Why shouldn't Detroiters blame others for the city's problems?

[Detroitnerd]

Found a pretty good post on one of my new favorite blogs, Economic Undertow. Read and discuss:

The ‘Blame the Victim’ Game in Detroit

In areas where technocracy has been installed such as Greece, both the initial conditions and the failure of the process is blamed on the inhabitants. Greeks are ‘corrupt tax-cheats and lazy’. Detroiters are ‘stupid, drug-crazed Negro savages bent on murder and destruction’, French are ‘near-communists and cowards’, Irish are ‘ugly … drunken child molesters’. The purpose of the blame game is distraction while retirement savings are stolen by the establishment. The elderly ‘deserve what they [[don’t) get! The blame game hits the target by appearing to miss it.
In Detroit, the citizens didn’t chase retail stores away, they didn’t over-invest in the auto industry, they didn’t ghettoize the city with ill-conceived developments and a web of freeways, they didn’t pollute the city with lead, zinc, chromium, mercury, toxic petroleum-based chemicals, they didn’t sell the city out to billionaire developers.
The citizens didn’t pave the city over with parking lots or built thousands of monstrously ugly concrete box- buildings. Detroiters are being shot by criminals, being driven out by block busting and urban decay, losing what little property wealth they had, having already lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Detroiters have been abandoned by their country not the other way around.
The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan, why not Detroit?
Detroit’s notorious crime problem appears to be the result of lead pollution from fuel additives and manufacturing residues in the soil along with fumes from burning lead paint spewed into the air from the thousands of building fires taking place every year in the city … rather than skin color.
The black establishment in Detroit has never been able to stand up to the white establishment which owns everything important, which controls the city’s budget, which anoints various city administrations, which constantly looks for opportunities to blame blacks for everything gone wrong.
Since 1920 the auto industry has run Detroit like a coal mining ‘company town’. Most of the housing stock in Detroit was sub-standard as built: cheap frame houses thrown up as rapidly as possible on an unrelenting grid. Detroiters are learning the hard way: land use and urban design matter. The citizens did not design the buildings or lay out the streets. What charm the city once possessed has been swept away for parking lots and cheap commercial and institutional ‘facilities’. The citizens did not do this, it was business interests seeking the quick buck for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Following the Great Wave of European master craftsmen to the city in the 19th century, most of the emigres in decades following have been unskilled, uneducated agricultural workers seeking assembly-line jobs. They added little to the community other than modest paychecks and a burning desire to relocate themselves to the suburbs as soon as possible. Even in the 1950s, when the auto workers union gained touted increases in pay and benefits, the companies they worked for were shrinking, first by way of automation then by ruinous competition and business failure.
The unraveling of the US car industry has been the decline and fall of Detroit: the population has shrunk from 1.8 million to less than 700,000. Who is to live in the abandoned houses? Even without the fires and the blight, half of the ‘original city’ would be empty. Where are the jobs?
Meanwhile, the Detroiters are on the hook for tens billions of dollars of debt taken on to run the ossified city government, pay pensions, build football and baseball stadiums … arenas, improvements for casinos and retail ‘big-box’ stores. The reason Michigan keeps Detroit at arm’s length is because the state is as bankrupt as the city. If it does nothing, the city’s finance burdens will crush the state, if it tries to ‘fix’ the city the effort will crush the state just as well.
The establishment has created this mess, not the Detroiters. Meanwhile, technocracy marches over the edge of the cliff around the world ...

From http://www.economic-undertow.com

[Shollin]

This forum has officially pushed to vote republican after never voting republican in my life. I even voted for Walter Mondale.

[Detroitnerd]

This forum has officially pushed to vote republican after never voting republican in my life. I even voted for Walter Mondale.

Hey, everybody gotta realize sometime that they're afraid of looking at things in new ways.

[Shollin]

Hey, everybody gotta realize sometime that they're afraid of looking at things in new ways.

I look at it as sometime we have to grow up and quit blaming others and playing the victim.

[Detroitnerd]

I look at it as sometime we have to grow up and quit blaming others and playing the victim.

That's funny. I view myself as all-growed-up and pretty successful in my endeavors. I just don't think the playing field is anywhere near as even as it ought to be, and, like all good, justice-loving Americans, I want it as flat and level as can be. Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable, Shollin.

[Hermod]

"Since 1920 the auto industry has run Detroit like a coal mining ‘company town’. Most of the housing stock in Detroit was sub-standard as built: cheap frame houses thrown up as rapidly as possible on an unrelenting grid."


So, those cheap houses were built in GM factories and just dropped on the sites. Damn, I never knew that.

I also never knew that all of those unskilled rural Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Moravians arrived in Detroit during the first half of the century possessed with a burning desire to move to the suburbs.

