DETROIT – Two weeks ago, I said in this column that while Detroit is in far better shape than it was a decade ago, and is a rewarding place to visit, it may still not be a great place to live.
But why is that?
To my dismay, most of the responses I received were about race, some of them openly racist. “Still haven’t figured it out? No matter what programs, money, etc. are thrown at the Blacks, the result is still the same — failure,” one man wrote.
That’s neither true, nor very helpful.
Ernest DuBrul, a retired biology professor from the University of Toledo, told me “you’re avoiding the elephant in the room. Detroit has a Black population of 76.3 percent. (That) skews any comparison of … per capita income growth or comparison to the suburbs.”
Well, what the good professor says is true, but incomplete. Yes, Detroit is overwhelmingly African-American, but the reason Detroit has such problems is not because the city is mostly minority.
The city is poor not because it is Black; it is Black largely because it is poor, and a disproportionate number of African-Americans live in poverty. Blacks seldom have anything like the net worth or the resources of their white counterparts, in Detroit or elsewhere. Many of those who could have left did, and live better lives in thriving suburbs, like Black-majority Southfield.
But many who have remained in Detroit don’t have the ability to move, or the connections, capital and abilities needed to succeed where they are. The reasons for the city’s decline are complex. But the biggest reason for Detroit’s woes may not be race or poverty but something entirely different that seldom if ever gets mentioned:
Elasticity.
Detroit is what urban expert David Rusk calls “completely inelastic.” Thirty years ago, in his acclaimed book, Cities Without Suburbs, he presented his case. “Elastic” cities are those that can grow by annexing more land. Los Angeles did that for decades, using its control of the water supply to persuade other areas to join.
Toledo greatly increased its physical size by annexing territory in the 1960s. Detroit once grew by annexation itself, gradually branching out from the area around the Detroit River where Cadillac landed in 1701. But the city hasn’t been able to annex a single square foot of land in almost a century. That’s because it’s surrounded by incorporated cities and the borders of other counties.
Elastic cities expand their borders and thrive; inelastic ones can’t, and don’t,” Rusk, himself a former mayor of Albuquerque, argues in his book. On paper, Detroit seems as if it should be an exception. The city is physically huge: 143 square miles.
You could put Boston, Seattle and Manhattan inside Detroit and have room left over, and Detroit now has only a third the population it once did. Why can’t the city expand from within?
Sadly, there are many impediments. The infrastructure is old. There are still many abandoned buildings and factories; some areas look like sets from World War II movies. Many ruined structures sit on polluted land that would require millions in cleanup costs.
Haphazard zoning during the city’s rapid expansion in the early twentieth century hasn’t been helpful. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told me when he tried to get Amazon to consider building its headquarters in the city he quickly found he couldn’t assemble nearly the amount of vacant land in one space that Amazon needed.
Years ago, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the city could no longer use eminent domain to collect land for private industry.
With annexation impossible, many businesses fled their worn-out facilities in Detroit to lower-tax suburbs or other cities.
After Coleman Young became the first African-American mayor of Detroit in 1973, he reflected, “I knew that this had only happened, that I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore.”
That, too, was a bit simplistic and unfair, unless you substitute “the business sector” for “white people.”
So what could truly restore Detroit?
David Rusk has an answer for that too: Some form of metropolitan government that would combine the city and the suburbs, in a new, much more truly representative Detroit.
Far more people live in Detroit’s suburbs (3.7 million) than in the city (620,000) but all those people are truly Detroiters. Cities that have metropolitan government, like Indianapolis, are mainly doing far better than those that don’t.
For years, experts said such an idea could never happen, because suburban taxpayers wouldn’t want to spend the money to bail out Detroit, and Detroiters would never give up political power.
But for three straight elections Detroiters have overwhelmingly elected a white mayor from the suburbs, and suburbanites seem much friendlier to Detroit these days.
Maybe, just maybe, some form of consolidated government could be an idea whose time has come.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
