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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DC is 10 x the cesspool Detroit is.
That looks exactly like what a post-apocalyptic world would look like.
This is just mass psychosis...just absolute insanity.
Det-riot will never have even adequate leadership or political structures, the thing “we” are missing is the idea behind Det-riot is they want it to be the way it is.
The riots in late 60’s, the “white flight”, these were designed to create a “Chocolate Town” if I can borrow Ray Nagin’s phrase.
Background:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/13_detroit.html
“”This is a racial incident... it represents one simple thing: black people want control of black communities.”
—Rev. Albert Cleage, Detroit religious leader
“It’s easy and safe to blame the teachers. What about the students? People are to afraid to even mention them.”
I believe I said it is a multi dimensional problem. But are you excusing teachers from culpability in any of this? Of course students are a big problem. They are a problem because there is no structure in their lives. No basis upon which to build any perspective of right from wrong. That comes from people who are either physically or mentally still kids, having kids, and wanting and getting nanny state micromanagement of parenthood so they don’t have to do it. The rest of us who let it happen are just as guilty. These kids are thus perfect fodder for bad teachers and bad government to indoctrinate them with liberalism, and the problem becomes self perpetuating. Many parents don’t care, or wear blinders, or do what they have to do to get their own kids out of this harmful system. Of course, that’s where home schoolers and voucher support comes in, but teachers unions and teachers who drink liberal cool aid are against that.
It is a problem of liberal society, and teachers are definitely part of the problem. I don’t claim their the whole problem.
And DC is the ONLY American City under the complete control of the US Congress...
I just spent a few moments looking at the google road views in Detroit and you are very correct. The place looks horrible, pretty much every where I looked.
Whew!
The locals were all watching you because they were concerned you were going to cut off their gas, or electricity, or water, or phone service, or cable TV service, or etc...
After 8 years of W doing the heavy digging.
This makes them the worst team in NFL history!
You really think the problem is the teachers?
Probably not a simple yes or no answer. Do you think a decent/competent teacher would work there? My guess is the literacy rate among the teachers probably isn’t 80%.
I feel sorry for the kids/students who are caught in a downward spiral. The question is how to break the cycle?
I'd like to see that nationwide. There would be some minor adjustments initially (*snicker*), but in the long run it would be very beneficial.
Yes because liberal writers never tell of the horrors of Detroit or East St Louis or Gary but instead paint the worst place in America to live in as Wasilla, Alaska.
When I lived briefly in Southfield, I had to drop a U-Haul off at 8 Mile, and I walked the 2 miles back. A guy I knew (who happened to be black) said "Are you crazy?".
Only the future will tell.
I survived Jimmy CArter (which I think will be the Zero model) and CLinton....even Nixon.
So, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
I hope you have a good new year!
No, not excusing the teachers. I’m sure there are a lot of poor teachers. I do have to hand it to them though. They work in a very unsafe, crazy environment. I wouldn’t work in any school in Detroit.
Exactly, Detriot is a town that “thinks Black” as it were, everything is viewed through a racial lense, anything that even remotely threatens that view is rejected out of hand.
Run, don’t walk, run away from Detriot.
“They work in a very unsafe, crazy environment. I wouldn’t work in any school in Detroit.”
Ditto. But Detroit is our future if we don’t get a handle on this liberalism that pervades virtually every dimension of our society. Our national choice of Obama bodes ill.
“Joe America” has literally no idea what Detriot is all about, or what it is like on the ground there.
Interesting article. Thank you.
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