Parts of Detroit – Downtown and what we now call Midtown – are booming. This is clearly a good thing in many ways. But there is increasing concern over what is to become of the city’s low-income residents. There are a lot of those.
Current estimates show that while poverty has declined, something like a quarter of a million Detroiters are still below the poverty line. Gentrification hasn’t become a major issue – yet. But there are signs that with the city’s revival, it may.
Five months ago, Mayor Mike Duggan announced plans to create a $250 million dollar Affordable Housing Fund, and said he would fight to preserve 10,000 affordable housing units across the city and build at least two thousand more.
That would be great, but there are several problems here. One is that so-called affordable housing may not really be affordable to those who need it. The traditional definition of affordable housing is something families with 80 percent of the metropolitan area’s average medium income can afford. Trouble is, that figure is something like twice the average Detroit household income, and the biggest single demographic is people whose income is only about 30 percent of that, or less than $26,000 a year. What’s to become of them?
Most of them live in neighborhoods seldom visited by planners or the press, like Herman Gardens or Chandler Park. But if revitalization does spread from the city’s core, and every neighborhood does have a future, as Duggan likes to say, this will be a problem.
We have already seen the first signs of it, as when Griswold Apartments, a low-income facility for low-income seniors, was rehabbed into a luxury apartment building called the Albert. The hundred or so mostly longtime residents were forced to move, except for one man whose body was found by construction workers weeks later; his heart may not have been able to stand the strain of being uprooted without a place to go.
This is not a simple issue. When I began teaching at Wayne State in 1993, much of Midtown was called the Cass Corridor, and I would see a couple of ghastly hookers and their sidekicks who apparently lived on two old mattresses in a rubbish-strewn vacant lot.
They are long gone now, and I don’t think anyone misses those days. But you have to wonder what happened to them, and to a wide assortment of local characters. They weren’t all exactly noble; many had substance abuse and other problems. Many of Detroit’s quarter of a million deeply poor have problems too, if only a lack of marketable skills, that have combined to keep them in deep poverty. Yet they are human and they are here.
They are not going to vanish, go back to Alabama or decide suddenly to become software engineers. They deserve decent housing, and they deserve to have city planners, as well as those in the state and nation, to be thinking about a way to include them in our future.
I am not talking about forcing the poor into housing projects or programs, but of providing them with alternatives. I have often felt that a revival of some form of the Depression-era WPA would make sense. I may be wrong, but I am convinced of this:
Ignoring the problem is not the answer, and policies that may prevent a quarter of a million people from having a place to live don’t make much sense either.