Detroit should not have let the permits for the Lions build Ford Field, they should have just told them to fix up the Silverdome. Maybe Detroit can get them to build an arena for the Red Wings outside the city so that it doesn't adversely affect the city ambiance.

I see now how my youth was blighted growing up on a square grid of streets when we should have had a series of graceful curves and cul-de-sacs like Christian Hills. Mayor Jeffries must have told them that blacks were going to live there someday so they said, "Yes, yes, yes, we will make it a square grid to further disadvantage the blacks in 2013."

[Detroitnerd]

Hermod, there are definitely some things in the essay I agree with and some I don't. That's why I posted it here and proposed a discussion. Not just a place to play that popular Italian game "reductio ad absurdum."

A lot of the debt Detroit has today is because it took on bond debt in the past for such expensive projects as demolishing Poletown so GM could build a factory. And, as revenues kept dropping and expenses kept rising, the city has kept on using its bonding authority to prop up its budget, allowing it to offer tax abatements and subsidies to some of the richest developers in town. It's a serious problem, though nobody wants to talk about that because it doesn't fit the narrative of suburb-hating, white-hating Negro Marxists elected by a monolithically black poor voting block all failing because they stuck it to the capitalists and embraced leftist politics. If anything, Detroit's leaders have played Santa Claus to prominent capitalists for decades. That has been a major factor conducting to where we are now.

[Wesley Mouch]

Hermod, no sense even trying to get DNerd off his agenda. Its fact resistant. Its a tough as the agendas he fabricates for others.

Couple thoughts.

If you want a regional agenda, you should work with your region. Detroit, convinced that the deck is stacked against it, doesn't play well with others -- so sensible regional policy with urban considerations will only get so much play statewide. Perhaps as inner-ring suburbs such as RO start pushing urban planning, we'll get some results.

The desire for sprawl is real and can't be wished away. All we can do is work to assign the costs of sprawl to the creators. Hard to do while you instead fight regionalization.

[Detroitnerd]

If you want a regional agenda, you should work with your region. Detroit, convinced that the deck is stacked against it, doesn't play well with others -- so sensible regional policy with urban considerations will only get so much play statewide. Perhaps as inner-ring suburbs such as RO start pushing urban planning, we'll get some results.

Wes, are you familiar with the Michigan Suburbs Alliance?

http://www.michigansuburbsalliance.org/

[omnishambles]

I've been reading up a lot on Detroit and the rust belt in general and it seems like Detroit may have had some kind of perfect storm situation going on in terms of 'reasons it all went pear shaped'. No? Does anyone think there's some kind of Irish potato famine equivalence as well? All the eggs in one [[manufacturing - auto industry) basket so when the bottom falls out of that one industry it just screws over so many people the city can't absorb the losses in terms of $ and people? I don't know. Detroit is written about and thought of, as far as I can tell, as some kind of unique and extreme disaster area. I wish I had some time on the ground there, all anyone outside the city has is this image of everything being ruined, forever and ever, the end.

Also, Detroitnerd and Shollin, are you two in love? The bickering feels like the beginning stages of a romcom.

[canuck]

I think that the relentlessness of the city grid may have more to do with the flat landscape than anything. There are a lot of good houses in Detroit from the look of it, a lot of charming streets. Detroit seems to have erased a lot of its nineteenth century gems in rather a fast and furious manner though.

[Zug]

I think DNerd makes some good points, and so does the blog. I concede that you cannot remove all of the blame from Detroit's citizens...specifically those that commit the crimes that we all know about. However, it is important to acknowledge that outside circumstances shape the opportunities that people have. Blaming the victim is easy, and it's easy to overlook some of the root problems, which are often less sensational. Which gets more attention: DETROITERS KILL AND STEAL! or FREEWAY CONSTRUCTION MADE IT EASIER FOR MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES TO LIVE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE CITY CORE AND THEY TOOK THEIR TAX DOLLARS WITH THEM WHICH GRADUALLY KILLED THE CITY! [[I'm not saying the freeways are the only reason for a decline, but just using that as an example.)

So, for those that do blame the victim, to them it feels right. You see crime in Detroit as "proof" that your assumptions are correct. But as I said, it completely ignores circumstances that limits a person's choices. The article is correct...it is usually business and political interests that have shaped the conditions in an area. For example, many Chinese work in polluting factories. Is it because they love inhaling smoke and working long hours? Maybe for some, lol, but mainly they do so because the government allows long working hours and poor working conditions, and businesses take advantage of the regulations. In Detroit, if you have no jobs, a poor education system, and economic segregation [[meaning, poor people are not exposed to people that can direct them to decent jobs via networking), and a desire for illegal drugs in the region...then someone is very likely to become a drug dealer. Is that person bad for choosing a life of crime? Yes. However, when there's little incentive or opportunity to do better, what do you expect? So yes, you can blame the person, but you can't ignore other factors.

