By Mike Turner
January/February 2012
Talk to Gary Heidel for any length of time about economic redevelopment efforts in Michigan, and you’ll hear him repeatedly use terms such as “teamwork,” “collaboration” and “partnerships.”
Heidel, executive director of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority since October 2010, says it’s going to take a variety of public and private entities working together to reshape the state’s economy.
“It’s collaboration and partnership, there’s just no doubt about it,” he said. “As a state entity and a private entity you can do what you want with your products, but in the challenges of the economy of today, you really have to do a lot of collaboration and partnerships.
“You’re seeing an awful lot of that going on around the state in a lot of our communities,” Heidel said. “The business community is coming together with the public sector along with the foundation communities and the nonprofits and really just looking at how do we make our communities and our regions important places. What we’re all about is improving the quality of life and having a strong economy.”
MSHDA, a quasi-state governmental agency, aims to fulfill its role in improving the quality of life in the state through a variety of approaches. Historically, MSHDA has focused on affordable housing. But its mission and vision have evolved and broadened over the years beyond individual housing projects to encompass what agency officials refer to as “quality of place.” Heidel traces the start of the evolution to Terrance Duvernay, who served as MSHDA executive director in the 1980s after a stint as city government’s chief administrative officer in his native New Orleans.
“Terry … got his start in the community action agency movement,” Heidel said. “He just felt you can’t provide quality of life to a person only by giving them a decent place to live. That is also impacted by the neighborhood they live in. So we started doing a lot of neighborhood work. It was still housing based, but it was how do we then focus on the neighborhood around the projects that we finance or just neighborhoods in general, and how can we improve those neighborhoods and be more holistic? I remember one of our annual reports at that time said ‘More Than Housing,’ which meant we were becoming more than housing. That theme continued on.
“It’s more than just the neighborhood that the house is located in,” Heidel said. “It’s also the community that the neighborhood’s in. More recently, it’s the region that the community’s located in. What we’ve come to see is the impact of our work on a regional economic basis. It makes a lot of sense, because a state economy … is made up of the regions in the state. How we work in a place like Lansing, Mich., and the small communities around Lansing — Mason, St. Johns, East Lansing — impact how that whole region comes together, at least from a residential development perspective.”
Much of that work involves focusing on the development of downtowns or the major corridors of communities, Heidel said. “These are very important to the future of the Michigan economy,” he said. “It’s how we start to link the communities within our region in a variety of ways to make them stronger.”