What the heck happened to Detroit?!

[Relayer76]

Hi Detroiters:
I have just recently discovered Detroit through Lowell's awesome Detroit Tour site. I have also spent hours on Google street view "walking" neighborhoods turned urban prairies.

You hear of plant closures on the news over decades and you think to yourself, yeah that's a lot of jobs, that's going to hurt but outside the local area, there is no follow-up reporting on the the impact these closures have on people or cities.

From what I've read so far I would attribute the current situtaion to a number of factors: decline of the auto industry due to imports , underprivileged black population, poor schools, cocaine epidemic in the 80s [[that really can destroy a neighbourhood fast), city designed for cars, lack of public transit, poor leadership at the municipal level. I'd really be interested in hearing the opinion of Detroiters as to what went wrong and also, where the people went? what was it like to leave a home behind? who owns these urban prairies, how do people who live in these almost empty neighborhoods feel about living there?

[Bearinabox]

Hi Detroiters:
I have just recently discovered Detroit through Lowell's awesome Detroit Tour site. I have also spent hours on Google street view "walking" neighborhoods turned urban prairies.

You hear of plant closures on the news over decades and you think to yourself, yeah that's a lot of jobs, that's going to hurt but outside the local area, there is no follow-up reporting on the the impact these closures have on people or cities.

From what I've read so far I would attribute the current situtaion to a number of factors: decline of the auto industry due to imports , underprivileged black population, poor schools, cocaine epidemic in the 80s [[that really can destroy a neighbourhood fast), city designed for cars, lack of public transit, poor leadership at the municipal level. I'd really be interested in hearing the opinion of Detroiters as to what went wrong and also, where the people went? what was it like to leave a home behind? who owns these urban prairies, how do people who live in these almost empty neighborhoods feel about living there?

The answers to your questions depend largely on whether you're asking about Detroit the municipality or Detroit the region. I would argue, for example, that the existence of urban prairies within the city limits has very little to do with the domestic auto industry losing market share to imports.

[fryar]

Huh. Didn't realize there weren't filters on here to filter out the word fuck.

My perhaps uninformed opinion is that the region as a whole has suffered from an over-reliance on a languishing auto industry, while Detroit has suffered from the urban flight phenomenon. Both have had follow-on effects. For example, a discussion on the social status of Detroit's black Americans prior to the introduction of highways may be relevant, but there's no denying that the depleted tax base that white flight brought about in Detroit boded ill for those black Americans who remained behind in Detroit.

Both trends, the withering banana republic and urban flight, have negatively impacted Detroit proper for multiple decades, a lifetime, really, and have never been successfully countered.

It's urban flight, to the extreme.

To return to my favorite old canard, Detroit could have not done this to its downtown:

i.e. turn it into a parking lot. While fun stuff like walkability and light rail from downtown up to the Museums in midtown does nothing to undermine urban flight or bad management decisions from a generation or two ago, these things can be a draw for some fairly well-heeled people who may contribute to rebuilding the tax base. But that's almost secondary, in my mind, as a cause. It's not the sort of thing that the urban flighters cared much about. I see it more as an opportunity missed to counteract those two trends.

[fryar]

I would argue, for example, that the existence of urban prairies within the city limits has very little to do with the domestic auto industry losing market share to imports.

A particular house might have been abandoned, due to urban flight, but the degree of blight does have to do with broader economic conditions, wouldn't you say? If S.E. Michigan was pumping out cars, and Detroit was on the losing end of urban flight, would the actual rate of unemployment be thought to run as high as 50%? Would scrappers descend on abandoned homes so quickly and efficiently? Would the prairie be prairie?

[DetroitDad]

Hi Detroiters:
I have just recently discovered Detroit through Lowell's awesome Detroit Tour site. I have also spent hours on Google street view "walking" neighborhoods turned urban prairies.

You hear of plant closures on the news over decades and you think to yourself, yeah that's a lot of jobs, that's going to hurt but outside the local area, there is no follow-up reporting on the the impact these closures have on people or cities.

From what I've read so far I would attribute the current situtaion to a number of factors: decline of the auto industry due to imports , underprivileged black population, poor schools, cocaine epidemic in the 80s [[that really can destroy a neighbourhood fast), city designed for cars, lack of public transit, poor leadership at the municipal level. I'd really be interested in hearing the opinion of Detroiters as to what went wrong and also, where the people went? what was it like to leave a home behind? who owns these urban prairies, how do people who live in these almost empty neighborhoods feel about living there?

