Oakland County, Michigan -- 1993
Chapter Two
Vital Connections
It starts with support. Support for growth, support for development.
Support of a vision.
In the case of Oakland County, that support surfaces through the commitment residents and community and business leaders have had -- and continue to have -- to be a part of a county that is permanently on the verge of becoming more than it's been in the past.
It's a mindset, really. An attitude. An aptitude. It is a way of seeing the world, a way of living that takes root in education and in inclination for achievement; exists through implementation and organization; and extends through commitment, leadership and ... vision.
Oakland County in 1992 had become the realization of that particular alchemy. It had become a mix of people fixated on achievement, leaders and institutions with vision and a common attitude and mindset that beget, ultimately, an identifiable and enviable way of life.
Seen from a broad perspective, that identity-based-on-reality enabled Oakland County in 1992 to become a legitimate world-class hub of vital connections ... drawn together, past and present, by attitude and aptitude.
Oakland County is, without reasonable doubt, cast upon a mindset. Call it progressive thinking. Call it entreprenuerial. Call it resourceful and productive. No matter which term you choose, you should not mistake the point: Oakland County by 1992 had truly become a unique laboratory wherein commerce, research and development, education and enterprise inter-relate, creating a dynamic working atmosphere.
Oakland County is enriched within a supportive milieu of distinct signals of commercial relevance, such as transportation and distribution networks, including airports, railroad freight services, interstate networks and modern highways, as well as an impressive utility infrastructure that includes highly stable gas, electric and telephone services and a fiber optic telecommunications network.
The closer you look, the clearer it becomes: Oakland County, through certain fate and by obvious design, had become by 1992 a center of surging commercial activity, with energy to spare and great promise for the future.
Again, this results from a mindset ... one that appears set in stone in Oakland County.
Ineluctably it manifests in the financial community, where faith in the future nourishes the rich embodiments of the present tense. Visions have become realities in Oakland County at the crossroad of concept and conceptualization. Ideas either evaporate or actualize, often at the whim of one man's imagination. And faith. And, more often than not, ideas achieve actualization in this singularly successful county on the northern edge of the Detroit Metropolitan Area.
By 1992, Oakland County had become the juggernaut of Michigan's economy. It took incredible effort on the part of all its residents -- past and prese nt. And it took belief -- that this region of southeast Michigan had and continues to have what it takes to lead the state in infrastructure, in communication, transportation and in high-tech commerce, let alone, many would argue, quality of life.
Commercial banking is a significant part of the infrastructure. The county's banks and other financial institutions have been notably proactive and visionary in fostering an atmosphere that is conducive for considerable regional investment.
Oakland County in 1992 had become Michigan's leading center for international commercial activity. Over 360 foreign-owned firms and joint ventures representing 21 countries are located here. And Oakland County's close proximity to Canada and the budding Canadian/US trade agreement provide excellent opportunities for international business.
Without a supportive commercial banking base in the county, these economic truthes would not be possible. Without institutions and individuals willing to step up and asign commitment to where their visions direct, Oakland County would not have been able to realize a 100 percent increase in economic activity between 1982 and 1990, or see its population exceed one million people, or be home to 36,000 businesses.
The window of Oakland County is fixed upon the world. Its an appropriate view, given the access the county maintains to not only Canada but to the entire Great Lakes Region, and the rest of the country and the international theater beyond.
Vital connections include Interstate 75, which weaves through the heart of the county, from its northwest corner, near Holly, to its southeast base, near Madison Heights. Known as the manufacturing corridor of the US, Interstate 75 extends from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to southern Florida. It provides Oakland County businesses with a direct link to cities along they way.
Interstate 696 links the eastern and western parts of the county with the Detroit metropolitan area.
Altogether, Oakland County in 1992 boasted 85 miles of intestate highways and 124 miles of US and Michigan trunk lines -- all toll-free.
At the center of it all is one of Oakland's three largest ciies, Southfield. With 25 million square feet of office space, Southfield is among Oakland County's busiest cities, rivaled only by the remarkably dynamic Troy and the absolutely incredible Auburn Hills -- both to the immediate north of Southfield.