There's nothing wrong with deepening your perspective...even if you do want to blame present Detroiters for the majority of their problems, there's no harm in acknowledging that there's other things that influence the world other than individual choice. Otherwise, you might as well say that the Great Depression was due to people choosing to be lazy bums and be unemployed...because that makes just as much sense as some of the "only blame Detroiters" stuff I hear.

[Shollin]

The problem I have with the freeway excuse is they are everywhere. Literally. Every major city in the continental United States of America has freeways. There isn't a single city I cannot access vio freeway, yet Detroit is the only city that let it destroy the city and continues to blame the freeways. It also boggles my mind that if Detroit was such a desirable to place to live, why would they use the freeways to leave?

[corktownyuppie]

Hermod, no sense even trying to get DNerd off his agenda. Its fact resistant. Its a tough as the agendas he fabricates for others.

Mouch, you and I agree way more than we disagree. And we both generally disagree with DNerd. I'm going to offer another stance on his views that might serve as a useful way to look at them.

Every culture, society, civilization has blind spots. These are beliefs, social structures, and social norms that are so embedded in the way we live from day-to-day that even having them be questioned is in itself disruptive and sometimes infuriating.

But given the wisdom and perspective that comes with time -- long, long periods of time -- we look back and sometimes say, "WTF were we thinking??" An example of this could be something as simple as segregation, which might have been rooted in pragmatic [[if not positive) intentions. Now looking back, even the former Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran on a campaign of

"

segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"

, admitted that he was in the wrong.

I take a lot of the perspectives DNerd, the Michigan Citizen, and the World Socialist World News to be incorrect, given my belief structure and my sense of fairness.

But...

...although I still think a lot of the things they advocate are wrong and bullheaded, I recognize that with the "Law of Unintended Consequences" always at play, from time to time they mention something that causes me to question -- or even shift -- my views.

Now certainly there are a lot of false positives. But I think its useful to consider these contrarian arguments as a growth opportunity, an opportunity to continue asking, "There is always going to be a blind spot in my thinking...what are they pointing to...something that may be out of my awareness...that would allow me to see a more complete perspective of everything at play.

So, back to the task at hand... perhaps a useful way to ask the question is this: If we were to start today and ignore all of the political alliances and constraints...what would be the most optimal way to best serve the needs of the citizenry?

And rather than fight the battles of the past with the mindset of the past....what if we were to look at today's complex problems from a higher perspective and more data?

Detroiters should blame others for their problems. But they should also blame themselves. Now we can sit and argue about who was more at fault, but what would the point of that be?

I think one of the main themes of the 20th century was this question of dependence vs. independence. Everything was about power and hierarchies. Now we are moving to themes of interdependence.

It's not who broke it. It's how we fix it.

[JBMcB]

In Detroit, the citizens didn’t chase retail stores away, they didn’t over-invest in the auto industry, they didn’t ghettoize the city with ill-conceived developments and a web of freeways, they didn’t pollute the city with lead, zinc, chromium, mercury, toxic petroleum-based chemicals, they didn’t sell the city out to billionaire developers.

No, the people they voted into office did. This situation is not limited to Detroit.

[maverick1]

Detroiters should blame others for their problems. But they should also blame themselves. Now we can sit and argue about who was more at fault, but what would the point of that be?

This sums everything up right here. I don't know why everyone in this area can't understand it. It wasn't just Black Detroiters running the city post 1967 and it wasn't just "The Man" oppressing the city's residents. It's not a simple answer and people want a simple answer. I want this region to move forward but it we all seem to be stuck in the 70s and 80s.

[Shollin]

This sums everything up right here. I don't know why everyone in this area can't understand it. It wasn't just Black Detroiters running the city post 1967 and it wasn't just "The Man" oppressing the city's residents. It's not a simple answer and people want a simple answer. I want this region to move forward but it we all seem to be stuck in the 70s and 80s.

I wish we were stuck in the 70's or 80's. Detroit was in better shape back then.

[Zug]

The problem I have with the freeway excuse is they are everywhere. Literally. Every major city in the continental United States of America has freeways. There isn't a single city I cannot access vio freeway, yet Detroit is the only city that let it destroy the city and continues to blame the freeways. It also boggles my mind that if Detroit was such a desirable to place to live, why would they use the freeways to leave?

If you look at Detroit, it is actually fairly unique with the amount of coverage by freeways compared to other cities. Consider, Chicago is almost 100 square miles bigger than Detroit and has freeways radiating into 4 directions from their downtown. Whereas Detroit has freeways going in 6 directions.

