July 7, 2008
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
comments
4 Responses to “The Fall of Detroit”
Leave a Reply
An observation and an aside.
Observation: The longest stretch of time I spent actually in Detroit (as opposed to passing through or over-nighting) was a (working) week nearly ten years ago, but I recall finding certain aspects of the city quite attractive (or maybe I mean potentially attractive). I’m not quite sure what I mean by this, but it’s my recollection of an overall impression: that if . . . I knew not what . . . Detroit could be a good place to live. It sounds as though “I knew not what” didn’t come to pass.
Aside: Reading “Detroit” in the title of your post triggered the memory of a dream from last night, the details of which I’ll spare you (mostly because they are fading) save to say that a principal figure in the dream said to me, “They think you’re from Detroit.”
Besides football, they have hell good sporting teams… and Peter Markus lives there so technically it will be the next US HQ of Calamari Press!
Calamari Press — “The Sound of Young America”
Jeff
I hardly qualify as someone who should comment, but Danny and I spent a year-and-a-half or so in Troy, at the Somerset Apartments, across the road just South of the Somerset Collection, in a “beautiful, parklike setting.” I worked for Saks Fifth Avenue, again just across the way, as Visual Merchandising Manager. One of my staff members was a performance artist who had a hard time getting up in the morning to be at work on time. As much as I liked him, I nearly fired him. We also attended a couple of his shows, which were often terrifying and which once made the front page of the Sunday Arts Section of the Free Press. Now I won’t be able to name the area we went to, downtown, near Greektown, to see his shows. But I remember being terrified of the neighborhood, hurrying from the car into the little theatre and back after the show was scary. Still, it was thrilling to be present in “unsavory” climes, sit in folding chairs and see a work that someone I knew worked so hard to create.
This is getting long, my apologies, but one other time, a warm, bright Sunday afternoon, Danny and I decided we’d drive over to Grosse Point, and work our way down along the lake to downtown, then get on the freeway back up to 16 mile. Somewhere along the downtown part, we took a wrong turn and were suddenly exactly in the middle of “the wrong part of town.” Razorwire everywhere, we actually drove by the old Saks, downtown, boarded-up. We had no idea where we were. We panicked, we slowed down at red-lights but didn’t stop unless we had to. We eventually found our way to a street name we recognized and managed to get out of the ruined territory.
For all our terror that day, I remember sensing what it must have been like back in the day. One could see it had been a thriving metropolis. No movie made really captures the post-nuclear feel of the place now.
Makes me sad that it passed and that it may have little hope of a comeback.