Southfield, Troy and Auburn Hills form a distinct connection in many ways. Each city is unique ... yet each also share a similar past. Prior to the early-1950s, all were fundamentally undeveloped.
Southfield was mostly farm field and open fields. Today it is an amazing mosiac of high rise office towers, beautiful neighborhoods, fine apartments and townhouses, hotels, shopping malls and is at the heart of the Detroit area's latest expressway -- Interstate 690 (The Walter Reuther Freeway).
Troy was large country tracts of essentially unsettled land, an expanse of real estate that was home mostly to ferns and ponds, the veritable southeast Michigan equivalent of the "wild west." By 1992, Troy had attracted more than 80,000 residents and had become Oakland County's largest city.
Auburn Hills, for its part, wasn't even Auburn Hills. The area -- which surrounds the City of Pontiac to the east and to the north -- was called Pontiac Township until the early-1980s. Then, as its location near the busy intersection of Interstate 75 and Michigan Highway M-59 began to attract significant office and research and development activity, large scale change came to this once-dormant township. Local politicos jumped on-board the burgeoning leap into the future that was taking place in their community, and convinced the local electorate to adopt cityhood and take on a name that would draw attention to the topography of the area.
Southfield emerged as Oakland County's statistical leader in the 1950s, with the arrival of the Northland Shopping Center and the eventual development of five major thoroughfares: I-696 (The Walter Ruether Freeway); U.S. 10(The John Lodge Freeway) : M-39 (The Southfield Freeway); US 24 (Telegraph Road); and M-102 (Eight Mile Road).
By 1992, Southfield, had taken on a Service Business personality, with a strong mix of residential diversity and aggressive city services. Troy, in its own right, had established a mix of up-scale retail activities, business and residential while Auburn Hills embraced research and development facilities and regional and national corporate headquarters.
Troy and Auburn Hills are located directly on Interstate 75; Southfield is but a few miles to the west and is linked to Interstate 75 by the Reuther Freeway, which is the central spine of the Interstate 696 Corridor, a 144-mile area that is home to half a million residents. The "corridor" constitutes only 17 percent of Oakland County's land area but it is home to 68 percent of its office space, nearly half of its jobs and 43 percent of the shopping floor area in Michigan's leading economic county.
Interstate 696 has kept Southfield in the center of the action. It provides a link between the Interstate 75 Corridor and the fast-growing communities to the west such as Farmington Hills, which, by 1992, had become the second-largest municipality in the county.
A brief look at the inception of Interstate 696 serves to showcase the region's commitment to development as well as the challenges created by the implementation of a project so enormous and significant.
Interstate 696 (The Reuther Freeway), entered the living vernacular on a snowy Thursday morning in December 1989 with the completion of its third phase of construction. On that grey but memorable day a psychological barrier described by The Detroit News as "an invisible, yet powerful emotional line that seperates east from west" was overcome concretely with the completion of the freeway's final phase.
Interstate 696 was open at last and the metropolitan region of Detroit, including Oakland County, finally had a genuine "beltway" around the central city. Overall, the 28.2 mile concrete expanse runs from Novi to St. Clair Shores. The final 9.1 mile section of the freeway is positioned in the middle of sections of the freeway that were completed in the 1960s and 1970s, which lent particular poignancy to its completion in 1989 -- some 32 years after the entire project was first proposed.
The final link of The Ruether Freeway -- named for the late United Autoworkers of America (UAW) president Walter P. Ruether -- was delayed because of property acquisition difficulties and area resident resistance. To gain approval of the project, highway officials spent more than $150 million on the acquisitions and improvements, including the adaptation of a costly underground design that helps mitigate against loud noise.
The futuristic freeway also has safety considerations such as long, flat entrance and exit ramps, curbless shoulders and a median designed to guide straying cars back onto the road. Interstate 696 is considered to be one of the best freeways in the midwest. The completion of the freeway project expanded market opportunities for area firms and "revealed development possibilities that had been shrouded by poor access," according to a project Corridor Committee report. Interstate 696 enhanced the market demand of industrial sites in the area "by effectively enlarging labor markets and easing access for suppliers and shippers," the report added.
