View in browser PRESENTED BY LEAFFILTER Axios DetroitBy Joe Guillen and Annalise Frank · Oct 07, 2025
⚾ On this date in 1935, the Tigers won their first World Series with a 4-3 win at Navin Field over the Chicago Cubs.
☂️ Today’s weather: Rainy, with highs in the upper 60s.
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Today’s newsletter is 1,006 words — a 4-minute read. 1 big thing: How cities address povertyBy Annalise Frank
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
When the next mayor takes office in January, they’ll need all kinds of expertise to try and improve Detroiters’ finances.
Why it matters: Poverty is a critical and complex issue here. While it’s crucial to draw on longtime local experts, it can also be worthwhile to cast a wider net and see what has worked elsewhere.
State of play: Detroit residents’ incomes have made significant gains, but the poverty rate still climbed recently.
- As the previous story in our poverty series showed, mayoral candidates City Council President Mary Sheffield and the Rev. Solomon Kinloch Jr. want to incentivize employers to pay living wages, among other strategies.
Caveat: It can be tough for Detroit’s mayor to make change because Michigan cities are barred from instituting their own minimum wages, and national forces affect the local economy.
Between the lines: Poverty is a massive, but abstract problem. To see it as solvable, policymakers can divide it up into stages, according to Tonantzin Carmona, who studies wealth and inequality at Brookings Metro, a research program for local-level policy.
An example of stages:
🚰 Immediate relief: Eviction prevention, utility support or cash assistance — like guaranteed basic income, which has been piloted around the country and discussed in Detroit.
👶 Medium-term stability: Child care and smaller-scale assistance programs supporting a certain number of residents.
🎒 Long-term mobility:Improving educational outcomes; state-level advocacy to raise wages and funding for cities; large-scale efforts to increase homeownership; and workforce readiness.
Plus: Raising revenue to support safety net-like programs is also important, Carmona says, but that revenue shouldn’t come from those who can least afford it.
- “How do we stop making poverty worse?”
- She points to work in San Francisco and Chicago to reform towing fees and fines for parking and speeding tickets, which disproportionately impact Black and brown residents.
Zoom out: Getting local funding for health and food assistanceprograms is as important as ever. Sweeping federal changes have put more of those costs on states and localities, says Kamolika Das, local policy director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
- “It’s going to be a ton of money to raise just to keep current local services at the existing level, and to really be able to do anything even more beneficial … you just have to think very ambitiously about what can be done,” Das says.
2. Looking back at Duggan’s efforts 
Mayor Mike Duggan gives his final State of the City speech in March. Photo: Courtesy of the city of Detroit via Flickr
In his 12-year tenure, Mayor Mike Duggan sought to make job creation a crucial piece of his legacy.
Why it matters: As Detroit looks toward new leadership, with goals to improve wages for the lowest-income residents, it’s critical to record past strategies.
- Economists have praised progress made in growing incomes, but poverty remains pervasive.
State of play: Duggan’s strategies have included attracting new businesses and development, and targeting specific neighborhoods for growth.
- One cornerstone has been Detroit at Work, launched in 2017 as an all-encompassing hub to link residents with jobs. It offers 70 training programs.
Zoom in: In an interview with Axios, deputy mayor Melia Howard pointed to a “critical” jobs access strategy first used at Stellantis’ east-side plant in 2019, and then replicated when other companies like Amazon came to town hiring.
- With workforce readiness assistance through Detroit at Work, employers agreed to give city residents first priority for applying to jobs before the larger public.
Between the lines: The city also spent pandemic recovery dollars on programs including Skills for Life, paying participants to work for the city while getting training, high school diplomas or GEDs; other earn-while-learningopportunities; home repair; and homelessness and foreclosure prevention.
What they’re saying: “The programs that we have instituted, I don’t believe show that we are a tale of two cities,” Howard says. “You can see Detroiters helping each other every single solitary day with program[s] and opportunities.”
The other side: Critics like Detroit People’s Platform argue Duggan’s overall strategy embraced a “status quo” that privileged the powerful with tax incentives.
- The group says Detroit has perpetuated an uneven recovery across neighborhoods and hasn’t done enough at a larger scale for Black Detroiters living outside the downtown core.
Share this story 3. The Grapevine: Tigers return to Comerica 
Comerica Park’s main entrance before Opening Day in April. Photo: Mark Cunningham/MLB Photos via Getty Images
🌭 Playoff baseball returns to Comerica Park today at 4:08pm for Game 3 of the American League Division Series against the Seattle Mariners. FS1 is broadcasting.
- Detroit’s returning home after playing its first five playoff games on the road. Pitcher Jack Flaherty will start for the Tigers, per the Detroit News.
- The best-of-five series is tied 1-1.
🏦 Speaking of Comerica Park, the stadium’s corporate namesake was acquired by Fifth Third for $10.9 billion in stock, the banks announced yesterday. (Axios)
- The merger won’t result in a new name for Comerica Park in 2026, but a stadium rebrand would be possible the following year, Comerica Bank CEO Curt Farmer told the Free Press.
- “No change for the 2026 season, but you should expect that there will be eventually a name change,” he said.
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Fill out a free estimate form. 4. 🛒 WIC and SNAP at risk during shutdownBy Julianna Bragg
Data: USDA, U.S. Census Bureau; Note: Share calculated using July 2024 population estimates; Map: Kavya Beheraj/Axios
Government food assistanceprograms may be at risk if Congress is unable to reach a funding agreement to stop the shutdown soon.
Why it matters: Millions of mothers, infants and low-income families who rely on WIC and SNAP — programs commonly known as food stamps — could lose that support.
- Here in Michigan, nearly 15% of the population participated in SNAP as of March, per USDA and Census data.
State of play: WIC could run out of funds within weeks.
- The federal Office of Management and Budget has committed funding for SNAP through October, but hasn’t confirmed how long funds would last after that.
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Our picks:
👻 Joe is seeing so many awesome Halloween house decorations around Ferndale.
🎃 Annalise is not trying to reignite the candy corn debate, but she is deep in Brach’s pumpkin candy season.
Edited by Tyler Buchanan.
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