Detroit City Is the Place to Be (3 page)

John said we should go. I squinted out over the ledge one last time. The icy wind was almost harsh enough to make you cry, and Detroit, from up here, looked like it went on forever.

*   *   *

The story of Detroit has long functioned as a cautionary tale, as much a memento mori as one of those Roman catacombs lined with the skulls of dead monks.
What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will become.
For this reason, observers have a tendency to approach Detroit as a forensic investigation, a sort of murder mystery. They examine the body, poke their gloved digits into the wounds, dust the crime scene for prints. Whom you ended up fingering in the drawing room could often say as much about your own biases as about the city itself. For instance, when people place all of the blame for the demise of Detroit on the riots, or white flight, or “political corruption,” there’s an implicit racial—sometimes racist—element to the critique, as Detroit, post-1967, would become a black city, still 85 percent African American today, run entirely by a black political elite, which lends the nostalgia for the “old” Detroit expressed by so many white suburbanites of a certain age an occasionally disquieting subtext.

Unsurprisingly, black Detroiters of a similar age can offer up a wholly different reading of these events, one in which the word
uprising
replaces
riot
, and in which the destructive fallout, while not celebrated, is contextually understood as a reaction to years of workplace discrimination, redlining, slum housing, and abuse at the hands of goon-squad cops. As for the city’s subsequent decline, well, an observer sympathetic to this point of view might note that
of course
the oppressors would not simply flee, not without sacking the joint on the way out the door and doing everything possible once they’d gone (top-down disinvestment, supporting lopsided suburb-favoring land use and tax structures, dismantling public transportation, more redlining) to ensure the failure of, and effectively place sanctions upon, the hostile regime left behind.

Some blame the unions for their unchecked power and excessive demands, making Michigan an impossible place to do business; others, the Big Three automakers, for selling out the working class by moving factories abroad and to southern “right to work” states and for so badly bungling their own business model with chronic shortsightedness and an inability to adapt to a world involving actual competition with high-quality foreign product. Environmentalists might see the combustion engine as Culprit Zero; urbanophiles, the metastasizing suburbs; leftist European academics, the rot of capitalism and the long-fated unraveling of our great Yankee folly.

But I wasn’t really interested in any of that. Detroit-as-whodunit had been done, ad nauseam. Rather than relitigate the sins of the past, I hoped to discover something new about the city—specifically, what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded? Who sticks around and tries to make things work again? And what sorts of newcomers are drawn to the place for similar reasons? These questions seemed particularly pertinent now that Detroit was no longer such a freakish outlier. Cities in Florida and California, in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, in England and the Mediterranean and who knew where next, they’d all woken up to the same problems that have been pummeling Detroit for decades, including but not limited to structural bankruptcy, unsustainable city services and public obligations, chronic unemployment, vacant and increasingly worthless real estate, and the disappearance of a workable tax base. Left unchecked, Detroit levels of crime, political instability, and blight would certainly follow.

I wanted to think about how Detroiters struggled mightily to solve these problems—historically, yes, but more importantly right now.

*   *   *

I wasn’t alone. In the waning months of the Bush administration, a curious thing happened, as Michigan experienced a small but significant uptick in one very specific sector of its tourism economy: journalists started showing up. It turned out that explaining the origins of the financial crisis in any detail required elaborate definitions of complex and stupefyingly boring financial terms like
credit default swap
and
collateralized debt obligation.
But with the potential bankruptcy of General Motors, you had something tangible and wholly understandable to a layperson. We’d all at least
ridden
in an American car at some point, just as we all possessed opinions on various ways in which they sucked. Even better, Detroit provided the sort of breathtaking visual backdrop that shots of anxious-looking Wall Street floor traders or the exterior of Bernie Madoff’s condo simply could not compete with. As the hurricane approaches landfall, journalistic convention dictates a live report from the field, wherein the correspondent must don a rain poncho and shout into a microphone while being buffeted by the elements, palm trees flailing wildly on the deserted beach in the background. A visit to the ruins of the old Packard plant or a “ghost street” of abandoned houses became the financial-collapse equivalent. It had taken the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression to do the unthinkable: Detroit had suddenly become trendy.

And so we all came. Reporters from
Fortune
, the
Guardian
, CNN, the
Economist
,
Vice
, from Tokyo and Paris, Sydney and Los Angeles. While attempting to get footage of the Packard plant, a Dutch film crew was carjacked, which itself became a news event, adding to the “Detroit so crazy!” story line in a satisfying, metanarrative kind of way. At a public school rally, I nearly bumped into Dan Rather. Was Dan Rather even
on television
anymore? Had he just turned up on his own dime, drawn by an old man’s vampirish sixth sense to the most swollen vein in the circulatory system of the present news cycle?

Time
also turned its gaze back to Detroit in 2009. This time around, the magazine had come not to engage in speculative nuclear annihilation but rather to launch Assignment Detroit, a project being billed as a bold new journalistic experiment—a team of reporters would cover the city over the course of a year, living in a company-purchased home in Indian Village, one of the last remaining swank neighborhoods in the city proper. Not coincidentally, one of the first stories produced by Assignment Detroit was about how residents of such besieged neighborhoods had taken to hiring private security details to patrol their blocks. The previous fall, around the time of the auto bailout hearings, a photo essay of ruined Detroit buildings on
Time
’s website titled “Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline” had been a big hit, despite the unfortunate ordering of adjectives. The tagline of Assignment Detroit’s new blog, “One year, one city, endless opportunities,” also hinted, inadvertently, at the magazine’s own opportunistic appropriation of Detroit’s sudden chicness.

