington.

If they ratchet that down, that's not... - It's a fight we have every year.

So if they cut funding for affordable housing, every city in America is gonna have to push back on that.

If they cut funding for transit, every city in America is gonna have to fight back on that.

But Detroit's not gonna be unique.

We'll be dealing with the same issues as everybody else.

- Are there departments that you worry about in terms of their functioning under new leadership?

- I don't know about new leadership.

We still are not where we should be in the permitting and opening new business in this town.

- Yeah, everybody says that.

- And so, we are a lot better than where we were.

You can now at least do your forms online and not have to stand in four different lines in City Hall.

But I have a team now that is benchmarking the most efficient cities in Michigan.

And I said, "I don't want you to tell me "you made it a little bit better than it was before.

"I want you to show me the best city in Michigan "in permitting, and I want you to show me every step.

"Why do we have a step they don't have?

"Why do we have a fee they don't have?"

And I think getting the culture of bSIG to make the permitting of new businesses a competitive advantage is something that I haven't gotten to effectively enough, something that I would be doing.

A new mayor's gonna have to deal with that.

Although I hope in the next 10 months to get them certainly a running start.

But when I think about the things that haven't gotten done, Detroit Promise just aggravates the heck outta me, that we have not made this a part of the culture.

- The college scholarships for graduates.

- Every kid in this city who goes to high school in the city has their college tuition guaranteed.

And I just met with a group of 18 to 22 year olds over at Newlab the other day saying, "How many of you knew at 13 and 14 it was there?

"By 12th grade, your counselor's running around."

And one of the women there says, "I moved from Kalamazoo.

"In Kalamazoo, I knew at seven years old "about the Kalamazoo Promise that I can go to college."

And we've done a lot of billboard and radio ads.

We have not gotten into the schools and gotten people to understand that you have an enormous advantage being born in Detroit that your college is paid for.

I haven't done a good enough job of that.

And so that's something I'm gonna work on this year.

The next mayor has an enormous potential advantage.

If you get every seven and eight-year-old in the city to know when they run into their friends in the suburbs, "I'm going to college," it changes the culture of the city.