DETROIT – Twenty years ago today, New York’s twin towers were destroyed by the worst terrorist incident in our nation’s history. Destroying Detroit took much longer.
Longer, but in some ways, the destruction may have been more complete. Seventy years ago, Detroit was at its peak. The city was the fourth largest in the country, nearing two million people. That summer, President Harry Truman came to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the city.
Detroit at that point had more than six times as many people as it had in 1900. Everybody expected the boom to keep on booming.
Today, Detroit barely resembles the city it once was. The new census shows it with a mere 639,111 inhabitants, barely one-third what it had in 1950. Census estimates show the population has declined further since then. Those who live in Detroit today are poor and black — although the white population has been increasing.
Most of this has been known for decades, and a succession of mayors have predicted that the city would come back, that Detroit would one day be a great place to live again.
But it is time to ask the tough blunt questions:
Will Detroit ever really “come back”” and be a viable city again, with a sizable middle class? Can it? Is that even possible?
Much of what we know is not reassuring. Today entire neighborhoods are largely abandoned, overgrown, in ruins. Less than half the adult population is even in the labor force.
The news is not all bad: Mike Duggan is certainly the most capable mayor the city has had in decades. The city has street lights again, and the downtown is probably in better shape than at any time since the city’s heyday in the early 1950s.
But the neighborhoods, with a few exceptions, are rundown to ghastly, and most parents won’t put their children in Detroit’s public schools, even though they too are clearly better than they were.
Perhaps most telling of all, there are not enough jobs — at least, enough good paying jobs that residents, many of whom have limited skills, can fill. The city was making modest improvement in terms of employment prior to the pandemic, though unemployment was still higher than elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
Then the coronavirus dealt Detroit a further setback. In a column last month, I suggested that a metropolitan government needs to be created that would fuse Detroit with its richer and more populous suburbs, as is the case in places like Indianapolis.
That, and amend the state constitution to allow the city to again use eminent domain to take private land for major job-creating ventures, like auto plants or a vast sprawling Amazon operation.
Bill Gelineau, however, has a different idea. Gelineau was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor in 2018. He winces, however, at the nutty ideas of some libertarians, such as giving loaded guns to homeless people.
While he lives in Grand Rapids, Gelineau, a licensed title examiner, went to college in Detroit, and believes strongly that “a more successful Detroit is the key to a more successful Michigan.
However, he told me, “sadly, we’ve created a political culture which has made most political solutions unworkable.”
In a thoughtful essay published on his campaign website, he argued that the best thing that could be done is for the state to allow what is now Detroit to form a new county.
Then, neighborhoods in Detroit, and possibly some surrounding suburbs as well, would be broken up into new mini-cities that would be able to engage citizens in “a more in-touch and personal democracy. “ Making a larger, metropolitan city invites featherbedding, corruption and the worship of power, he believes.
There is certainly truth in that. But some of Detroit’s “neighborhoods” are impoverished and depopulated, and it is hard to see them having the ability to create and run a government.
What is left out of most discussions about Detroit is any understanding of how it declined. Many whites in the metropolitan area blame black residents, who they claim did not keep up their property, ruined the city with the huge 1967 riot and were unwilling to work and lacked the discipline to rebuild.
Blacks, on the other hand, accuse whites of using the city up, and then fleeing with their companies and jobs to the suburbs, leaving behind ruin, pollution and the poor who couldn’t escape.
There may be elements of truth in all that. But the truth is, as historian Thomas Sugrue argued in his classic book The Origins of the Urban Crisis that other factors largely doomed Detroit.
The city mushroomed from 285,000 people in 1900 to 1.5 million by 1930, and those running the city did not have the foresight to zone properly. Early auto factories were cramped, multi-story affairs. After World War II, auto companies wanted to build more efficient, sprawling one-story factories. But Detroit no longer had large tracts of land, so they began to build in the suburbs.
When the Lodge Freeway opened in 1954, with the sprawling Northland Mall at its end in the suburbs, it meant that people could leave the cramped city and get an affordable plot of land where taxes were lower, and the city began to empty out.
The more people left, the harder life was for those left behind, who were saddled with more taxes and poorer services, so many of them left too, a phenomenon that has continued.
In recent decades, the story has no longer been one of white flight but the departure of the black middle class.
Today, there is vast disagreement on how Detroit can be “fixed,” or even what that would mean.
All that is certain is that it won’t be easy. But unless and until that happens, Michigan can never truly be prosperous again.
-30-
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
