Posted on 01/01/2009 8:10:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
"This is the place where bad times get sent to make them belong to somebody else, thus, it seems easy to agree about Detroit because the city embodies everything the rest of the country wants to get over."
--Jerry Herron, AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (1993)
Detroit My plane hadn't even finished descending through the snow-drizzly sheets of December gray, when already, I heard someone crack on it. "Ladies and Gentlemen," a Northwest flight attendant announced, "Welcome to lovely Detroit, the one and only home of the Detroit auto worker of America. Happiness is a way of travel, not a destination."
The lawyer sitting next to me sniggered. He was only buzzing in for a day or so, but knowing I was a reporter, come to write a story on the city, he asked, "How long are you in for?"
"About a week," I responded.
"Good luck with that," he said, piteously shaking his head. "It sucks."
Before I'd left, I'd asked an acquaintance if he was from Detroit. "Indeed I am," he said, "Give me all your f--ing money." Another colleague, always mindful of my desire for maximum material, suggested, "You should go when it's warm, you'd have a better chance of getting hurt."
Somewhere along the way, Detroit became our national ashtray, a safe place for everyone to stub out the butt of their jokes. This was never more evident than at the recent congressional hearings, featuring the heads of the Big Three automakers, now more often called the Detroit Three, as that sounds more synonymous with failure. Yes, they have been feckless and tone-deaf in the past, and now look like stalkers trying to make people love them with desperation moves such as Ford breaking the "Taurus" name out of mothballs, or Chrysler steering a herd of cattle through downtown Detroit for an auto show (some of the longhorns started humping each other in front of reporters, giving new meaning to the "Dodge Ram," which they were intended to advertise).
But with millions of jobs on the line, including their own, the Detroit Three honchos went to Washington to endure the kabuki theater, first in their private jets, then in their sad little hybrids. All to get their slats kicked in by Congress (and who has been more profligate than they) in order to secure a bridge loan to withstand an economy wrecked by others who'd secured no-strings bailouts before them. The absurdist spectacle was best summed up by car aficionado Jay Leno: "People who are trillions of dollars in debt, yelling at people who are billions of dollars in debt."
It happens, though, when you're from Detroit. In the popular imagination, the Motor City has gone from being the Arsenal of Democracy, so named for their converting auto factories to make the weapons which helped us win World War II, and the incubator of the middle class (now leading the nation in foreclosure rates, Detroit once had the highest rate of home ownership in the country), to being Dysfunction Junction. To Detroit's credit, they've earned it.
Before arriving, I conducted an exhaustive survey, reading everything I could about Detroit, including and especially the journalistic labor of the diligent if shell-shocked scribes of the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. How bad is Detroit? Let's review:
Its recently resigned mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, he of the Kangol hats and five-button suits, now wears jailhouse orange as he's currently serving a four-month sentence as part of a plea agreement for perjuring himself regarding an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, which yielded soupy love-daddy text messages that would make Barry White yak in his grave. Those in Detroit who are neither recipients of sweetheart contracts nor Kilpatrick family members on the city payroll at inflated salaries think he got off easy. Because what led to the perjury was concealing an $8.4 million payout from city coffers to settle a whistleblower suit brought by cops who'd been fired for investigating, among other things, the murder of a stripper named Strawberry who, prior to her death, was allegedly beat up by Kilpatrick's wife when she caught her entertaining her husband.
In a city often known as the nation's murder capital, with over 10,000 unsolved murders dating back to 1960, the police are in shambles through cutbacks and corruption trials. (They have a profitable sideline, though, as one of the nation's largest gun dealers, having sold 14 tons of used weapons out-of-state.) Their response times are legendarily slow. Their crime lab is so inept that it has been closed. One Detroit man found police so unresponsive when trying to turn himself in for murder that he hopped a bus to Toledo and confessed there instead.
Detroit schools haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years. Students have reported having to bring their own toilet paper. Teachers have reported bringing hammers to class for protection. Declining enrollment has forced 67 school closures since 2005 (more than a quarter of the city's schools). The graduation rate is 24.9 percent, the lowest of any large school district in the country. Not for nothing did one frustrated activist start pelting school board members with grapes during a meeting. She probably should've reached for something heavier.
An internal audit, which was 14 months late, estimates next year's city deficit to be as high as $200 million (helped along by $335,000 embezzled from the Department of Health and Wellness Promotion). With a dwindling tax base--even the city's three once-profitable casinos are seeing a downturn in revenues (the Greektown Casino is in bankruptcy)--the city has kicked around every money-making scheme from selling off ownership rights to the tunnel it shares with neighboring Windsor, Canada, to a fast food tax. It's perhaps unsurprising that Detroit now has the most speed traps in the nation.
It also has one of the highest property tax rates in Michigan, yet has over 60,000 vacant dwellings (a guesstimate--nobody keeps official count), meaning real estate values are in the toilet. Over the summer, the Detroit News sent a headline around the world, about a Detroit house that was for sale for $1. But it's not even that uncommon. As of this writing, there are at least five $1 homes for sale in Detroit.
The city council has been such a joke that one former member demanded 17 pounds of sausages as part of her $150,000 bribe. Its prognosis for respectability hasn't grown stronger with Monica Conyers, wife of congressman John Conyers, taking the helm. She has managed to get in a barroom brawl, threatened to shoot a mayoral staffer as well as have him beaten up, and twice called a burly and bald fellow council member "Shrek" during a public hearing. But with all the problems facing the city, the council still found time to pass a nonbinding resolution supporting the impeachment of George W. Bush.
How bad is Detroit? It once gave the keys to the city to Saddam Hussein.
Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days. It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.
Men's Fitness magazine christened Detroit America's fattest city, while Men's Health called it America's sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the "most dangerous" title for five of the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.
On the upside, Detroit ranks as the nation's foremost consumer of Slurpees and of baked beans on Labor Day. And as if all of this isn't humiliating enough, the Detroit Lions are 0-14.
The best description of the feel of the place came to me from Jason Vines: "We're all Kwame-fatigued, the economy is crap, and the Lions suck. We're tired." A former executive with both Ford and Chrysler, Vines spun me around the decimated, half-abandoned neighborhood of Highland Park, which Chrysler left in the early '90s for the greener pastures of Auburn Hills. It's hard to fault them, he notes, since bullets used to occasionally whiz into the Chrysler buildings from the surrounding neighborhood.
Like many Detroiters (he lives in a posh suburb, where houses on his block have remained unsold for six years), he's bracing for one or all of the Big Three going down. He predicts millions will be thrown out of work, right down to the diner owner in Utah who serves lunch to the people who produce the screws which are bought by the widget manufacturers who produce a component that goes into a seat of a Ford automobile. The diner owner thought he wasn't in the auto business. "But he was," says Vines. "He just didn't know it."
Precisely what caused all this mess is perhaps best left to historians. Locals' ideas for how it happened could keep one pinned to a barstool for weeks: auto companies failing or pushing out to the suburbs and beyond, white flight caused by the '67 riots and busing orders, the 20-year reign of Mayor Coleman Young who scared additional middle-class whites off with statements such as "The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it," freeways destroying mass transit infrastructure, ineptitude, corruption, Japanese cars--take your pick.
What's clear, though, is that Detroit has failed, that it's broken and cracked. It is dying. But it's not yet dead. Although it has lost over half its population since 1950, 900,000 people still live there. I went to Detroit to experience a cross-section of those who live between its cracks, who either choose or are stuck with living among the ruins.
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Yep, that caused all the problems.
Detroit is the best (and worst) example of black racial politics run wild. I fear for my country as this seems to be the direction that Obambi instinctively wants to take the country. As someone who was raised in the 50’s, I never thought I would see my country in the state it is today.
Mostly Cleveland is just boring and empty of major attractions.
....but I haven’t visited enough of them to judge. I’m sure others here will have their “favorite” nominees, but no one would leave Newark and Detroit off the list. Sad cases......
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I’m going to nominate Baltimore ,, it won’t win overall but parts of it could challenge Newark and Detroit...
Looking at that photo spread someone posted I would be real tempted to go to Detroit and salvage all that early 1900’s stonework and architectural detail items (clawfoot tubs and such) from the condemned buildings but as I’m white I could never get approval... If I lived there that’s how I’d make a living... truck it to LA , Boston or NYC and make a fortune even at wholesale...
“America doesn’t need Deetroit and by extension Michigan.”
That has to be the stupidest post I’ve read in a long time. Giving up on one of the nations large states is friggen stupid.
Sad but true, the only difference is, the media will cheerlead for Obamao and spread propaganda, they will NEVER examine the outcomes of Obamao’s proposals.
Look at this thread, most FReepers had no idea how destitute and destroyed Det-riot is, and has remained since the late 60’s.
The media never reports it, they only report the “celebrations”..see looting after a Det-riot team wins a sports championship.
only the weather prevents the populace from returning to their loincloth roots.
It gets my vote for quote of the day.
MINE TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It gets my vote for quote of the day.
LOL! Mine, too!
Well, it won't be a winning football team anytime soon, I daresay.
““Joe America” has literally no idea what Detriot is all about, or what it is like on the ground there.”
To be honest, neither did I until I read this article. But in other ways, I’ve know about Detroit for quite some time. The article portrays an America to be, the culmination of liberal policy executed by self interested bureaucrats on behalf of a disinterested and unmotivated population. There can be no other result, and evidence of the decay is openly visible in every population center in the country and very much so in the center of national bureaucracy: D.C.
OK, I have to admit, that's funny. But imagine Sarah Palin doing any of those things and the national outrage from the drive-by idiots.
Can someone explain to me why the big 3 couldn’t move to another state? Why are they tied to Michigan?
I like to post this URL in threads about Detroit: http://www.forgottendetroit.com. Take a look at http://www.forgottendetroit.com/fisher/photos.html. For some reason the name ‘Fisher Body’ has stuck with me through the years. I’m not a car person, but I can imagine that Fisher was a meaningful contributor to the automobile industry and this is what they’ve come to.
I went to UM in Ann Arbor for 2 degrees, my late husband’s people are from Dexter, my son went to UM. I feel connected to Michigan. Even when I was first there in the early ‘70s, fellow students were surprised that my family still lived in Wash DC, as they had all escaped Detroit after the ‘68 riots for the suburbs. Instead of being a place where college kids could go for a weekend or good time, we only went into Detroit to see rock acts at Cobo, then we’d high tail it back to A2. Like I said, this was back in the early ‘70s, and things have only gotten worse. It’s sad, really.
yes i agree. i live here in southwest detroit. ive been here 9 years. i got my house from my aunt when she died. i use to live on one of the best neighborhoods here! but now it is THE HOOD . i seen my neighbors all move away. and are replaced with drug dealers, squaters, hookers and streets of vacant homes. they steal everything from these homes , and then we have to keep our kids away from them. they wont tear them down. stray dogs and cats and rats are living in these homes. i want to stay here in detroit but something needs to be done. i cant change the whole city but i try to keep the peace here on my street. i wish more people would do the same.
the article says its from Dec 2008...but didnt this happen THIS year? or am I wrong?
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