I do not agree with some of the arguments in this article from Mother Jones, but it is thought-provoking and I wanted to share it. I think the article is overly critical of Gilbert, particularly since no one else would might have stepped up had he not done so. I also think that the view on blight removal is excessively negative. While I do not think people should be put out of their homes for the sake of "urban renewal," there are A LOT of unsalvageable structures that no one is living in, and which are falling apart and should be removed.

At the White House, Gilbert banged his fist on the table. "The one thing you guys have got to do," he thundered "is figure out how to help us do this blight work." To save Detroit, he told the assembled officials, they needed to help tear down Detroit. By tearing down tens of thousands of buildings —some still occupied, some abandoned—they would make room for new, vibrant neighborhoods.

Gilbert's fist-pounding proved persuasive. Several weeks after the White House meeting, the Obama administration pulled together a $300 million aide package for Detroit, made up of combined federal and private dollars. There was money to hire firefighters, repair buses and begin the construction of the M-1 Rail, a $140 million trolley line that will travel 3.3 miles through the city's gentrifying downtown. But almost half of the total was earmarked for blight removal, and Gilbert himself became co-chair of a task force charged with identifying the demolition targets. There are no minutes of the White House meeting, so it's impossible to know what discussion there was about the blight-removal approach. It also appears that not a single representative of the neighborhoods soon to be bulldozed—no minister, no community organizer, no teacher or city council member—attended the meeting. The closest person to a community representative was Dennis Archer, who had served as Detroit's mayor from 1994 to 2001.


This is the fundamental dynamic that has played out throughout Detroit's crisis and recovery: The city's future is being determined by politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists while native Detroiters—more than 80 percent of whom are black—often can only watch from afar. Peter Hammer, Director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University's Law School, describes the plans for Detroit as "the suburban view of what a city should look like. It's not a view of the city that's responsive to the needs of the citizens of Detroit."