Detroit has seen a lot of press lately. I remember as a high school student in the city when Time embedded a team of reporters and photographers to keep an eye on it in 2010. It was big news around town. The general response was interest; what did outsiders want to see so badly that a newsmagazine was willing to devote resources to a long-term look? The answer was failure. The public thinks of Detroit as a place characterized by debris, signifying American decline, but nevertheless as distant, almost foreign. Americans think that if Detroit can come back, America will always be on top. Americans think that if Detroit cannot recover, they might as well watch it decay.
My colleague Shahrukh Khan recently joined the phalanx of journalists and commentators buzzing with criticisms of old Detroit and praising the new. He asked you to believe that Detroit is rising from the ashes. Small business, he says, will bring Detroit back. Another HPR contributor, Ola Topczewska, described a scattering of optimistic business and non-profit initiatives, each one looking to affect change in different ways. Only time can tell, but certainly we must ask whether and how the rebuilt Detroit will be better than the current. Social and political revision is necessary to building a retooled Detroit, one capable of withstanding economic boom and bust, and one a diverse population can call a comfortable home. If Detroit does not overcome its history of segregation, not only racial but also socioeconomic, an economic comeback means nothing.
Dan Gilbert, Peter Karmanos, and Mike Ilitch are all investing in Detroit. Note, they are not saviors. They are investors. Detroiters are welcoming of change; the population has been misled and mistreated for generations. However, the solution is not just economic, and the goal should not just be economic recovery.
After all, the city has never been perfect. It was simply a boomtown. The history of Detroit was more or less quiet until Henry Ford changed the world. The population surged as labor from around the globe and the United States flocked to work the assembly lines and give their children a shot at the American dream. However, a unified Detroit never existed. Poor African-American Southerners came to work, and they lived with each other because of de facto segregation. Moreover, Italians lived with Italians, Irish with Irish, Polish with Polish, Germans with Germans, poor White Southerners with poor White Southerners. One was defined by ethnicity and creed. What parish one belonged to meant everything.
Racial tension flared in the 1920s and the 1940s before the riots of 1967 truly disrupted the precarious structure of the city. It was a perfect storm: white flight was underway, racial politics wreaked havoc on the status quo, and in Detroit, the automotive capital of the world, massive new highways led out of the city, beckoning homeowners to whisk their families away to a dream house in the suburbs. Only the addition to their morning commute gave them a moment’s pause. The black population could not follow because of actively discriminatory housing practices such as redlining, not to mention price restrictions. In subsequent decades, changes let much of the black upper and middle classes settle in certain close suburbs, further exacerbating the wealth gap between city and suburb.
So a major American city, still home to major corporations and a permanent underclass, was left to politically fend for itself. Politicians on either side of Eight Mile blamed the problems of the community on the other. Polarizing characters, fighters, won elected office. A widespread resentment built up, and politicians capitalized on it. Residents of the suburbs blame the black population of Detroit for ruining their city; the residents of the city consider the white population of the suburbs to be ignorant of urban life. The trend has been bucked in a few select places in the region, in places like Midtown and some middle class suburbs, where racial segregation has eroded somewhat. Still, the region is defined by its past.
Maybe to a business executive, the financial resurrection of a city is a good thing in and of itself. They might gain from a richer, cleaner Detroit. Nevertheless, the most important part of a city is its people. If the poor black residents of the city are simply sectioned off into new impoverished neighborhoods, if the Latino industrial workers in Southwest Detroit continue to live in poverty, if racial tension continues to divide the region, no economic improvement will matter.
What Detroit really needs is a mature political class in both the city and the suburbs willing not only to allow the tempting narrative of us versus them to whither away, but also to dismantle the barriers raised by previous generations. The how is not only economic.
Geography is extremely important. The money is in the suburbs and now in a thin strip starting around the iconic Renaissance Center and jutting Northwest along Woodward Avenue. Detroit is about 140 square miles. Compare that to Manhattan (about 23 square miles), and Boston (about 50 square miles). If the prosperity of a thin strip does not spread throughout the city, the consequence could be a rich city center surrounded by vast tracts of impoverished property. The increased tax base will help alleviate the current scarcity of city services, but investment in one zone will not make the city great, or even stable.
To build a new city, a city that can survive economic ups and downs, population shifts, and even some political mismanagement, resources should be devoted to creating a community of diversity, not just economically but socially. How to do that is the hard part. Education, property ownership, entrepreneurship, poverty relief, political leadership, youth, and, yes, investment, are all important factors. One thing is certain: until the focus is squarely on the people and the people’s needs, Detroit can never be the city it should be.
Photo Credit: Mashable.com