Dearborn’s mayor says his city is testing solutions to Michigan’s biggest problems

Dearborn is growing faster than most cities in Michigan. That’s forcing Mayor Abdullah Hammoud to rethink housing, public safety, and how the city funds major projects.

DEARBORN—Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud says his city is dealing with many of the same pressures facing other communities across Michigan—rising housing costs, aging infrastructure, tight municipal budgets, and increasingly heated national politics.

But he also believes Dearborn offers a glimpse of how cities might respond.

“Dearborn is an important city to the overall Michigan ecosystem,” Hammoud told The ’Gander in a recent interview. “Dearborn is at the forefront of a lot of innovation and a lot of potential solutions to many of the problems cities face across the state and across the country.”

Fresh off a landslide re-election, Hammoud is a few months into his second term leading the Detroit suburb of roughly 110,000 residents—and drawing attention beyond city limits.

Dearborn is home to Ford Motor Co.’s massive headquarters campus, as well as the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village—one of Michigan’s most visited tourist destinations. The city is also far younger and growing much faster than just about every other community in the state.

At 35, Hammoud is already one of the youngest mayors of a major Michigan city. 

His administration has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in outside funding, expanded affordable housing development, and pushed community-based policing strategies—moves that have put Dearborn on the radar of policymakers and political observers across the state.

For Hammoud, the city’s growth offers both opportunity and pressure: “Growth comes with growing pains. But Dearborn is at the forefront of a lot of potential solutions,” he said. 

Housing pressure intensifies

One of the clearest examples of those growing pains is housing.

City data shows Dearborn currently has fewer than 2% of its housing units vacant—a sign of an extremely tight market that Hammoud says is driving intense competition for real estate.

“Putting in an offer on a house is highly competitive. You’re getting 30 to 45 offers on a single home,” Hammoud told The ‘Gander. “It’s a vicious cycle that keeps feeding itself.”

While rising home values benefit existing homeowners, they also make it harder for younger families to enter the market and can drive property tax assessments higher, Hammoud said.

The issue extends far beyond Dearborn. Michigan faces a statewide housing shortage, with state officials estimating tens of thousands of additional homes are needed to meet demand.

To ease that pressure locally, Hammoud’s administration is trying to significantly expand the local housing supply, including with a new neighborhood on the east side, which will feature about 300 homes and apartments built primarily on city-owned land, near the intersection of Greenfield Road and Paul Street. 

A recent city study found the city will need roughly 1,500 additional housing units by 2035. About 600 of those units are already approved or in development.

Hammoud also says housing policy should focus not just on affordability, but ownership.

“We always talk about the affordable housing crisis, but we never pair it with the home ownership crisis,” Hammoud said. “If we just create renters out of everyone, that’s where we really begin to work against the overall health of our communities.”

Fighting for every dollar

Housing isn’t the only challenge that Michigan cities are facing.

Hammoud said modern city leadership increasingly requires aggressively pursuing outside funding—from federal grants to philanthropic partnerships—to support major projects. 

Since taking office, he said Dearborn has secured roughly $200 million in outside funding.

That includes infrastructure grants for major road projects, disaster-recovery funds for flooding-related work, public safety grants for fire staffing, and more, MLive reports.

“You have to fight for every single dollar,” Hammoud said.

Michigan’s municipal tax structure is known for leaving cities with limited options for raising new revenue. Property taxes remain the primary funding source, while tools available in other states—such as local hotel or sales taxes—are largely unavailable to Michigan cities.

That reality, Hammoud said, forces local leaders to get creative—including by chasing more grant dollars, building more public-private partnerships, and lobbying for more state and federal funding to pay for the types of projects that go beyond basic city infrastructure and services.

“My budget covers the ABCs of government,” Hammoud said. “All the glitzy, glamorous projects that people tend to get excited about, you have to find outside pools of funding to cover.”

Rethinking public safety

Dearborn has also seen a sharp decline in violent crime in recent years, part of a broader national trend. Hammoud attributes that, in part, to a major shift in local policing priorities.

When he first took office, many traffic citations focused on minor violations like expired plates or items hanging from rearview mirrors, Hammoud said. Nowadays, cops focus more on speeding and reckless driving—issues residents have consistently raised as their biggest concerns.

“I’ve never knocked on a door and had someone tell me the expired license plate in front of them bothered them,” Hammoud said. “They say speeding and reckless driving bothers them.”

The shift also helped reduce crashes causing injuries by about 15% last year, city data shows.

National politics hit home

Some challenges facing the city are largely outside local control. As the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement across the country, Hammoud said cities like Dearborn—one of the largest Arab American communities in the United States—are watching closely.

“With the emergence of ICE in a very aggressive fashion in cities across this country, Dearborn is preparing for what that wave may look like when it lands in Michigan,” Hammoud said.

The Trump administration has also moved to end Temporary Protected Status for some immigrant groups, including people from Yemen and Lebanon who are living in Michigan.

“I think you’re going to see a surge of [US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] officers try to come in and get people who came here legally and strip them out of their home because the president decided to cut their visas overnight,” Hammoud said. “That is very dangerous.”

Nearly half of Dearborn’s population was born outside of the US. Hammoud, the son of Lebanese immigrants, says that reality increasingly shapes how he talks about the city publicly.

“I find myself needing to uplift the story of Dearborn more because it’s a real success story of an immigrant community,” he said. “Immigrants tend to take jobs that traditional folk are not willing to take on. They’re opening small businesses at a higher rate, for example.”

A hometown mayor

Born and raised in Dearborn, Hammoud says leading his hometown carries personal weight. 

When he sees trash in the median of a local road, he said, it feels like somebody littered right outside of his home. He keeps a garbage picker in his car just for the occasion.

“I’m still just Abdullah,” he said. “I just happen to have a little bit more responsibility now.”

As he looks toward the rest of his second term, Hammoud says his administration’s success won’t just be measured in infrastructure projects or development. Instead, he hopes to measure his impact through more young people growing up in Dearborn—and then choosing to stay.

“It’s all about leaving Dearborn better off than when I inherited it,” Hammoud told The ‘Gander. “Making sure my daughters, when they grow up, think of this Dearborn as the place they want to settle down and start their families in. … That, to me, is the biggest metric of success.”

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