On a sunny Friday morning in September, Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, got behind the wheel of his black Jeep Grand Cherokee to give a tour of the city he has led for 10 years. Not far from Michigan Central Station, the former hulking ruin that was recently transformed into a gleaming office complex, he slowed to point to a construction site of vertical steel girders and yellow earth-moving machines. It will become a 600-room JW Marriott hotel, scheduled to open by 2027, when college basketball’s Final Four will be played in Detroit.

Farther west, more earth movers were crawling along a mile-long stretch of riverfront land, adding contours that will soon be a spacious, green recreation area, with elaborate play structures, a water park, basketball courts and outdoor workout equipment. It will be one of the final links in a 3.5-mile chain of parks, open spaces and bike paths that have replaced the warehouses and industrial yards that previously lined the Detroit River.

Just beyond the park stood a vestige of Detroit’s troubled past — a crumbling, boarded-up building that was once the Southwest Detroit Hospital, which closed 18 years ago. Detroit City FC, a professional soccer club, hopes to raze it and build a new stadium.

A mile or so away, Duggan, 66, pulled up at another construction site that will be the home of a University of Michigan research and innovation center focusing on software, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. “This is where we are going to create the jobs of the future,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, Duggan stepped out of the Jeep at a small park off Rosa Parks Boulevard, north of downtown. In 1967, it was the site of an unlicensed after-hours club that was raided by police. The action provoked a violent uprising that raged for five days, left 34 people dead, 1,200 injured and more than 14,000 homes, buildings and stores burned or destroyed. The episode spurred the flight of thousands of residents from the city and marked the start of Detroit’s long, painful decline.

“We had tanks in the streets,” Duggan said softly. “This is where the violence began in 1967. So standing here now is very powerful.”

On this day, though, the mayor strode into a bustling coffee shop nearby — called The Congregation — housed in a former small church. He was quickly recognized.

“Mr. Mayor!” a blond woman with a nose piercing said, standing to shake his hand. The woman, Adelaide Welden, 34, is an example of the optimism building in Detroit, and the kind of young, urban pioneers the city is starting to attract. A Texas native, she moved to the city and bought a duplex that she and her fiance are renovating. “I’m getting married next week!” she told Duggan with a smile. “I love Detroit.”

For more than half a century, Detroit has been widely viewed as the most troubled and seemingly unfixable example of urban decay in America; to many, it was the murder capital of the country. (And as recently as Oct. 10, former President Donald Trump, addressing the Detroit Economic Club, called the city a “mess.”)

At one point about 40% of its streetlights didn’t work. The city lost about two-thirds of its population, going from more than 2 million people in the 1950s to just over 600,000 in more recent years. The downtown was dotted with boarded-up office towers and apartment buildings left to rot.

In 2013, the city hit its nadir: Burdened by $19 billion in debt, Detroit became the largest city in the United States to file for bankruptcy protection.

Since then, however, under Duggan, and with the help of some billionaire investors, Detroit has made progress reviving the downtown area as well as a nearby district known as Midtown, home to Wayne State University, and the Corktown neighborhood, once a stronghold of Irish immigrants. More than a half-dozen upscale hotels, dozens of restaurants, and refurbished apartment buildings have opened in those areas, bringing life back to the city’s center.

And now Detroit’s comeback seems to be gaining serious momentum and spreading to neighborhoods farther from the city center. In the past nine years, the city has provided grants to help more than 170 small businesses open — a sign of economic optimism that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

More than 35,000 vacant and dilapidated homes that had long depressed neighborhood property values and attracted crime have been razed or renovated. A recent report by the University of Michigan estimated that the value of Black-owned homes in Detroit increased by nearly $3 billion from 2014 to 2022. And another sign of progress: In 2023, Detroit’s population grew by nearly 2,000 to 633,000, a slight uptick but the first yearly increase since 1957.

Detroit still faces many thorny issues. Its schools remain underfunded, with low proficiency rates in reading, math and science. Last year, there were 252 criminal homicides in the city — the fewest since 1966 but still a significant number. About a third of its residents live below the poverty line. Blight persists in many areas. Keeping and creating affordable housing as new developments grow and housing costs rise is a tough balancing act, Duggan acknowledged.

“Housing affordability is a big issue,” said Patrick Cooper-McCann, a professor of urban studies and planning at Wayne State University. “Detroit’s No. 1 problem is still the prevalence of poverty. Lower-income people struggle with basic costs.”

Many neighborhoods that have been cleaned up still haven’t had much new development, Cooper-McCann added, and the local transit system hasn’t restored service to prepandemic levels. Filling all the renovated office space in the downtown area has also become a challenge now that many companies allow employees to work from home at least part of the week.

Some big-name employers have moved operations and thousands of jobs to Detroit. They include Ford Motor, Microsoft, Google, Stellantis and most notably Quicken Loans and other financial businesses owned by Dan Gilbert, a native Detroiter who has invested several billion dollars to buy and renovate more than 100 properties in the city. The Ilitch family, founders of the Little Caesar’s pizza empire, have also invested billions in Detroit real estate around the downtown hockey and basketball arena that is named after the company and opened in 2017.

Similarly, the Ford family built Ford Field for the NFL team it owns, the Lions, while Ford Motor has invested in renovating office space in Corktown and spent $1 billion renovating Michigan Central. GM, which defied a corporate exodus and kept its headquarters in Detroit, will soon move to a new building in the heart of downtown.

But the city will need further job creation to keep its revival going, especially jobs that city residents can fill.

“We have to work to attract entrepreneurs,” said Kevin Johnson, the CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., the city’s economic development agency. “We have a lot of open land where new industrial opportunities can be housed.”

In May, Detroit celebrated a major step forward in its recovery. The 18-story Michigan Central building, a Beaux-Arts train station that had been a notorious eyesore for four decades, was reopened after a $950 million restoration by Ford Motor, which plans to move about 1,000 employees into the edifice and other nearby buildings. The project was backed by William C. Ford Jr., the automaker’s executive chair.

Located in Corktown, the building features a soaring vaulted ceiling in its main hall that was modeled after Grand Central Terminal in New York. Next to it Ford also renovated another building that is the home of Newlab, an innovation center housing 100 startup companies.

Duggan’s formula for turning around the city started with simply improving everyday life: fixing the streetlights, improving trash collection, shortening response times by police and other emergency services, reopening parks and building more recreation areas. Cameras installed at gas stations have helped cut carjackings. A system that detects the sounds of gunshots and alerts police immediately when they go off has helped reduce violent crime.

The city’s bankruptcy reorganization, which relieved the city from making payments on a portion of its $19 billion debt, freed up funds in its general budget for some of the cleanup project.

“You make everyday life better, and that gets people to stay in the city,” he said. “If people stay, then you can start to bring businesses back.”