DETROIT – Thirty years ago, those who lived in Detroit’s suburbs often boasted that they hadn’t been in the city for years. Ten years ago, the leader of the region’s most affluent county, trashed the city in a New Yorker article: Drop Dead, Detroit!
But talk like that is no longer socially acceptable. There’s widespread agreement that the city’s downtown is in better shape now than at any time since the 1950s. Three gleaming major league sports stadiums are in walking distance of each other.
The city’s bankruptcy ended a decade ago, and Detroit hasn’t had a real economic crisis since. Every Saturday morning, hundreds, sometimes thousands, pour in to shop for produce, plants and everything else at Detroit’s amazing Eastern Market, the largest public market in the nation, a city tradition since 1891.
That’s the good news. But the reality is far more complex. Yes, in many ways, Detroit is in better shape than it was.
Yet very few outside the city are seriously considering moving in, or moving back. There any number of reasons for this. Car insurance rates can be triple what you would pay in the suburbs. Services are still spotty, depending on the neighborhood.
Crime is still an issue. Last month, the city announced with some fanfare that in 2023 Detroit had fewer murders (252) than any time since 1966, when it had 232. However, it was soon noted that Detroit had two and a half times as many people six decades ago.
To be fair, there were significant decreases in nearly all categories of crime last year, perhaps because Detroit was able to place an additional 200 officers on the street. But the story that dominated the headlines was that of Samantha Woll, a vivacious and popular leader of the city’s downtown synagogue, who was brutally stabbed to death inside her upscale condo early one October morning.
Police eventually arrested a man with a criminal record who they think found her door unlocked and the victim asleep on a couch. Mayor Mike Duggan, who first took office in 2013, has accomplished many things, but said he should ultimately be judged a failure unless the city’s population increased during his tenure.
Based on that, he is failing. Detroit, which had approximately 700,000 people when he took office, now has an estimated 620,376, according to the U.S. Census bureau, an estimate the Mayor is hotly disputing. But it is clear that stories like that of Samantha Woll aren’t helping entice people to Detroit.
What the city does need, all agree, is a better economy. Earlier this month, the Citizens’ Research Council, the most respected such group in the state, released the first part of a comprehensive study of Detroit’s economic condition. Eric Lupher, the president of CRC, told me Detroit City Council asked them “to assess the continued need for tax abatements and the DDA (Downtown Development Authority).”
The politicians, he noted, have been getting grief from citizens’ groups that “complain of giving tax breaks to millionaires.”
But the research group felt it couldn’t answer that question in a vacuum; it first had to get the big picture of the shape Detroit is it.
The full report, “An Assessment of Detroit’s Economic Condition and a Critique of Its Economic Development Efforts” is available to anyone online (crcmich.org) and makes compelling reading. The short answer to the city council’s question is that some tax abatements are necessary, but others have been poorly used.
So tangled are the finances that while there are all sorts of good reasons to end the Downtown Development Authority, thank to bond obligations, they need to keep it going until at least 2053.
But the overall outlook for Detroit is sobering. “Detroit’s economy has improved substantially,” since bankruptcy, it “still has serious socioeconomic problems that, when combined with high property tax rates, make it hard to attract and retain businesses.”
The higher costs and greater difficulties of locating a business in the city has made tax abatements necessary, even though they mean Detroit gets less badly needed revenue.
Detroit, the report details, is a city whose past has worked against it. The population swelled from 285,000 in 1900 to nearly two million in 1950, because it was the center of the automotive industry, and the center of well-paying “blue collar and service jobs that did not require high levels of education.”
Those jobs are mostly gone now, and what’s been left behind is “one of the poorest major cities in America,” where income is half the average in the suburbs, and education levels are almost equally lower. Financially, while residents are better off than they were when the city filed for bankruptcy, racial disparities are still huge. White Detroiters’ per capita incomes soared by 49 percent over the past decades; Black ones saw an increase of only 16 percent.
There are efforts to improve things; Mayor Duggan is fighting to get tax reform. But there are no realistic quick fixes. The bottom line seems to be that parts of Detroit are a very nice place to visit.
But you might still not want to live there.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
