Detroit City Is the Place to Be (26 page)

Abandoned Highland Park police station.
[Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre]

9

AUSTERITY 101

N
O MATTER HOW DEXTROUS
or well-intentioned our elected officials, any plan to reinvent Detroit, or even adequately address the city’s most fundamental crises, required the one thing Detroit lacked most of all: unimaginable amounts of money. As John Mogk, the Wayne State law professor and urbanist, pointed out, Detroit’s major recent success stories have been obtained in large part through spectacular levels of capital investment. “If you reach back to the sixties,” he said, the housing development of Lafayette Park “has probably experienced a billion dollars a mile in public and private investment. Midtown”—which includes the university and hospital districts—“in the two miles from the Fox Theater to Grand Boulevard, has probably experienced a billion a mile over the past ten years.”

Mogk contrasted this healthy area of Detroit, which he calls the Core, with the other 130 square miles of the city, which he calls the Heartland—historically the strength of Detroit, a city never known for its downtown as much as for its industrial plants, strong neighborhoods, and high levels of home ownership. The Heartland, Mogk noted, has been steadily deteriorating. “And that’s where all the problems are,” he says. “And the only part of that whole area that’s received anything commensurate with the level of investment in the Core area has been the Poletown Plant and the Chrysler Jefferson Plant. So, as Core Detroit becomes more closely linked with the suburbs, Heartland Detroit is drifting off on its own. To focus on what’s happening in the Core area really creates a false sense of future hope. If you look at the income distribution in the city and ask me if the Heartland is coming back, well, are you kidding me? Cities are not built or rebuilt for low-income residents. It would be nice if they were. But that just doesn’t happen.”

As municipalities across the globe stare down varying levels of financial catastrophe, the notion of increasing investment in failing communities such as the Mogk-defined Heartland has become folly, with the terms of debate instead shifting almost entirely to discussions of debt reduction and austerity. The received, morality-tale version of the salvation of the auto industry, often recounted in the form of a self-help recovery narrative, in which the mulish executive-suite occupants were forced to hit rock bottom before making the “hard choices” necessary for survival, has more recently been applied to ever more insolvent governmental entities, which have been painted as the functional and moral equivalents of GM or Chrysler, that is, bloated and inefficient bureaucracies unwilling to change with the times, get tough on labor, and become “lean” and “competitive.” Like the Big Three, we were all being told that our cities and states—along with their citizens and public servants—needed to discard childish illusion and accept that aspects of American life had changed forever.

In this context, the Michigan legislature adopted the Emergency Financial Manager law, which deficit hawks cast as a top-down, stern-father means of enforced frugality, necessary for irresponsible charges who had proved incapable of making, and abiding by, a budget. The fact that most of the cities facing possible EFMs were, like Detroit, contending with all of the problems associated with concentrated poverty (including the absence of any sort of real tax base) tended to be glossed over, though it was hard to see how any of this could end well: cities like Detroit already barely delivered on the most minimal of public services, and the idea of forcing even more cuts, somehow rooting out “waste” in the system, moved beyond the vague shared-sacrifice campaign slogans employed by politicians across the spectrum and began to enter the realm of field amputation.

For those who wish to observe the effects of austerity measures taken to their natural extreme, one local Galapagos-scaled ecosystem worth studying is Highland Park. Located about six miles from downtown, Highland Park is technically not part of Detroit at all but its own separate municipality. (Though one surrounded on all sides by Detroit, so central on a map of the city it practically marks a bull’s-eye.) In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1805, the federal government had given Michigan territorial officials permission to sell state property in order to fund the rebuilding of Detroit. Part of the unloaded land, a patch of mostly swamp, passed through the hands of a series of developers who hoped to turn the place into a viable township. As developers are wont, they seized upon one of the most appealing aspects of the local landscape—the few hills punctuating the marsh—to come up with the prototypically suburban name of Highland Park.
1

One of the would-be developers was Judge Augustus Woodward, who proposed naming the village Woodwardville. But his plans didn’t go anywhere, and nothing much happened with Highland Park until Captain Will H. Stevens, a one-eyed veteran and former Colorado prospector, managed to get the swamp drained, making the land inhabitable, if not yet desirable. When Henry Ford relocated to Highland Park in 1906 to radically expand his production capability, the area surrounding his new factory was predominantly farmland. There were also modest shoe and wagon factories, a general store, and a blacksmith’s. The site of Ford’s world-changing Model T plant had once been a hotel resort and spa, with mineral baths and a neighboring harness racing track. In 1910, the year the factory opened, the population of Highland Park was 425. By the following year, it had grown to 4,120, and by the end of the decade, it had become 46,000.
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Highland Park resisted annexation by Detroit at the behest of Ford, the city’s largest corporate citizen, as part of a blatant tax dodge. The tiny Polish enclave of Hamtramck, also surrounded by Detroit, pulled a similar move around the same time to create a tax haven for its Dodge plant, robbing Detroit, even in those boomtown years, of revenues from two of its most productive factories.

As recently as the fifties, Highland Park, called the City of Trees, boasted one of the area’s most desirable addresses. Even after Ford decided he needed more space for his manufacturing operation and decamped to the Rouge plant, the city remained the world headquarters of Chrysler, founded in Highland Park in 1925.

Ford’s Highland Park plant, ca. 1920

By the early nineties, though, Chrysler chair Lee Iacocca had announced that the company would be moving to Auburn Hills, some fifty miles north of the city. With the departure of those final five thousand Chrysler employees, Highland Park lost a quarter of its tax base and 80 percent of its annual budget. Having spurned Detroit’s advances during Ford’s heyday, Highland Park now stood abandoned by its onetime corporate suitors for younger, prettier suburbs. There was occasionally talk of Detroit absorbing Highland Park, but that was just wishful thinking, Detroit at this point having zero interest in adding more crime, blight, and desperately poor people to its own mean buffet of urban pathologies.

