Today marks the beginning of a new series, Families in Neighborhoods, that will explore efforts underway in Detroit to reimagine the city’s neighborhoods as places of opportunity for children and families.

It will feature commentaries about Detroit serving as a blueprint for cities to learn how to strengthen the conditions in which communities can become family- and child-centered. This first installment features a Q&A with Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Wayne State University.

As Detroit seeks to be a city that puts its children and families first, it must retain and attract families who choose to raise their children in the city. This effort requires a thorough understanding of where we’ve been — the trends and factors leading to families choosing to stay or leave the city — to inform how we can move forward.

Lenhoff, who has a doctorate in educational policy, and her team at Detroit PEER: the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research at Wayne State University conducted an analysis of these trends and factors, observing several key themes undergirding the connection between Detroit’s neighborhoods, family mobility and schools. Lenhoff discusses Detroit PEER’s recent research, which centers on three key findings:

• Between 2013 and 2022, the decline in households with children in Detroit (16%) was far greater than the decline in total households in Detroit (4%).
• Factors that led to the decline in households with children include higher rates of property vacancy and unemployment rates, but neighborhood school enrollment did not appear to be a key factor.
• However, there is evidence to suggest that strong neighborhood public schools — and stronger connections between neighborhood schools and their surrounding communities — foster integration, community cohesion, increased school attendance, increased social capital and other factors that improve the quality of life and vitality of neighborhoods and the families that reside in them.

Q: Detroit PEER conducted research focused on which neighborhoods in Detroit have seen the highest increases and decreases in population of families with children over the past decade. What did you find?

A: We all know that a major priority for the city of Detroit over the last decade has been to increase the population. With more residents comes a stronger tax base, more resources flowing to and through neighborhoods, and stronger social cohesion, which can all have a cyclical effect and continue driving people to move to the city. We were interested in learning where in the city families with children were moving to and from and trying to understand whether there were major factors influencing those patterns.

Tracking trends in the overall population, the number of families with children in the city fell in the 10-year period between 2013 and 2022. While there was a 4% decline in total households during this period, there was a 16% decline in households with children and a 12% decline in K-12 students in Detroit. Just five of the 54 neighborhoods in Detroit gained K-12 students in the last decade, including the Brooks, Chadsey, and Boynton neighborhoods in southwest Detroit, and two downtown neighborhoods along the riverfront that increased numbers but still only have about 100 students.

Many neighborhoods on the city’s west side had a stable student population or declined by less than 20%, whereas most neighborhoods on the east side and central Detroit declined in student population by more than 20%.

Change in Detroit Student Population by Neighborhood, 2013 to 2022

Source: Wayne State University’s Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research

Q: You looked at some factors that may lead families with children to remain or leave their neighborhood, including the role of neighborhood schools. What did you find, both quantitatively and qualitatively? What might explain these findings?

A: Yes, we thought that one thing that might be driving these population trends could be where schools are located and whether Detroit families wanted to enroll in neighborhood schools. There are about 20 fewer public schools (Detroit Public Schools Community District or charter) in Detroit now than there were 10 years ago. Although these closures have occurred across the city, there are now some students who do not have a public school near their homes. We found that there was a 6 percentage-point decrease in the average share of students who attended a school in their neighborhood or within 1-mile of their home. In 2022, an average of just one-third of students in a Detroit neighborhood attended a school close to home.

Despite these trends, there were 10 neighborhoods in 2022 where more than half of the students attended a school in their neighborhood or within a mile from home: five neighborhoods in southwest Detroit, four in central Detroit just east of Woodward, and one on the east side.

We did not find that neighborhood school enrollment was related to population trends over the last decade. This is likely because school choice policy in Detroit allows families to enroll in schools outside of their attendance zones. Therefore, families could live anywhere in the city and send their children to school in just about any neighborhood of their choice. This may mean that families are not focusing as much on school location when they choose where to live as they might in other places where students must attend their zoned school.

We did find that, like the overall population, households with children were more likely to decline in neighborhoods with higher vacant property and unemployment rates in 2013, although these relationships were stronger in the overall population than among households with children. For instance, there was a -0.55 correlation between unemployment and total population change and a -0.28 correlation between unemployment and student population change. Likewise, there was a -0.60 correlation between vacancies and total population change and a -0.32 correlation with student population change. This points to possible factors pushing families and other residents away from some Detroit neighborhoods that may feel unsafe or lacking economic opportunity, and it also may indicate that families with children are having a harder time moving to better neighborhoods, perhaps because they need larger houses or have more limited resources.

Q: You’ve also done research over the years on the role of schools in sustaining and strengthening neighborhoods. What do these findings mean about how families are looking at schools and their neighborhoods?

