The Review Magazine Spring 2025

HOUGHTON CONNECTING

By Emily Landau

HOUGHTON pop. 8,386

The winner of the 2024 Community Excellence Award was the City of Houghton with Connecting Houghton , a placemaking project decades in the making that transformed the city’s aging downtown and waterfront into a vibrant, accessible, and unique public space through a combination of incremental change, community engagement, and DIY spirit. For years, this city of about 8,300 on the Upper Peninsula’s Keweenaw Waterway had been developing its waterfront, a muddy, hazardous industrial area originally used by trains and freighters hauling copper and coal. “We started acquiring waterfront property in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Tom Merz, former mayor of Houghton (from 1996 to 2006) and chairperson of the city’s planning commission. “By 1990, most of it was public. The goal was to transform it from a place where kids weren’t allowed to play into the place where you bring your kids.”

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