EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
How Real is Detroit’s Comeback?
When I first started teaching at Wayne State University in 1993, there were vacant lots a few blocks from my office with homeless people sitting on mattresses.
Now, they’ve been replaced by gleaming new and renovated buildings. There isn’t any doubt that “Downtown” and what they now call “Midtown” Detroit looks and feels better than it has in decades. Some of the change has been quite dramatic.
But what does this “comeback” really mean?
As has often been noted, the renaissance hasn’t spread to many neighborhoods. While new jobs have come into the city, mostly by being moved back from the suburbs, the percentage of jobs held by Detroiters is smaller than it was a decade ago.
There are a significant number of poor people, without much education, who are never going to be able to work for any of Dan Gilbert’s firms. What will become of them?
Detroit has been out of bankruptcy and barely in the black for some time now – but what would even a mild recession do to that?
The city has still been losing population, though more slowly. A significant number of young professionals have indeed moved into Detroit. But in many cases, their drivers’ licenses still say they live at their parents’ homes in the suburbs.
That’s because otherwise their car insurance would be unaffordable, even under reform legislation enacted earlier this year.
Detroit Public Schools endured years of emergency management, before being reorganized and freed of their bad debt. They have a dynamic new superintendent who gets high marks. But the fact is that nearly 90 percent of all third graders are less than proficient in reading and math. And another fact is that most parents in the city do not put their children into what’s now known as the Detroit Public Schools Community District.
They put them in charters, they put their kids in private schools or so-called schools of choice in the suburbs. The state funding formula established by Proposal A makes it difficult for the Detroit schools to ever compete. Public transportation in Detroit and coordination with the suburbs’ systems is woefully inadequate, meaning many people who need jobs can’t get to where the jobs are.
The city also desperately needs to attract new jobs and businesses, and it has something like 23 square miles of publicly owned land to sell. But it is mainly scattered in small checkerboard-like parcels. And that makes it hard to attract potential businesses and factories who need sprawling, multiple-acre campuses, especially since the city can no longer use its power of Eminent Domain to take land for private development.
Detroit needs money, people and more good-paying jobs. Everyone knows that. The problem is how do you get any one of those three without the others?
How do you get Detroit to move beyond the shadow of their past, and come up with a viable plan for a sustainable and better future?
