Originally Posted by
Zaiko
Bham 1982
In a way I admire your ability to maintain an opposing argument. Birmingham is a real town with a sense of community. When Chris Leinberger wrote the Next Slum for the Atlantic in 2007, he said Birmingham would be one of the few places in Michigan that would avoid the ravages of the pattern of build and abandon.
But I grew up there too. It's still a small, snobby, parochial place of white people who are uncomfortable around blacks, poorer whites, and most foreigners. The people there are not worldly. Most of them can not appreciate the value of being around people that are not like them. They are not interested in being within breathing or underarm smelling distance of the other. Birmingham lawyer Lex Kuhne says metro Detroit's main problem is the absence of common experiences. Kuhne would prefer being able to risk the odors and be closer to others on a train.
A growing percentage of Birmingham and other suburban kids grow up and never come back. Every one from L. Brooks' crowd now has a son or daughter in New York City. By the 1990's, even those kids realized that the 1950's automobile based lifestyles should not be preserved at all costs.
I saw a Mad Max movie once that was supposed to be futuristic. Driving around Detroit at high speed, using our precious dollars so a single person be protected in 3,000 pounds of metal, glimpsing a few human faces but being in position only to suspect them of something, makes me think of that movie. I makes me think of Charleton Heston's[[from St. Helen, Mi) 1973 movie Omega Man. It makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' book, The Leviathan. We will kill each other to protect our rights to private property and our rights to drive around. I wonder sometimes, with all our anger, fear, failure and lack of ability to keep acquiring material things, why Woodward, 275, 16 Mile or 38 Mile don't descend into public demolition derbies.
Brooks, as many people have pointed out on this forum better than I, has invested metro Detroit's future in the 1950's. He has done the bidding for a demographic of perhaps 1-2 million white men and women who live in fear of blacks coming up over 8 mile road.
Governor Snyder's director of strategy and brain trust of the administration, Bill Rustem, asked publicly before he worked for Snyder, when Brooks & Co will stop campaigning against Detroit in order to get elected in Oakland County. Brooks and or that mentality is holding us hostage. We are all poorer because of it.
Your writing here makes you appear to be an apologist for sprawl and perhaps racism. I hate to think that of anybody. Both ideologies are sad.
The answers and solutions for Michigan won't come from the suburbs. The seeds of self-destruction still grow there.
I presume you have a series of arguments to refute Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis.