DETROIT – Is the glass half full or half empty? Are things in battered Detroit truly going to keep getting better – or is the city’s much-celebrated comeback largely a media creation?
The answer depends on both who you ask – and how you ask the question. The first years of this decade were probably, in many ways, the worst for the Motor City since Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac climbed out of a canoe and founded the place in 1701.
After years in which Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s corruption both embarrassed and financially damaged the city, the bottom fell out. The state took control of Detroit in 2013, and named an emergency manager to run the place. He promptly declared bankruptcy.
Yet after that, the city began what seemed to some an almost miraculous turnaround. The city emerged from bankruptcy shorn of most of its debt – and the public schools did much the same.
Mike Duggan, a county political boss and prosecutor who went on to fix a battered hospital system, became Detroit’s first white mayor in 40 years, winning a primary on a stunning write-in vote.
Within months, things felt different. Suddenly, every street in Detroit had working street lights for the first time in decades. An ambitious program of demolishing vacant and collapsing houses was begun. Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans billionaire, moved his offices and employees from the suburbs back to downtown Detroit.
Soon, a gleaming downtown emerged that looked and felt better than it has in decades. New and renovated apartments followed.
Young, upwardly mobile suburbanites moved in. Suddenly, Detroit was cool and trendy again, and its mayor a media rock star.
But the reality was, as it always is, far more complicated than the image. When the U.S. Census counts the population on April 1, it is certain to find that Detroit is losing people, as it has in every census since 1950. That year, it counted 1,849,568 Detroiters.
Some experts think that number may have hit two million by 1954, when the first of the freeways opened the way to flee to the suburbs. Sixty years later, Detroit had shrunk to 713,777.
Now, demographers are guessing the city has no more than 672,000 – and say that while the population loss has slowed markedly, Detroit is still losing people.
Detroit is also gaining jobs – but most of them are being held by people who live in the suburbs. The percentage of jobs held by Detroiters who actually live in Detroit is smaller than a decade ago.
The city’s public schools have begun growing again, and there is almost universal high praise for Dr. Nikolai Vitti, their superintendent. But the reality is that most city children of school age still go to private, suburban or charter schools.
And the reality is also that the vast majority of children in what is now called the Detroit Public School Community District are failing to meet minimum proficiency standards on standardized tests.
So is the glass half full or half empty? I sat down recently for a podcast on Detroit with three of the city’s most respected urbanologists. “There are two myths in Detroit,” said John Gallagher, a columnist and award-winning author of numerous books on the city. “There’s two really dangerous myths out there right now. One is that Detroit is back and everything is wonderful.”
“That other is that nothing has changed, that it is still horrible. They are both wrong. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there is still a long way to go.”
John Mogk, a law professor at Wayne State University who has been deeply involved with the city for many years, essentially feels the same way. “I think there is much more hope in the neighborhoods today than there was seven, eight, nine years ago – even if the recovery hasn’t started to reach those neighborhoods,” he said.
“They feel as if something positive may be about to happen, even if it isn’t happening yet.”
However, Karen Dumas, a lifelong Detroiter who has had careers in both media and government, feels somewhat differently.
“We need to realize first of all that the Detroit of tomorrow is not going to be the Detroit of yesterday, with two million people, and people need to abandon the idea that it can be.”
“I think we need a land use strategy. The demolitions look good and feel great, but we need to be asking how to use this land,” said Dumas, who served as strategist and communications director for Mayor Dave Bing, who took office after the disastrous Kilpatrick administration.
“We also – people in the community need to see what’s happening and how and why it benefits them,” she said.
Detroiters also, she added, need to see people who look like them – people of color – involved in making decisions.
“There’s sort of a dangerous narrative that Detroit had this failed black leadership, and now there’s a white mayor and school superintendent and things are getting fixed,” she added.
Everyone does agree that the city badly needs better public transit – and especially, new business and jobs.
Mogk thinks state law needs to be changed to allow the city to use eminent domain to take land that could be transferred to private industry to assemble parcels large enough to be able to attract major developments and the jobs they’d create.
Each of the experts worried about the city’s ability to sustain its fragile comeback – or even stay solvent – if a recession were to hit.
But the bottom line may have been put best by Gallagher, who lives on the city’s riverfront. “There is no overarching solution. We just have to keep grinding away at a hundred different things, and again, we are making progress – though we’ve got a long way to go.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
