Rob On: Teen Takeovers

There’s a phenomenon happening across the country—though I don’t know how entirely new it is, as I only heard the term a week or two ago—known as the “teen takeover.” Essentially, a bunch of kids utilize social media and smartphones to converge on a downtown area en masse, usually because they feel they have nowhere else to go.

While I’ve been tracking it on the local news here in Detroit, this isn’t just a Michigan problem. From Chicago’s lakefront to malls in Atlanta, Orlando, and New York, major cities across the United States are grappling with the exact same headlines.

I have to give credit to kids today: they know how to handle technology. Most of my students don’t read or write for pleasure, and common sense sometimes seems to be in short supply, but they completely understand how to leverage social media. They have an incredible knack for disseminating information via sophisticated, fast-moving flyers to as many people as humanly possible, as fast as they can.

Within Detroit proper, hundreds of kids have been converging downtown, generally just walking up and down the streets because they have no particular destination. That has become the central argument surrounding these takeovers: kids simply don’t have places to go anymore. And based strictly on my decades of experience as an educator, I know one universal truth: when kids have absolutely nothing to do, they get into trouble. This whole idea of a “teen takeover” is just asking for a chaotic situation.

The Extinction of the Teenage Hangout

I’m going to make myself sound old here, but back in my day, the mall was the cornerstone of teen culture. If you weren’t shopping at the mall, you were working there; if you weren’t working, you were just hanging out—walking from store to store, looking at girls or guys, and generally being seen. The mall of my childhood even had a small, four-screen movie theater attached, giving us one more reason to flock there.

When I was younger, kids also spent their summers playing in local parks and rec sports leagues—soccer, baseball, softball. These days, the travel league phenomenon has largely co-opted summer rec sports. If you aren’t paying thousands of dollars to travel across the state, you’re left on the sidelines. It leaves the less athletically inclined kids completely by the wayside, destroying another organic way for teens to socialize.

Even finding a simple summer job feels impossible for them now. I hear my students complain constantly about how tough it is to get hired. The entire application process has become automated. Everything is submitted online, and for all I know, companies use algorithm keyword filters to flag or discard responses before a human being ever sees them. We’ve completely lost the element of the “eye test.” Most entry-level places don’t offer immediate, face-to-face interviews anymore unless they are utterly desperate for staff. If a kid can’t even get a foot in the door to work a register, that’s another eight hours a day they’re left to fill on their own.

Lean Into the Crowd, Don’t Fight It

When I was in high school, the local Burger King became our designated hangout after football games. Sure, kids made a mess and probably trashed the parking lot from time to time, but they also flooded the drive-thru, spent money, and bought food. They actively supported the business. If you walked into a Burger King at 10:00 PM back then and saw it full of high schoolers, it was clear the space had become a community hub.

Kids today don’t have those organic hangouts. I remember when I was teaching in South Carolina, Summerville High School—which had roughly 3,000 students—was directly across the street from a Tastee Freeze. Students would flood the place immediately after school. It was a local institution. Of course, when a business leans heavily into the teen crowd, they always risk alienating their adult clientele.

But what if businesses leaned into it intentionally instead of fighting it? What if a fast-food joint actively touted Friday nights as “Friday Night Lights,” explicitly welcoming the high school crowd after the game? The implication would be clear for older families who might want to avoid the noise, and the business could capture a loyal, spending demographic safely.

Hyper-Commercialized Cities

Instead of creating these hubs, we’ve hyper-commercialized our downtowns. A lot of the businesses in downtown Detroit are bars, upscale dining establishments, or massive entertainment venues like Comerica Park, Ford Field, and Little Caesars Arena. Most kids can’t afford a ticket to a Tigers, Red Wings, or Pistons game unless they’re sitting in the absolute nosebleeds. The rest of the corridor is full of high-end places that either actively frown upon teenagers or are explicitly not geared toward them.

Let me be clear on a couple of things. No, I do not advocate for or defend the “takeover” phenomenon. I know that in downtown Detroit and other major cities, these gatherings have occasionally sparked fights and even shootings. That kind of behavior is absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances. However, any time you gather a massive crowd of people, someone is going to act like a knucklehead. That’s true whether you’re talking about a sporting event, a concert, or a street takeover.

Unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I’d probably be running for office. But I do know that the pandemic and our collective smartphone addiction sucked a massive amount of socialization out of us as a people.

Giving Back the Spaces to Be Young

To the city’s credit, I’ve noticed a lot of beautiful new parks and green spaces under construction or recently opened around Detroit, like the massive new Centennial Park on the riverfront or the upcoming indoor skate park at the old Packard Plant. They look great. But concrete and grass aren’t enough on their own. Cities need to get much more structured with their parks and rec programming. There needs to be a real, aggressive push to actively recruit and involve these kids in city-sponsored activities, public pools, skating rinks, and organized leagues.

It’s tough when I look back at what I did for fun as a teenager. I was involved in sports and I had a job. Of course, I was also a nerd, so a lot of my time was spent just hanging out with friends listening to 90s alternative music, playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, or reading comic books—all while thinking about girls.

We had spaces to be young, dumb, and relatively safe. If we don’t want kids taking over the downtown streets, we need to start giving them those spaces back.

Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Whether I’m closing in on 1,000 consecutive days of blogging or reflecting on the decade of work that brought me here, the mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.

Today’s post is inspired by the WordPress Daily Prompt. While I’ve taken the topic in my own direction for the Road to 1,000 Days, you can find more responses to today’s prompt HERE .

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