DETROIT – For decades, Detroit had a lurid national reputation as one of the worst places there was, the huge, old, decrepit and dangerous Murder City, USA. “I’m so bad I vacation in Detroit,” said a popular black T-shirt emblazoned with a hand pointing a gun at the viewer. (The color wasn’t an accident.) Many suburbanites bragged that they hadn’t been in the city for years.
Then, all that dramatically began to change. The city, whose population is four-fifths African-American, emerged from a painful bankruptcy in 2014 with its assets mostly intact. The year before, mostly Black Detroiters had stunned the political world by resoundingly electing a white mayor from the suburb of Livonia with a well-deserved reputation for getting things done.
Soon, the nation’s media was full of stories about Detroit’s perceived renaissance. Mike Duggan, the new mayor, quickly improved police response times, got street lights blazing on every street for the first time in years, and began a major demolition of blighted, unsafe and abandoned buildings.
Some major suburban employers moved their operations back downtown. New restaurants, from casual to pricy, popped up. Suddenly, going to Detroit for dinner and a show or a sports event or festival was trendy, the in thing to do.
“Tough, Cheap and Real – Detroit is Cool Again,” no less a publication than National Geographic proclaimed to the world. Newspapers were full of stories of young artists and creative people moving or moving back to the city.
But how real is the supposed Detroit Renaissance?
Sadly, the truth is that it’s less so than meets the eye, and there’s reason to think in coming years, things may well get worse, not better. Few, if anyone, understand the city better than John Mogk, an 84-year-old law professor who has devoted most of his adult life to trying to improve Detroit.
He’s been on or chaired virtually every task force on city and city-state affairs for more than half a century. Fifty years ago, he ran for mayor himself, and while he didn’t win, he made an impressive showing by pledging to save the city’s neighborhoods.
When Mike Duggan won, he was initially optimistic. But almost ten years later, midway through the mayor’s third term, he is much less so. True, he says, what he calls the “core,” meaning downtown Detroit and nearby areas has had an incredible resurgence.
But the rest of the city hasn’t. “Unless the city can attract the middle class to neighborhoods and assist residents there now, the continuing reality is that the city as a whole will continue to slowly decline (while) the core will continue to prosper.”
There’s little doubt, he notes, that Duggan is one of the most skilled and experienced administrators in the state, who has developed a “close relationship of trust and cooperation with the handful of investors” in downtown Detroit. For years, the hulking ruin of the vast Michigan Central Station stood as a symbol of devastated Detroit. But now, the Ford Motor Co. is pouring millions into renovating the entire complex of buildings.
Other projects are under way all over downtown. But not in most neighborhoods, many of which are bleak, devastated and depopulated. Early in his second term, Mayor Duggan told me that his success or failure would be determined by whether he could reverse Detroit’s population decline that began after 1950.
But on that count, he has failed. Detroit, which had 1,849,568 people at its peak, had an estimated 684,609 when Duggan became mayor. Last year, the U.S. Census bureau estimated that had fallen to 620,376. The mayor attacked those estimates as a “clown show,” but that didn’t change the numbers.
“The problem outside the core is that the city has one of the highest poverty rates and lowest median family incomes in the country,” said Mogk. “Only five percent of the population lives in middle-class neighborhoods,” and every neighborhood is at least 75 years old. Many people cannot afford to maintain their homes.
“Eventually, they become uninhabitable. As homes are abandoned, others in the neighborhood who can afford to leave will.”
When Mike Duggan came to power, he pledged to rebuild the city, saying “every neighborhood has a future.” But with the exception of downtown, he has failed, the professor said.
Case in point: In 2017 the Duggan administration pledged to rebuild the Fitzgerald neighborhood, which has about 11,000 residents on the city’s west side near the University of Detroit.
The goal was to renovate 100 homes in two years. The developer did only 13, and then gave up, claiming it wasn’t cost-effective. That may have been so, Mogk said, but it would have been worthwhile to both the city and the state in the long run if they had subsidized the project and made up the difference.
So what’s happened, he added, is that while Detroit’s core has blossomed, “most of the remainder of the city (has been treated as) a hospice in attempting to control the pain as life slowly comes to an end.”
Nevertheless, the professor, who earlier in his career worked on urban problems for the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, is not without hope for the city where he was born in 1939. There are, he believes, things that still could be done to truly revitalize Detroit.
Next week, a look at how the Motor City might truly be revived, with ideas that just might be pertinent to other older cities too.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
