Detroit City Is the Place to Be (15 page)

All these ideas should have fueled the ambitious Detroit Works Project. But unaccountably, by the fall of 2010, the Bing administration’s slow rollout of the plan was proving an unmitigated fiasco. The initial public meetings drew spillover crowds, which the administration admitted to being unprepared for, and the city officials present adamantly refused to provide any specifics of the plan, the mayor’s PR team having apparently decided to adopt a Denny’s suggestion box strategy—they would pretend to listen. Video stations where Detroiters could record their thoughts on the future of the city were set up throughout the venues, though the suspension of disbelief required to think Bing and company might actually weigh the opinions of a retired autoworker with a high school education alongside those of a team of urban planners from Harvard struck many as ludicrous, if not vaguely insulting.

At the first of the rightsizing meetings, held at a Baptist megachurch on the city’s far west side, Bing himself showed up late, creeping into one of the confusing “break-out sessions” where citizens were supposed to be giving their feedback. “I didn’t come here to speak,” Bing said, sidling up to the podium. “I came to listen. We have some ideas, but I don’t want to force them on the community. I’ve got to go to other rooms, but I want to make sure
you
speak out.”

Beside Bing, the moderators had arranged several easels holding variously shaded maps of the city that were far too small to read and a stack of oversized cue cards listing a series of condescending questions concerning what the future Detroit might look like. These included:

What will we be driving?

Where and how will we be shopping?

Will we live in bigger or smaller houses?

What will schools look like?

How and where will we be spending our free time?

Another cue card read: “Detroit’s neighborhoods are clean, safe, and walkable.” One of the hapless moderators quickly clarified, “This is what the city
should
look like by 2030.”

A woman shouted, “Who’s checking that there’s gonna
be
a city in twenty years?”

After the first meeting’s lambasting in the local media, certain tweaks were made. At the follow-up, held at the Serbian National Hall, Bing made a formal address to the crowd. Though falling short of pounding the podium with his fist, he attempted to work up a folksier, man-of-the-people rapport with the audience, ending with a practiced Bush 41-style applause line: “Not gonna happen on my watch!” As Bing spoke, his face was projected on a giant screen behind him; over his left shoulder, the right hand of the sign-language interpreter occasionally loomed into the frame, looking like a disembodied ghost hand readying to give the mayor a judo chop or vicious throttling if he said the wrong thing. Eventually, someone tightened up the camera shot to cut it out.

The speech was so boring I began to pay special attention to Bing’s body language, which was how I noticed, every so often, the mayor’s habit of drawing one of his long fingers gently across his forehead, just above his eyebrow, as if he were smoothing a stray hair. I realized this must be Bing’s “tell,” though I couldn’t single out, based on this speech alone, which portion was the bluff.

It later emerged that relations between Mayor Bing and Rip Rapson, the head of the Kresge Foundation, which had been funding much of the initiative, including Toni Griffin’s entire salary, had soured. Griffin, an outsider who’d tried to import a team of consultants, had never been trusted by many in the city. Nor had Rapson, a white guy from suburban Troy, Michigan, who talked about a “suite of coordinated investments” that could foster a green economy, who referred to vacant land as “a canvas of economic imagination” and envisioned what he called “neighborhoods of choice.” The Bing administration became nervous, both about the power Rapson hoped to exercise and on the simple level of public relations, and so despite the Kresge Foundation’s largesse, the city tried to freeze out Griffin and declined to include Kresge officials in the announcement of the federally funded light rail project. Rapson, in turn, began to threaten cutting funding.

After months of delay, Bing finally announced the lame opening phase of the plan, in which neighborhoods eventually would be ranked one of three ways—steady, transitional, or distressed—and be allocated services accordingly, the idea being to shore up the first two types of areas and persuade residents to move out of the last ones. The administration also announced an initial three-neighborhood “demonstration area” in which such service changes would be implemented. Stable neighborhoods would receive the bulk of $9.5 million of federal money designated for home rehab and development, along with increased code enforcement—trash pickup, mowing of vacant lots, the lighting of streetlamps—while the focus in distressed areas would be on demolition of vacant homes.