A: It’s interesting because, although families in Detroit have so much school choice and can send their children to schools across the city, nearly every family we’ve spoken to over the years would prefer to send their children to a school close to home. We know from other research that strong bonds between schools and families create a solid foundation for teaching and learning because educators are more attuned to their students’ needs and families feel more comfortable contributing to the school and sharing their needs and resources with the school community.

Families really want to go to school close to home, and they tend to begin their school search process by looking at schools close to home, but many Detroiters end up choosing a school further away.

The shift toward school choice over the last 30 years, nationwide and especially in Detroit, has really changed the relationship between schools and neighborhoods. Now, parents don’t necessarily need to move to neighborhoods with schools they like, if they can use school choice to enroll them outside their neighborhoods. Although sometimes having more choices gives families access to higher quality schools, school choice tends to lead to greater segregation in schools, and it can erode the connections that schools have with their local communities.

Although some parents choose other schools because of special programming or services like transportation or after-care, many parents make their decisions based on word-of-mouth and reputation. However, many families who choose a school further from home are not enrolling in schools that look all that different from those close to home. This is one way that school choice can make it hard to build strong school and neighborhood communities – families choose schools further from home even though closer schools may be just as good. This can have real and negative consequences for building strong school and neighborhood communities.

Q: What are the implications of that? What does that mean for how we think about social capital and racial and socioeconomic integration in our schools and communities?

A: One important example of these negative consequences is student attendance. We’ve surveyed and interviewed thousands of families in Detroit over the last decade, and a persistent challenge for student attendance is transportation. When neighborhoods have students dispersed across many different schools, this makes transportation more difficult for both the school system and for families. For schools, it is extremely costly and inefficient to provide school bus transportation for any student to go to any school in the city. School buses work best when many students can get on a bus route and be transported to the same school or small group of schools in one area. For families, the dispersion of students across schools means that you may not have neighbors you can call on for help when your car breaks down or your work schedule makes it impossible to drive your children to school.

I’ll give you one example of the neighborhood where I live in Detroit, Corktown. With a team of researchers, I’ve been studying how the changing neighborhood and housing in and around Corktown may be affecting families and children, and especially their access to educational opportunities. We found that the roughly 500 public school children in the greater Corktown area attended 97 different schools in 2021-22, and only about one-fifth attended the neighborhood’s zoned public school. For many students, they are the only child in Corktown who attends their school. This can make it difficult to form and sustain friendships with students at school; it can make it challenging for schools to understand who they are serving and what their students need; and it can mean that families have fewer people and resources to rely on in their neighborhoods to help them with their children’s education. This kind of student dispersion also means that racial and economic segregation in schools is likely to persist, even as neighborhoods become more integrated. Corktown is already one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, yet the neighborhood’s local school is 99% Black and 84% low-income.

Q: What is this telling us about how we can strengthen neighborhoods to enable families that want to stay to remain and thrive, and for families who want to move to Detroit to be able to do so?

A: The city’s leaders could be doing a lot more to support our neighborhood public schools. In every economic and neighborhood development plan, a neighborhood’s schools and families should play a role. These initiatives should include concrete steps for supporting student access to school, creating safe walking and public transportation routes, establishing family-friendly amenities, and communicating with the schools and their constituents about the resources and infrastructure they need to thrive. Community-based organizations could also play a role in bridging schools with their local neighborhoods and encouraging residents to enroll and participate in the growth and development of schools. After all, schools are strongly shaped by the families who enroll in them – the more neighborhood students enroll in a school, the better the school will serve the neighborhood.

Q: You bring up the role of community-based organizations in bridging schools with neighborhoods. There are so many great examples of organizations doing that work in Detroit — Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives and Congress of Communities — who are acting as the glue between communities and schools in southwest Detroit, or Brightmoor Alliance working on chronic absenteeism in northwest Detroit, or Cody Rouge Community Action Alliance working to elevate youth voice in neighborhood-level decisions. How might we think about these examples in Detroit as part of the broader national context — and how Detroit can model the way for other communities?

A: Detroit has a chance to be a real pathbreaker when it comes to growing population and strengthening school and community integration. In many other cities, population growth has meant that new residents, who are more likely to be white and/or higher income, tend to move into neighborhoods and push out older residents who are more likely to be Black or Hispanic and/or lower-income. Because Detroit has a surplus of property and a much more gradual population incline, we can be thoughtful and intentional — and learn from the mistakes of our peer cities — in creating truly integrated communities and schools over time.

Greater Corktown is one area where the city is investing millions of dollars into ensuring that low-income residents have high-quality, affordable housing while also creating new market-rate housing alongside private investment. The city is also investing in educational and economic supports for residents so that, as the neighborhood grows, so does the opportunity for social mobility for its residents. I’m working with a team of researchers from around the country who are eager to learn from Detroit and hopeful that these investments will show that population growth and neighborhood change can create educational and economic opportunities and strengthen neighborhood cohesion.