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Tony Devito

Tony Devito image
Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
November
Year
1975
OCR Text

Planning Director

The stagnation of the federal government's housing program, which has struck Detroit with thousands of deteriorating dwellings, was enough to make Tony DeVito leave Washington.

De Vito, 50, who is Detroit's new planning director, was running HUD's New Towns program, which recently tailed off into nothingness. He had previously gained a reputation for new-town planning in the private sector, designed Montreal's widely-hailed new downtown plaza, and worked with a company that built prefabricated housing tracts and suburban developments. He has architecture and planning degrees f rom Columbia, Harvard, and M.I.T.

From a floundering federal agency with no money for his specialty, De Vito has jumped into the middle of what, for him, is a whole new ball game working with an existing city setting, and one that, in fact, came into being virtually without planning of any sort (except that done by the auto industry for new plants, and the highways needed to bring in the work force).

So formidable has been the challenge of creating some order out of this mess that De Vito, when he moved to Detroit six months ago, became the city's fourth planning director in the past two years.

De Vito's new job involves much more than deciding where developers can or can't build their projects. He has begun work on a master plan for the city's physical face that projects decades ahead. Since he has to take into account every social and economic factor known to humanity, other city departments' plans get run through him including those for public health, transportation, conservation, and community and economic development. De Vito must try to balance and coordinate the short and long-range plans generated by the city to keep things flowing in the same direction.

It’s a job that's proved hard to fill in Detroit; but as Mayor Young's administration begins to flesh out and implement its vision for the city's future, a planner of De Vito's skills and experience may well find the Motor City a rewarding - as well as an extremely challenging place - to work.