The storm that rusted the Steel Belt

Detroit – The storm that upended New Orleans came fast and furious. In contrast, notes Political Science Professor Lyke Thompson, "Detroit has endured a slow-moving disaster – a disaster that stretches across decades of deindustrialization."

Lyke Thompson

If you had shot photos daily of Detroit over the last half century or so and then strung them into a fast-playing movie, it would indeed look as if an invisible force was tearing the city apart, destroying thousands of homes, clearing away huge chunks of neighborhoods, idling scores of factories, throwing legions out of work and prompting all manner of heartbreak, much as Katrina did.

So where is Detroit’s federal aid? asks Thompson, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University. He points out that New Orleans got many millions from the feds to recover.

That apt question does apply to Detroit especially, but not exclusively. The vortex of forces that has battered the Motor City has played out in other industrial centers across America. The resulting devastation cries out for federal relief – in the form of a vigorous national urban policy backed up with dollars.

Remember when the South was dirt-poor? Well, wipe that outdated image from your head. The industrial North, once the Promised Land to which Southern refugees fled, is now the one with hat in hand.

Just take a look at the 2009 poverty figures the US Census Bureau recently released. All five big cities with the highest share of poor people – Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St. Louis, in that order – once played starring roles in the Northern Steel Belt, spewing out outboard motors, rubber tires, handyman tools, door locks, tractors, airplane parts, construction beams, lawn mowers, gears, locks, motorcycles, furnaces, glass windows, water meters, railroad tracks, steam engines, mining gear, nuts and bolts, pots and pans, kitchen sinks, and, Detroit’s specialty, automobiles. The work was often hard, but the pay was good, permitting many a strapping lad to muscle his way out of poverty and into the middle class.

That portal to the good life has all but vanished. The Steel Belt has morphed into the Rust Belt. The ranks of the poor have swelled.

Thompson notes that state government, itself reeling from the downturn in the automobile industry, has steadily cut back on the revenue it shares with Detroit. “There should be much more serious attention from the national government," he says.

Robin Boyle, chair of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State, says that revenue sharing money from state and federal governments in America pales by comparison with what European cities get. As reported in a previous post, he notes that Europe further protects its cities by outlawing sprawl, which drains urban centers of resources and people.

Do Europeans have a better attitude toward cities?

No, says Boyle, who grew up in Scotland. They have the same love-hate attitude that you find in America.

Here, in my opinion, hate has the upper hand. In 1975, when Gerald Ford was president and New York City was staring into the abyss of bankruptcy and seeking federal help, the New York Daily News blared on the front page: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD," which seemed to have summed up how the White House felt.

Boyle points to Ronald Reagan, who said in effect: Cities, you’re on your own. Reagan cut back on urban programs right and left.

Professor Thompson points to statistics showing that in some ways the slow-motion storm that chewed up Detroit left this city worse off than is New Orleans today. As the chart notes below, Detroit has higher poverty, unemployment and even housing-vacancy rates than does New Orleans.

The storm that tore Detroit apart wreaked havoc throughout the industrial North. Hence, even Milwaukee outstrips the Big Easy in poverty.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2009

Of course, New Orleans deserves every penny of federal aid it gets. But it shouldn’t have to take a sudden cataclysm to loosen the federal purse strings. The federal government must start treating America’s besieged cities as the national treasures they are.

The suburbs are killing Detroit - and themselves

Detroit – Sporting waves in his close-cropped hair, my cousin Tommy drove fast cars, wore sharp clothes, spoke the latest jive and walked the latest strut. That’s the Detroit way, he explained when as an older teen in the early 1960s he would visit my family in southeast Washington, D.C.
He regarded my home town as kind of square – which got no argument from my friends and me. We knew that, with the likes of the Cadillac and the Mustang, the Supremes and the Miracles, Detroit defined hip.

These days, of course, Detroit doesn’t strut; it hobbles, and on makeshift crutches. Its fall from riches to rags was doubtless the most spectacular of any American city. The Motor City’s plight sends chills down the spine of big-city mayors elsewhere. They know its fate is where their trend lines may head.

Still, under what appears to be the sagacious leadership of Mayor Dave Bing, the ex-Piston basketball star, this battered, emaciated city is trying valiantly to heal itself. As the first stage in the effort to come up with a plan, Bing initiated a series of listening sessions, where residents poured their hearts out about the harshness of life in a city recently rated by Portfolio.com and bizjournals as the most stressful in America.

This ambitious effort at renewal is badly handicapped, however. While the shenanigans of previous Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick certainly didn’t help, the sources of the city’s woes lie mostly outside its borders, where current Mayor Bing has little control. A chief culprit is the proliferation of municipalities that make up the Detroit area.

Detroit is half the city it once was. The number of residents shrank from 1.85 million in 1950 to 911,000 today, knocking Detroit from fifth to 11th in the ranking of American cities. The big, fashionable Victorian house that the young Tommy called home is now an empty, weedy lot; Detroit is saddled with an estimated 60,000 such lots. What’s more, some 93,000 housing units – a fourth of the city’s housing stock – sit vacant.

Detroit residents voice their concerns at community meeting in rotunda
of Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing addresses community meeting

Five community forums convened by Bing drew thousands. The last took place last week at the elegant Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Bing got several ears-full: Direct opportunities at ex-felons. Lobby Washington in behalf of Detroiters, not just General Motors. Make the payment for trash collection fairer. Ask the governor to declare a state of emergency in response to a foreclosure crisis in Detroit. Be mindful that unused land may have environmental hazards that must be cleaned up. Set up a regional transit authority. Make contractors pick up trash before mowing empty lots. Restore the requirement that city employees live in the city. Encourage more retail downtown to draw people to live there. Don’t just rehabilitate; put new houses on empty lots.

The listening isn’t over. The next step in the planning process will entail 40 smaller neighborhood meetings.

Bing is wise to adopt this bottom-up approach to planning. But the problems are tough to get a handle on.

Lyke Thomspon, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University, noted in an interview that “130-plus municipalities of one kind or another” lie in the three-county Detroit area (Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties). He adds that most of the people who left the city moved to the suburbs, rather than out of state.

In short, unfettered suburban sprawl has played a key role in hollowing out Detroit. One problem with sprawl is the suburban habit of walling out poor people through snob zoning and other means, thereby putting the burden of poverty on the city, which, due to the flight of wealth to these very suburbs, have a declining ability to deal with the problem.

Professor Robin Boyle

Robin Boyle, chair of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State and native of Scotland, notes that Europe’s industrial cities, such as Liverpool and Essex in England, are going through the pangs of job losses just as is America’s Rust Belt. But the European cities aren’t suffering as much due to strict land-use regulations that prevent sprawl.

Detroit used to blunt some of the damaging impact of sprawl by reserving city jobs for city residents. The city thus used one of its own precious resources - jobs - to help fight unemployment within its borders and to shore up the city’s economy and tax base. In 1999, however, the Michigan Legislature outlawed residency requirements for public employees and thus took away this survival tool.

In the long run, though, the hollowing out of Detroit, the metro area’s flagship, hurts the suburbs, too. A shabby main city tends to keep corporations away from the entire area, not just the city. What’s more, a vibrant hub acts as a magnet for the young creative class, which urban planners regard as vital to an area’s future prosperity.

Tellingly, this city is not alone in losing people. Since 2004, while the nation has been growing, the entire Detroit metro area has annually seen its population drop, according to the Census Bureau.

The suburbs ignore Detroit’s fate at their own peril.

Photos are by Gregory Stanford