The new obsession with Detroit did not end with journalists, at least not according to the journalists themselves, who reported on how artists were also colonizing the city. Could this be a first wave of bohemian gentrification? Was Detroit the next Williamsburg? One young couple from Chicago had bought a home in Detroit for a hundred bucks. Brooklyn artists came and froze another house in a block of ice. Thanks to a nearly 50 percent tax incentive being offered by the state, Hollywood film crews also arrived, along with actors like George Clooney and Richard Gere. A glossy French fashion magazine even produced a special “Detroit issue” featuring shots of models in ruined industrial backdrops. The magazine cost twenty dollars in the United States—or, in local terms, one-fifth of the price of a home in Detroit.

Land speculators made the scene, too, as the new mayor, former Detroit Pistons basketball star Dave Bing, began to publicly acknowledge the need for the city to both shrink and radically reinvent itself, a pledge that urban-theorists, who had long regarded Detroit as the unsolvable math problem of their field, found tantalizing. And so they came, too, along with the Scandinavian academics, the neopastoralian agriculturalists, the deep-pocketed philanthropical organizations and the free-market ideologues and the fringe-left utopianists—they all came. For the most idealistic of these pioneers, which is how many of the newcomers self-identified, Detroit might very well be the city of tomorrow, but of a wholly different sort than described above. They’d come to see the place as a blank slate, so debased and forgotten it could be remade. The irony was almost too perfect: Detroit, having done more than any other city to promote the sprawl and suburbanization that had so despoiled the past century, could now become a model green city for the new century, with bike paths and urban farms and grass-roots sustainability nudging aside planned obsolescence.

So I joined the wagon train, alongside the hustlers and the do-gooders, the preachers and the criminals, the big dreamers looking to make names for themselves and the heavily armed zealots awaiting the end of the world. They—we!—came like pilgrims, to witness, to profit from, to somehow influence the story of the century. It might very well turn out to be the story of the
last
century, the death rattle of the twentieth-century definition of the American Dream. But there could also be another story emerging, the story of the first great postindustrial city of our new century. Who knows? Crazier things have happened in Detroit. It’s a place so unspooled, one’s wildest experiments, ideas that would never be seriously considered in a functioning city, might actually have a shot here. Nothing else had worked, and so everything was permitted. The ongoing catastrophes had, in a strange way, bequeathed the place an unexpected asset, something few other cities of its size possessed: a unique sense of possibility. On a psychological level, this played out as one of those instances when a hoary cliché (or, in this case, a Kris Kristofferson lyric) is basically true: having nothing left to lose really
did
open the mind to an otherwise tricky-to-come-by sense of freedom.

After I moved back to the city, people I met in dozens of different contexts described Detroit as “the Wild West.” Meaning, it’s basically lawless. Meaning, land is plentiful and cheap. Meaning, now, as the frontier quite literally returns to the city—trees growing out of tops of abandoned buildings! wild pheasants circling the empty lots!—so, too, has the metaphorical frontier, along with the notion of “frontier spirit.” All possibly offensive notions to the people who’d never left, for reasons of choice or circumstance. But it’s undeniable that Detroit feels like an extraordinary place, and at the same time, just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for … what, exactly? The end of the American way of life? Or the beginning of something else?

Either way, that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn’t want to see the future?

Service Street. The author’s building is the third from left.
[Chris Ringler]

1

GOIN’ TO DETROIT, MICHIGAN

D
ETROIT IS 139 SQUARE
miles and shaped, roughly, like an outboard motor. Looking at a map, you might also think of an anvil, but mostly because the northernmost border, the famous 8 Mile Road, traces such a perfectly planed line. My own return to the city began at the edge of downtown, in the Eastern Market neighborhood. Though best known for its weekly farmer’s market, Eastern Market remained primarily a distribution hub for wholesale food: produce, imported dry goods, meat from several working slaughterhouses.

I’d made regular deliveries to Eastern Market for my dad as a teenager, and when I pulled my rental car onto Service Street, which ran behind the building housing my new apartment, I realized I’d navigated this very alley many times before, years earlier, in one of my father’s knife-delivery vans, dropping off (as I recalled) newly sharpened meat grinder blades, which resembled little metal starfish and spun around in the grinders’ gullets. Butcher & Packer, a supplier of restaurants and meat markets, was still in business, just down the block from my new place. A key component of the Butcher & Packer inventory had been an assortment of premixed spices for seasoning sausages. Twenty years later, I could immediately conjure the pungent, curried funk of the place.

The rest of the block, comprised of nondescript brick warehouses and commercial structures, had been converted into lofts. The buildings fronted Gratiot Avenue, a major Detroit boulevard. One of the street-level businesses was a place called the Unemployment Institute, which, according to signs in the windows, offered services like “pre-employment screening” and “online job searching.” Large color photographs of people doing businesslike things had been incorporated into the signage—for example, a man touching his head pensively while staring down at a sheet of paper. The look on the man’s face was inscrutable; either he was puzzling over a very difficult business-related problem or he’d just received terrible news. Conveniently, if the Unemployment Institute didn’t have what you were looking for, the Lama Temple, right next door, sold lucky oils and candles and lottery tip sheets. A green candle painted on the window bore the word MONEY. Aside from Butcher & Packer, the Unemployment Institute and Lama Temple were the only two operational storefronts on the entire block, but this was not an especially poor occupancy rate for Detroit.