Far more interesting is why we are continuing to fail, or meet with severely limited success.

[English]

Far more interesting is why we are continuing to fail, or meet with severely limited success.

This one's easy. SE Michigan is not adapting well to the demands of the 21st century marketplace. There are many good people, visionaries, and reformers here, but you still have hundreds of thousands of people who didn't get the memo that 1960 was 50 years ago. Detroit will never look like or be like the place it was back then, and neither race nor class relations are the same as they were back then. Yet our fundamental assumptions about unions, race relations, development and land use are still stuck in the mid-20th century. The cultural trend in desirable cities and regions is to think very differently about these issues than we do, which is why we keep losing our best homegrown talent. And on the cycle of decline goes...

[Left_For_Texas]

This is going well.

[DetroitDad]

This one's easy. SE Michigan is not adapting well to the demands of the 21st century marketplace. There are many good people, visionaries, and reformers here, but you still have hundreds of thousands of people who didn't get the memo that 1960 was 50 years ago. Detroit will never look like or be like the place it was back then, and neither race nor class relations are the same as they were back then. Yet our fundamental assumptions about unions, race relations, development and land use are still stuck in the mid-20th century. The cultural trend in desirable cities and regions is to think very differently about these issues than we do, which is why we keep losing our best homegrown talent. And on the cycle of decline goes...

YES!

Well said, but why? Why didn't those people get that memo? Whose responsibility is it that they get it?

Detroit's problems are a complex web of interwoven multicausal problems that reinforce each other, like a perverted system of checks and balances that assure failure. Root causes are tough to find in such a knot of cause and effect.

An area business man I met summed it up quite nicely when he said; "Detroit's problems are the result of poor planning". When I tried to bring up corruption and the importance of name recognition, he said; "that is all still the result of poor planning".

More on this later....

[Zacha341]

Agreed. And the increasing black flight over the last 10 years is a factor. I was talking to a married friend last week who said in 2007 they'd sold their Detroit home, pennies on the dollar and moved to St. Clair Shores. As she described it she and her husband were weary and disgusted of paying taxes to fund a corrupt city government in return for diminishing city services and high crime and high taxes. Sad to hear, but I heard her and understood. Now that's 'two more' tax payers that left....

A particular house might have been abandoned, due to urban flight, but the degree of blight does have to do with broader economic conditions, wouldn't you say? If S.E. Michigan was pumping out cars, and Detroit was on the losing end of urban flight, would the actual rate of unemployment be thought to run as high as 50%? Would scrappers descend on abandoned homes so quickly and efficiently? Would the prairie be prairie?

[Zacha341]

Well stated English... too many people are still in 1975 thinking in terms of employment or the once broader spectrum of 'entitlements'. Both have changed and will not be resuming the "good ole' days".

This one's easy. SE Michigan is not adapting well to the demands of the 21st century marketplace. There are many good people, visionaries, and reformers here, but you still have hundreds of thousands of people who didn't get the memo that 1960 was 50 years ago. Detroit will never look like or be like the place it was back then, and neither race nor class relations are the same as they were back then. Yet our fundamental assumptions about unions, race relations, development and land use are still stuck in the mid-20th century. The cultural trend in desirable cities and regions is to think very differently about these issues than we do, which is why we keep losing our best homegrown talent. And on the cycle of decline goes...

[gazhekwe]

Urban flight is a good way of putting it. It has a way of increasing exponentially as the neighborhood empties out. First step: Here "they" come. "They" could be anybody different from the general neighborhood population, either racially, culturally, socially, or economically. Sure enough, next "regular" family that moves out, their house goes to one of "them." Now the whole neighborhood is edgy and thinking, 'if we don't get out now, we'll lose our equity, the values will drop, the stores will close, yadayadayadayada,' and one by one, they start leaving, then there are hosts of for sale signs and the values do drop. Sure enough, the last ones left do lose their equity. Some are so angry and bereft that they just walk away, and try to rent their now undesirable homes. The market is saturated and even "THEY" don't want to buy here as there are so many choices. Empty houses and rentals start deteriorating. Values drop further and absentee landlords don't see any good in spending to maintain property that isn't worth anything. Surrounding neighborhoods suffer from the spread of the opinion that this area is no longer viable or worth living in. And so it goes.