With all its impact, the final completion of Interstate 696 seemed to set the tone for the early-1990s in Oakland County. During its first year, the freeway accommodated more than 172,000 vehicles a day -- at least 40,000 more than predicted. By the year 2000, the number is expected to exceed 200,000 vehicles daily.
Even to someone who knows better, it is easy sometimes to gather the impression that the whole world flows across the Ruether Freeway on any given morning. In a way, it really does.
Oakland County -- and, for that matter, the entire Detroit Metropolitan Area -- remained seriously dependent in 1992 on its vital link to expressways and highways.
Movement by vehicle was of critical importance, with businesses centered in various regional areas, from the Eight Mile Corridor in southern Oakland County and out through Ferndale, Royal Oak, out to Southfield, Troy, Birmingham and the Bloomfields to Auburn Hills, Rochester Hills, Pontiac, Waterford, White Lake and Highland Townships; down through Farmington Hills and Novi; and back through Franklin, Bingham Farms and Beverly Hills.
Movement by vehicle in 1992 meant more than strictly transporting people from home to office, people from office to shopping mall or people from parking lot to baseball game. The true dynamic of movement by vehicle was driven by commerce, and plenty of it. For if Oakland County had become anything by 1992 it had clearly become the region's center of of media and communications, including publishing, information processing systems, advertising and marketing agenices, film makers and television affiliates -- all of which positioned the county as a major player in the emerging twenty-first century.
Oakland County in 1992 carried the fever of southeast Michigan's economic destiny. The die had been cast in the late eighteenth century, when French Canadian trappers set up shop on the northern side of the Detroit River. Detroit, at the time, was what writer Joel Garreau called "a wild place in the wilderness, where the lands came close together between the broad expanses of Lake St. Clair and Lake Eire, where settlement began."
The opening of the Eire Canal in 1825 dramatically closed the time gap between southeast Michigan and the world beyond, as did the eventual development of rail links, the airline industry and modern-day electronic and satellite-based communication systems. By the mid-nineteenth century, Detroit had become a hotbed of soon-to-be industrialists, entreprenuers, inventors, developers and commercial artisans. An energy was unloosed -- an energy that remained pervasive in Oakland County in 1992.
Out of this came, first the buggie and then, the automobile. With the automobile came a huge infusion of capitol, wherewithall, craft, capability, coherence and character. In no certain order. But with great design upon the order that followed.
Detroit put America on wheels, became the arsenal of democracy, beget the Big Three, the Motown Sound and set in motion the development of Oakland County, to the north, to the logical point of suburban development.
That Oakland County grew as Detroit and Wayne County grew was no surprise. In the early days, much of what happened in Oakland County had to do with agriculture and leisure time activities. With more than 500 lakes, Oakland attracted summertime visitors from the city. Some built summer homes. Some eventually stayed for the winter.
The more they stayed, the more others followed. They came out Grand River Boulevard. Out Woodward Avenue. Out to what became "the suburbs," and later -- and certainly by 1992 -- what eventually became the new "center of gravity" in the Detroit Metropolitan area and, effectively, in southeast Michigan.
By 1992, it was safe to say, Oakland County residents had everything they needed ... within a short drive of home. Utility suppliers like Detroit Edison and Consumers Power provided the energy needs. The Detroit Water System provided most of the water needs. Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a 35-minute drive from the center of the county, offered international air service. Closer to home, the Oakland Pontiac Airport became a hub for corporate flights and cargo shipments.
By 1992, hotels providing approximately 14,500 rooms were on-line and operative, from Southfield to Birmingham to the Bloomfields, Pontiac, Rochester Hills and Waterford. Unique meeting facilities had also become fully integrated into the local texture at Meadowbrook Hall, Cranbrook Academy of Art and at country clubs and educational facilities. Moreover, eleven general medical and surgical hospitals were providing excellent services to the county's one million-plus population.
Oakland County was built upon a solid base that has provided a dynamic environment for economic growth and opportunity for both individuals and businesses in the community. Oakland County has emerged as a modern metropolitan center, due in large part to its impressive network of communication, transportation, energy providers and a supportive financial community.