Race for Detroit mayor narrowed

Voters in Detroit on Tuesday narrowed their choices in the city’s mayoral race to two: Mike Duggan, the incumbent mayor who has overseen the city as it has emerged from bankruptcy, and Coleman A. Young II, the son of Detroit’s longest serving mayor.

With a vast majority of precincts counted, Duggan, 59, who was elected in 2013 as the city’s first white mayor in four decades, had a wide lead among eight candidates in the non-partisan primary late Tuesday. Young, 34, a state senator whose father was Detroit’s first black mayor, was running a distant second. The two men, who are Democrats, will face each other in a general election Nov. 7.

The election will be a test of disparate issues in a city that, in a matter of only a few years, has experienced the nation’s largest ever municipal bankruptcy, a downtown building boom and a struggle to rid itself of thousands of vacant, crumbling buildings.

Critics had predicted the city might take years to emerge from bankruptcy and that any glimmer of a renaissance would take even longer. But signs of improvement have piled up. Street lights are on. Police response times have dropped. And some home sales prices have risen.

“This city is coming back to the way it was before,” said Rondo Johnson, 91, who has lived in Detroit for decades.

Some residents said race will be a factor in the election to lead this city, which is 82 per cent black. Young’s father, who died in 1997 after serving as mayor for two decades, is widely remembered as giving African-American residents a voice at this city’s municipal building.