Visualizing Opportunity: Using Community Asset Mapping to Explore Economic Development in Detroit

Asset mapping is a useful method for determining community strengths, often used in community-driven research, policy, and advocacy efforts for social change. Mapping is frequently used in studies grounded in Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), especially in places like Detroit with its recent surge of economic development resulting in part from community members effectively advocating for themselves. Detroit’s Motor City Match (MCM) program is a city funded initiative providing grants and other assistance to support Black-owned businesses, women entrepreneurs, and “legacy Detroiters.” Presently, 28 rounds of grants have been completed, and the program has awarded more than 2,146 grants since it began in 2015, via six tracks: Planning, development, design, cash, building/infrastructure, and “community violence intervention.” Over $19 million in grant funds have been awarded to grantees in the cash track since the first round. We use the example of MCM to demonstrate the utility of multi-layer asset mapping in practice, creating asset maps that illustrate and help substantiate claims of the program’s success or failure.

Asset mapping is used to facilitate understanding the problem and potential solutions in the context of the community, which is essential to the strengths-based perspective of ABCD. Community asset-mapping is a logical choice for the project, because the MCM program purports to be diverse, inclusive, and community-driven. The data for the project are drawn from publicly available sources about MCM grantees and their businesses, including administrative program data, the businesses’ websites, and news media outlets. The data were mapped using Google Maps; and contextual analysis of surrounding resources provides additional information for interpreting the grantees’ outcomes.

The maps include physical locations of the businesses and information about the economic/capital resources and socio-cultural attributes of the areas in which the businesses are located for a comprehensive picture of the economic, political, and social assets of the neighborhood. The maps show that many businesses are still operating but many others have closed or changed course. Food and beverage businesses are the most common in the program, but there are also a considerable number of lifestyle and beauty and wellness service businesses. There are lower numbers of creative and cultural businesses and spaces, along with community spaces. The maps show many of the businesses are concentrated in main commercial areas such as Woodward Avenue and Livernois Avenue; many of these businesses are near or in Midtown, Downtown and along the Avenue of Fashion District in north central Detroit.

The MCM maps help verify the program’s claims to support historic commercial corridors and Black-owned businesses. But the concentration of grants in existing wealthy areas of the city may undermine the claim to support Detroit neighborhoods and legacy Detroiters. The numbers of businesses closed and not yet open suggest that sustainability may be a problem. Asset mapping illustrates how community resources are used and can be directed in a more inclusive and equitable way to support economic development efforts. It is an effective method for identifying past and current trends and outlining future areas of inquiry.