Today, driving north on Woodward Avenue, you’d never notice having crossed from one city to the other. You pass a combination fish market and takeout restaurant (“U Buy, We Fry”), and the Gold Nugget Pawn Shop, and Mo’ Money Tax Returns, and a Babes N Braids, and a place called Cherokee’s Hot Spot where you can get your ears or nose pierced or pick up some exotic dance wear (“Plus Sizes Available,” notes a sign in the window), alongside numerous other long-shuttered apartment complexes, municipal buildings, and storefronts (including the rubble of a florist).

Yet Highland Park, officially the poorest city in Michigan, manages to tidily pack all of the problems of Detroit into just three square miles. In fact, fantastic as it might seem, the city is actually in much worse shape than Detroit proper, the one place Detroiters can gaze upon and say, “Man,
those
guys are fucked!” One afternoon, wandering around Highland Park, I must have accidentally stepped back over the border, because when I asked an older gentleman raking his lawn about Highland Park’s city services, he appeared deeply offended. “This is
Detroit
,” he snapped. “I don’t know anything about Highland Park. I don’t go over there.” We were two blocks away.

In other words, Highland Park is the Detroit of Detroit. In 2011, the Bing administration floated the possibility of closing eighteen of the city’s twenty-three public library branches; Highland Park’s entire library system has been closed since 2002. Detroit has shed more than half its population since the 1950s; Highland Park, over the same period, has lost four-fifths of its citizens. In Detroit, the streetlights are notoriously spotty, and there has been discussion of reducing their number by nearly half; Highland Park owed so much money to the electric company that it agreed to entirely decommission all lights on residential streets—which meant not only switching them off but physically removing the posts. (Residents have been asked by city officials to leave on their own porch lights as crime-prevention measures.) Detroit’s police force remains woefully understaffed; Highland Park fired its entire police department in 2001, outsourcing patrols to the Wayne County Sheriff ’s Department. Since its revival in 2007, the Highland Park PD has been headquartered in a ministation at a strip mall, where the jail is a makeshift chain-link cage.

When I visited the Reverend David Bullock, head of the Highland Park chapter of the NAACP and pastor of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church, he told me, “I always say to people, ‘You want to see what Detroit’s going to look like when the auto industry leaves? Come to Highland Park.’ It’s Detroit writ small.”

*   *   *

One day, my brother Paul called to tell me about one of his coworkers at Children’s Village, the juvenile detention center where he worked as a therapist. This particular colleague, Marvin Vaughn, held a staff position; his duties ranged from moderating group activities to restraining kids who became violent. The name Children’s Village took on a more sinister shading when you realized certain of the villagers had been accused of stomping random homeless guys to death or shooting people during violent carjackings. (Paul wasn’t allowed to talk about his clients, but the highest-profile cases always turned up in the papers.) Marvin, meanwhile, had a second job, in Highland Park, where, in addition to his full-time position at Children’s Village, he moonlighted another thirty hours each week as a firefighter.

Marvin would often drive straight from Children’s Village to Highland Park and spend the night at the firehouse. (Those overnight hours were billable, which was how he managed to work seventy-hour weeks.) Per capita, Highland Park had an insanely busy engine house, averaging 150 fires each year: apartments, party stores, vacant homes, most probably arson, though this was always tricky to prove. When Paul told Marvin about my book, he suggested I swing by on Angel’s Night.

I headed over to Highland Park around eight. It was unseasonably humid for a late October evening, nearly seventy degrees. On Oakland Avenue, I passed a couple of citizen patrollers in a gray Cadillac creeping along in the left lane at well below the speed limit. A yellow light, the sort an undercover detective in a seventies cop show would attach to his unmarked car if he needed to give sudden chase, flashed from their roof, its languid blink rate having seemingly been set to match the speed of the vehicle. It looked like the lead car in a funeral procession, if everyone else who might’ve attended the funeral had also met unexpected and horrible ends.

Marvin had given me directions to the firehouse earlier in the day, but we’d had a bad phone connection and I assumed I’d misheard the address, because the only thing in the vicinity appeared to be an industrial park of cheap prefabricated warehouses. After circling for twenty minutes, I finally called Marvin back, and he told me to drive into the park, the former site of Chrysler’s world headquarters. Following a circuitous road past nondescript auto-parts factories (Magna Seating, Johnson Controls), I reached the edge of a cracked, weed-strewn parking lot, where I spotted a tiny blue sign reading Fire Department. On the far side of the lot, bordering a set of train tracks, an unmarked warehouse building stood, so anonymous and isolated you’d think it housed toxic waste material or a fleet of garbage trucks. A tall, full-figured guy wearing a Highland Park Fire Department sweatshirt emerged from a side door and waved me over.

You could see how Marvin’s size would intimidate a misbehaving juvenile offender, but everything else about him exuded a laid-back, almost goofy affability. Marvin had grown up quite poor in Picayune, Mississippi, before his dad, following a well-trod African American migratory pattern, landed a job with Pontiac and moved the family to the metropolitan Detroit city of the same name. Marvin was in his midthirties, married, no kids yet, though his wife wanted some. There was a throat-clearing quality to his way of speaking that made it sound like at any moment he might suddenly burst into a raspy chuckle, and his voice darted up a couple of octaves whenever he became excited. Tonight, he wore a pair of thick-armed glasses that looked like they should be tinted. He also had a single patch of gray hair near the middle of his head, about the size of a large birthmark.