Still, it all felt vague. A private effort by deep-pocketed Marathon Petroleum to move five hundred families out of the southwest Detroit neighborhood where the company wanted to expand its oil refinery came with a price tag of $40,000 per household; Robin Boyle, a Detroit urban studies professor, did the math and figured moving only 5 percent of existing Detroit households, at the same cost as Marathon, would result in a bill of $600 million.

And what about the rest of the city?

*   *   *

Of course, “rightsizing” did not necessarily have to mean “shrinking.” As the debate over Detroit Works festered, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a lifelong Detroiter who’d held a prominent position in the administration of former mayor Dennis Archer. We were hanging out in a bar downtown, and possibly several drinks into the evening, when our talk turned to Bing’s initiative.

“Man, to me?” the political operative scoffed. “That’s hustling backwards. It betrays who we are.” When I wondered what the alternative might be, he said, “We should be doing the
opposite
of rightsizing. How did Philly grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. How did LA grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. Think about it: Detroit is fucking older than the country. This place was founded with frontier spirit. And now we’re here in 2010, a bunch of wusses.”

In fact, my friend’s riff was a favorite thought experiment of a certain subset of Detroit-area urbanophiles. Sometimes they reference David Rusk, the former Albuquerque mayor whose book
Cities Without Suburbs
makes the case for the economic vibrancy of “elastic” cities (like Houston, Austin, Seattle, and Nashville) whose central hubs have the capability to annex or otherwise regionalize their surrounding suburbs into a unified metropolitan area.

In Detroit, the chances of something like this ever happening were slim—okay, nonexistent—but daydreaming about the real benefits of such a move could be a tantalizing exercise. The takeaway from the census stories revolved around Detroit plummeting to nineteenth place on the U.S. city-size list, behind Austin, Jacksonville, and Columbus. (Columbus!) But the Detroit metropolitan area, which I’ll define for these purposes as Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, still retained a population of nearly 4 million. If our territorial-expansion fantasia could be magically enacted with even two-thirds of this figure, Greater Detroitopolis would easily vault past Chicago, with its measly 2.5 million residents, to be the third-largest city in the United States, behind New York and Los Angeles. This would translate into more state and national clout (and allocated funds, many of which are based on population) and eliminate the need for much of the wasteful duplicate spending inherent in maintaining multiple separate municipalities, especially at a time when many of these suburban communities, just as broke as Detroit, have been announcing their own cutbacks of nonessential services. (Along with services that strike many as fairly essential: in February 2011, the west side suburb of Allen Park announced plans to eliminate its entire fire department.) When Indianapolis enacted a similar “Unigov” city-suburbs merger in the late sixties (under Republican mayor Dick Lugar), the region enjoyed economic growth (and the benefits of economy of scale), AAA municipal bond ratings, and a broader, more stable tax base.

Rusk also convincingly argues that elastic cities are less segregated and have fewer of the problems associated with concentrated areas of poverty. And though sprawl wouldn’t necessarily be reined in, the region could finally adopt a sensible transportation policy. (The planned light rail project will nonsensically stop at 8 Mile Road, the suburban border.)

Beyond all of that, consider the branding implications. Unlike the New Detroit of
RoboCop
infamy, this New Detroit would no longer find itself sitting near the top of those annual “World’s Most Dangerous Cities” lists, thanks to the juking a trebled population would do to the existing crime stats; similar dilution would occur with statistics involving vacant property, unemployment, and packs of wild dogs. Detroit would become, on paper, a city like any other, with scary neighborhoods and safe ones, and much harder to caricature.

There are a number of reasons why this will never, ever happen. For one thing, Michigan has laws making such annexation extremely difficult. And even if the laws could be changed, long-nurtured, largely racial city-suburb resentments would never allow for such bedfellowing. White suburban residents would reel from the possibility of merging with a city so long demonized as a terrifying war zone; the black leadership in Detroit, meanwhile, would surely be loath to see its own political power subsumed within a majority-white supercity. Even the idea of a regional sales tax, which could help provide money for costly undertakings like Detroit Works, remains a nonstarter in the Detroit area. “Why should I pay for the city’s mistakes?” noxious Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson asked the website
Remapping Debate
. “Tax base sharing is anathema to me.”

Edwin St. Aubin, the real estate agent related to one of the city’s founding families, confessed that he could not envision a mass suburban repatriation anytime soon. “These people would rather live in a shack in a field than go anywhere near downtown,” he said. “They’ve completely insulated themselves from that economy.” Lowering his voice, he said, “You talk to some of these old developers? They’d want to line up bulldozers—” We were sitting in a restaurant, and here, he put his hands together, his fingers touching and his palms facing his chest, and slowly moved them across the white tablecloth. “And get rid of everything. Start over.”

In the eighties, St. Aubin had been married to a German woman. They spent one New Year’s in the former West Berlin, and he recalled sitting on a rooftop watching a spectacular fireworks display and then glancing east and seeing nothing but darkness. At the time it made him feel like he was staring into Detroit from the suburbs. “That’s exactly what it’s like here,” he said, “only there’s no wall.”

*   *   *

As for Detroit Works, by April 2012, the planning team had announced … more meetings. “At least” sixteen more, to be followed by the launch of “a Strategic Framework Plan for Detroit’s future.” Detroit Works officials declined interview requests, though the team did post a number of “policy audits” on its website, completed during the earliest stages of the project, and reflecting “the observations and analysis of the technical team at that time.” Buried in the text, a list of neighborhood typologies laid out by one of the working groups hinted at the possibilities inherent in a fully realized vision of Detroit Works. The high-density City Hub, with high- and mid-rise buildings, would receive priority for regional rail and bus service, while in the Urban Homestead Sector:

a family lives in a large, older home surrounded by a natural landscape, growing vegetables to sell at a farmers’ market. In return for giving up services such as street lights, the homeowner would get lower taxes (in exchange for experimenting with alternative energy and, where possible, using well water).

In low-maintenance Naturescapes, devoid of homes, pipe-encased creeks would be re-exposed and wildlife would flourish; in Green Venture Zones, on the other hand, vacant land and industrial buildings would be converted to fish hatcheries, hydroponic and aquaculture centers, nurseries, small market farms, and other enterprises; Green Thoroughfares would transform lesser-used highways and boulevards into “green gateways,” presumably akin to New York’s successful reclamation of the High Line elevated train line.

All grand visions. But with the city’s financial status in such turmoil that a state takeover was being threatened, the only thing Detroit Works could promise was an end-of-summer deadline for presenting its Strategic Framework to residents and “whomever may be in charge of the city at that point.”

Tiffini Baldwin, 18, and her daughter Nicole, 3. Baldwin graduated from Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit public school for teenage mothers, and is now studying physical therapy at a local college.
[Corine Vermeulen]

6

DETROIT IS DYNAMITE

N
OT LONG AFTER THE
dreadful census news broke and Detroit became the poster city of the undone American economy, an old 1965 promotional film began to circulate widely on the Internet. The unwittingly deadpan host was Jerry Cavanagh, the mayor of Detroit at the time, introducing the city to the world in a now deranged-seeming bid to host the 1968 Olympics. Sitting stiffly behind a desk in a wood-paneled office, Cavanagh, slightly paunchy, with a conservative haircut, dark suit, and fingers forming a diamond in a way surely promoted by pop middle-management books as a means of conveying alpha male gravitas, seems to embody a holdover authority-figure archetype from the days just prior to the counterculture’s triumphant rise. His cause certainly isn’t helped by the script he’s been given or by the style and content of the film, belonging as it does to that era-specific genre of documentary that includes the cold war instructional movie and nature specials hosted by Walt Disney. From the title—
Detroit: City on the Move
—on down, every line appears to have been written for maximum future ironic effect.