Also, in most cities, freeways do not dissect the central part of the city as much as they do in Detroit. This makes it even easier to get directly to a location and have as little contact as possible with the city. This may not seem like a big deal [[or is even considered very convenient to suburbanites), but this does two things: 1. create less traffic for retail on the main streets 2. gives no incentive to live close to things in the city because it's just as easy to get there via freeway. It is actually pretty rare for freeways to be as intrusive of an established city core as it is in Detroit. It's not a coincidence that the most desired historic downtowns in the US have few or no freeways going through the middle of them [[Chicago, New York, Washington DC, as examples). Even here in Michigan, look at Ann Arbor, there's no way to get to U of M or downtown AA without having to go through the city. The only other industrial city with freeways that look a little similar to Detroit is St. Louis...and there, people "blame" the freeways for a decline just like here in Detroit. [[I'm not considering cities that grew after freeways became the norm [[i.e. Houston), since city planning revolved around them.)

Also, there are some conspiracy theories that say freeways in Detroit were laid out to destroy ethnic neighborhoods, which then led to relocation and real estate block busting. If you look, freeways destroyed or divided Mexicantown, Chinatown, and Paradise Valley. Personally, I don't know if this was on purpose, or if it was just a result of these neighborhoods being so close to downtown and "in the path" of freeways. But really, whether there were sinister motives or not, the destruction of these neighborhoods to create a web of freeways had a direct impact on the demographics of neighborhoods throughout Detroit...because people were displaced.

So it's true that every city has freeways, but the density and layout of the freeways may have had a bigger impact on Detroit compared to freeways in other cities.

[Shollin]

Freeways in Chicago can only go in so many directions or else they would end up in the lake. The Dan Ryan is literally 4 blocks from the Sears tower and the Eisenhower is 3 blocks from the Sears Tower. How can you say freeways don't dissect the central city of Chicago? Have you ever looked at a map of Chicago? The loop is completely encased in freeway. Lakeshore drive is as close to a freeway as you can get without being a freeway. There isn't a single downtown of any major city I cannot access via freeway.

[mwilbert]

Detroiters shouldn't blame others for the city's problems because it doesn't help. If anything, it reduces people's motivation to make improvements.

Working to remove the impediments to Detroit's success would be more productive, and while identifying those impediments will probably also identify some blameworthy parties and policies, the focus shouldn't be on the blame.

[Zug]

Even considering the lake, there is still quite a difference in spacing of the freeways in Chicago vs. here. Plus, we have the river to one side, so it's not like Detroit is devoid of a coast. It's pretty easy to see we have a tighter "web" of freeways in Detroit. Also, freeways do not really go through central Chicago...as you said, they go around. So my original point was valid.

[Shollin]

Even considering the lake, there is still quite a difference in spacing of the freeways in Chicago vs. here. Plus, we have the river to one side, so it's not like Detroit is devoid of a coast. It's pretty easy to see we have a tighter "web" of freeways in Detroit. Also, freeways do not really go through central Chicago...as you said, they go around. So my original point was valid.

How in the world do they go through central Detroit and not central Chicago? This is a serious question but have you ever looked at a map of Chicago?

[Zug]

How in the world do they go through central Detroit and not central Chicago? This is a serious question but have you ever looked at a map of Chicago?

I'm not going to debate this back & forth. It's just a simple point that in Chicago, they avoided building a freeway that cut through the heart of downtown [[I also mentioned NY & DC). I'm not saying they have no freeways...or that freeways had no impact on Chicago. I'm just saying that Chicago's freeway era was not nearly as destructive to the Loop, Near North Side, and other established centers of importance as our freeway building era was to downtown [[and the Woodward corridor, in general). Our freeways created new physical borders for which to define downtown [[and midtown). All cities were affected by freeways in different ways. But Detroit's concentration of freeways, interconnected layout, and pattern of destruction combined with other local factors [[I never said freeways were the only factor) had a relatively unique impact on Detroit than other regions.

You don't have to try to demean me because you do not agree with my point. Freeways are certainly not the only factor that lead to Detroit's decline, but I find it difficult to say they played no role.

[Wesley Mouch]

Wes, are you familiar with the Michigan Suburbs Alliance?

http://www.michigansuburbsalliance.org/

No, I wasn't. Thanks. A quick reading suggests that the name of the group could just as well be "Southeastern Michigan Alliance of Old Cities of under 700,000".

I was wondering how long before we saw the inner-ring suburbs experience many of the same problems Detroit has faced.

[Bham1982]

Also, freeways do not really go through central Chicago...as you said, they go around. So my original point was valid.

Lakeshore Drive? Kennedy Expressway?

Yes, Lakeshore Drive isn't technically an interstate, but it's a freeway. Limited access, no streetlights, six lanes of divided, high speed traffic with shoulders. It completely separates the city from the lake, with limited pedestrian tunnels under the freeway.

And the Kennedy, which is huge, slices right through downtown.