SE Michigan in 2075

February 8, 2026

At our Song Foundation board retreat in Seattle last week, we were each prompted to write a vision for SE Michigan in the year 2075. Here's my attempt at this:

By 2075, Southeast Michigan is a region where opportunity is durable and broadly accessible. Young people from every neighborhood move seamlessly between education, work, and civic life, with clear pathways into skilled trades, entrepreneurship, technology, arts, and public leadership. Schools, workplaces, and communities are integrated rather than siloed, and talent is retained because people can build full lives here - professionally, culturally, and financially.

The regional economy is innovative and inclusive by design. Long-standing industrial assets have been continuously adapted into labs, studios, housing, and small businesses. Ownership is distributed through cooperatives, community trusts, and locally-rooted enterprises, ensuring that economic growth translates into shared wealth and long-term stability. Social systems are strong enough to absorb risk and disagreement, enabling experimentation, civic participation, and sustained innovation without precarity.

This future was built through a reinforcing shift in culture, people, and institutions. Leaders were expected not just to succeed, but to reinvest - mentoring others, sharing ownership, and carrying responsibility for place. Institutions evolved to reward this behavior, embedding long-term stewardship into capital, governance, and policy. What made the system durable were shared tables of leaders who carried common norms across sectors and generations, translating culture into structure again and again.

The foundation’s role was catalytic, not permanent: convening those tables, seeding trust, and helping moments of cultural readiness lead to institutional change. Its measure of success was planned obsolescence - designing a flywheel of reinvestment and mutual responsibility strong enough that the foundation could eventually step back, or spend down, without the system losing momentum.