Open Letter: We All Have a Stake in Detroit’s Future

“This is white supremacy. We will fight you. And before we let you take over our city, we will burn it down.”

That's what Malik Shabazz said last week, at a public Detroit Financial Review meeting. He was addressing officials from Michigan’s capitol, Lansing, who were in town to discuss solutions to Detroit’s dire budget problems.

It’s no secret: Detroit's on the verge of bankruptcy. There’s barely enough tax money left in the city government’s coffers to fund basic services others take for granted in major cities, like garbage collection or public transportation. But Detroiters like Shabazz didn’t want the state's help, not if it meant having an unelected emergency manager or financial advisory board appointed in Detroit.

The state has taken charge of other troubled, black majority cities like Pontiac and Flint under Michigan’s controversial Public Act 4, with mixed results. Generally, the solutions Michigan's they’ve come up with for those cities have shared three common themes: cut spending, kill unions and privatize everything.

But it’s unclear how effective those policies are. Pontiac and Flint remain in poor financial shape and directionless, with less assets left to leverage in the future. It should come as no surprise, then, that some Detroiters were reluctant to see the keys to the city finally handed to a financial advisory board on Thursday.

Of course, violence or destruction isn't the answer to Detroit's problems, either. But Shabazz’s race-based resentments should be taken seriously. It's an all too often underrepresented issue that has plagued Metro Detroit for far too long, and has been a real factor in the region’s politics. Rick Snyder conceded that point when discussing Detroit's financial crisis:

"In Michigan we’ve had challenges on race. I don’t want to minimize the fact that race is an issue out there that we that always need to be sensitive to. And we should be.”

Metro Detroit is one of the most segregated major metropolitan areas in the country. Detroit, home to a shrinking population of about 700,000 people, is 80% black and largely impoverished. Meanwhile, Oakland County, which has over 1.2 million people, is 80% white and consists mainly of sprawling, upper and middle class suburbs.

Now,it wasn’t always this way. In 1960, Detroit was 70% white and prosperous, and the suburbs were primarily undeveloped farmland or forests. But by 1980, there was less than half the number of whites in Detroit, with the city's white population dropping from 1,182,970 to 402,077. And, unfortunately, they hurt more than the city’s census numbers. Whites, Detroit’s traditional power base, took the city’s businesses with them as they fled from the crime and high taxes they associated with city life.

Iconic skyscrapers and historic factories were abandoned in Detroit, while new ones went up in predominately white suburbs like Dearborn and Troy. Detroit's proud black middle class – a symbolic symbol of the civil rights movement’s attempts to reverse centuries of oppression - was systematically destroyed nearly as soon as it had gotten off the ground. Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor, would later say that the city was essentially "mugged” by the suburbs.

John Sutton, a DEA agent assigned to Detroit in the early 1970s, noted in the Al Profit documentary Rollin something remarkable about the legendary Motor City: "I saw a kind of a black affluence [in Detroit] that I had never seen in other cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and places. Everyone was driving a new car – and naturally, an American-made car."

In 2009, Detroit officials estimated that Detroit's true unemployment rate was at a staggering 50%, illustrating just how far the city was to fall.

My, how times have changed.

It’s become routine to blame the decline of manufacturing in America for Detroit's woes. The city was, after all, built on the back of the big three automakers and the city’s crumbling factories make for a dramatic metaphor. However, that version of hispoignantly ignores the successes of the city’s suburbs, which have almost universally fared better.

Since the 1960s, Metro Detroit has managed to maintain a relatively stable population and level of affluence. The regional economy has diversified, with noteworthy job growth in the financial, health care, and technology sectors. Sure, the automotive industry is still the biggest employer, but the economy isn’t as monolithic as it used to be.

Though the recession in the late-2000s put a large dent in Michigan’s economy, Metro Detroit is far from dead. But Detroit proper, cut off from the rest of the region economically and socially, is in an extremely precarious position.

Yes, there are the believers like Dan Gilbert or Mike Ilitch that reinvest into Detroit, but they are too far and few in between. Too many suburbanites seem to think that if Detroit stopped existing tomorrow, it would be a burden lifted from their shoulders.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Never in America has there been a major metropolitan area without an urban core. And Metro Detroit needs a dynamic, vibrant urban environment at its center if it’s going to attract top talent or truly reinvent itself. The suburbs are too scattered and self-centered to promote actual change.

The last five years in particular have shown that Metro Detroit’s future is far from secure. There’s no guarantee that the economy will improve rather than get worse. The region has challenges in front of it that complacency won’t solve - the massive infrastructural costs of unchecked suburban development being but one example.

Metro Detroiters need to come together now, before it’s too late. Any racial divides, whether political or social, must be shed aside in the name of the greater public good. Everyone also has to recognize that emergency managers or a financial advisory boards are not magic bullets, and prepare to make some appropriate concessions. There is too much at stake.

Detroit put Michigan on the map. We can’t let it die. We need to rebuild, not destroy.