Detroit: Then and now
Back in the late 1980s I lived in northwest Detroit (at Seven Mile and Lahser) and worked downtown. I remember a t-shirt slogan that was very popular at the time: “I’m so bad I vacation in Detroit.” It was fitting. The few tourists who visited downtown saw a rundown commercial district with few shops or...
Back in the late 1980s I lived in northwest Detroit (at Seven Mile and Lahser) and worked downtown. I remember a t-shirt slogan that was very popular at the time: “I’m so bad I vacation in Detroit.” It was fitting. The few tourists who visited downtown saw a rundown commercial district with few shops or restaurants. The London Chop House, in its heyday may have been the best steakhouse between Chicago and New York, but shutdown for lack of customers in 1991. The center of town was declining, right along with its neighborhoods.
Today, tourists would probably be pleasantly surprised by downtown Detroit. There have been a string of new developments around Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius, anchored by Comerica Park (home of the defending American League Champion Detroit Tigers), as well as a new office building that houses software design company Compuware. Quicken Loans has also invested heavily in downtown real estate.
Quicken Loans and Compuware have encouraged their young workforces to relocate close to downtown Detroit, and the result is an attractive area that’s less fancy than Chicago’s but also less intimidating. There are some good restaurants –The London Chop House is back in business. Shopping options are improving, too. If you don’t wander too far from Woodward Avenue, or go north of the ballpark, you’d think you were in a normal, reasonably prosperous city.
Alas, Detroit covers a lot of ground aside from Woodward Avenue between Comerica Park and the river. Out in the other 120 or so square miles there are pockets of normalcy, but most of it is like the pictures we’ve all seen – ranging from seedy to decrepit to ruined to just plain empty. The photo essays convey something of the devastation, but to fully appreciate the scope of what happened in Detroit you have to see it in person.
Detroit lost more than a million people from the 1960s on. Many of them were victim – people who lost their jobs or their homes, or just got fed up with a failing economy and a hapless government. Even the ones who managed to land on their feet had to build new homes and maybe new businesses while their old ones were eventually left vacant. There are 700,000 people who remain – meaning Detroit is still easily the largest city in Michigan. More than a third of the city’s residents are poor. Close to half are illiterate. As awful as the physical damage to the city has been, the toll for people, who have to live among the wreckage with little in the way of education or economic opportunity, is the real shame.
Poor education was guaranteed by the powerful Detroit Federation of Teachers, whose members were among the best-paid teachers in the country in spite of atrocious academic results. Jobs were scarce because Detroit’s treatment of business was wildly inconsistent. Most of the time leading up to Detroit’s bankruptcy, the city’s leadership was deeply suspicious or even hostile. But then occasionally city fathers would decide they should promote jobs, which meant they would bend over backward to lure in some business with special incentives.
This led to debacles such as the General Motors Co. Poletown plant, in which the city used its eminent domain power to uproot a neighborhood with 1,300 homes, 140 businesses and half a dozen churches in order to make way for an auto assembly plant during the early 1980s. The misuse of city authority led to five years of litigation. Eventually, the courts approved the arrangement. (Later on the Michigan Supreme Court would reverse its decision, no longer allowing local governments to take land for private purposes.) Poletown was supposed to deliver 6,500 jobs, but as late as 2010 only half that numberwas hired. And who knows what might have happened with those small businesses if they had been left alone?
As things stand now, you don’t need to be bad to visit Detroit, but you’d have to be really tough or really desperate to live there. Downtown has started to recover a bit because, for once, city government has managed to simply allow local businessmen to build their businesses with minimum interference. For the rest of Detroit to recover, that mindset will need to take root permanently and then spread throughout the rest of the city.
Until then, the condition of the city is a tragedy – and it ought to be a national scandal as well. The progressive coalition that has run the city since the early 1960s ought to be examined closely, and its errors exposed and studied. If we learn the right lessons, we can avoid having any other large cities go through what happened in Detroit.