[canuck]

Welcome Relayer76! I had the same questions for the folks on this forum earlier this year and still am seeking answers but now am looking for solutions along with almost everyone here. I think that Detroit deserves better attention from state and federal govts but also from the international urban planning community. I do believe in a better future, and the turnaround has already started.

[Bearinabox]

A particular house might have been abandoned, due to urban flight, but the degree of blight does have to do with broader economic conditions, wouldn't you say? If S.E. Michigan was pumping out cars, and Detroit was on the losing end of urban flight, would the actual rate of unemployment be thought to run as high as 50%? Would scrappers descend on abandoned homes so quickly and efficiently? Would the prairie be prairie?

The city has its ups and downs along with the rest of the region, but even in good times the city has continued to lose population and expand its prairies. The people who left the city are mostly still in the region, which is contrary to what you'd expect if the regional economy were the primary cause of the flight. I'm not saying Detroit is somehow insulated from the region's problems, but I am saying that the region's problems don't come close to explaining the city's situation. You can probably point to an empty house in someplace like Rosedale Park and say "that house would be occupied if not for the mortgage crisis" with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but an empty house in Poletown is more likely empty because the whole neighborhood has been emptying out for the past thirty years.

[canuck]

What is particular about Detroityes is that you can access details from Detroiters lives, regional and city folks which are then debated and evaluated with a heady mix of emotion and reason. It paints a better portrait of the city than anything I've seen. People discuss new items and media representations of the city and I can imagine this forum being a nexus tool for rebuilding the city. I am amazed at the memories of people who can tell us about neighborhood life in the 40's and 50's.
I also like to hear about people who say they think of moving back from out of state. This goes to show that Detroit has many redeeming qualities.

[gazhekwe]

Whoever turns on the key to making Detroit's blighted neighborhoods viable will be the savior of the region. As Bearinabox said, most of the people who left the dying neighborhoods are still in the area. Maybe their kids will come back.

I was in beautifully restored blighted neighborhoods in Savannah, GA, Portland, OR and in Boston, MA. All three neighborhoods were cleaned up, fixed up and spiffed up. There were pix all around the restored buildings showing the sad deteriorated state of the place less than ten years prior. What did it take to get those started? It took some pioneering, and a huge chunk of support from the local governments. I guess it is happening in Harlem right now. Better police protection, values going up, businesses moving in, the opposite of the devaluing I described above.

Of course, then you get that whole "gentrification" fight. What happens to the people who are getting priced out of the market? It's like urban flight in reverse. They can no longer stay in their old neighborhood because of rising values, so they have to pick up and flee. Either kind of flight is destructive of community values, but the rising values kind sure ends up looking better, and the city's tax base rises.

[Relayer76]

YES!

Detroit's problems are a complex web of interwoven multicausal problems that reinforce each other, like a perverted system of checks and balances that assure failure. Root causes are tough to find in such a knot of cause and effect.


More on this later....

Really well said DetroitDad. That is pretty much the conclusion I have come to. I'm looking forward to more from you latter.

[detroitjim]

An incredibly virile disease known as "scumbrosis" .

Pray that your region does not fall prey to it.

[fryar]

The city has its ups and downs along with the rest of the region, but even in good times the city has continued to lose population and expand its prairies. The people who left the city are mostly still in the region, which is contrary to what you'd expect if the regional economy were the primary cause of the flight. I'm not saying Detroit is somehow insulated from the region's problems, but I am saying that the region's problems don't come close to explaining the city's situation. You can probably point to an empty house in someplace like Rosedale Park and say "that house would be occupied if not for the mortgage crisis" with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but an empty house in Poletown is more likely empty because the whole neighborhood has been emptying out for the past thirty years.

All of that I basically agree with. But the economic decline compounds everything. You'd still have urban flight, but as a fer-instance, that abandoned lot in Poletown might be mowed and maintained by the city if some of its residents found work in the dynamic, expanding economy of the surrounding area.

Whoever turns on the key to making Detroit's blighted neighborhoods viable will be the savior of the region.

In my opinion, don't hold your breath for that to happen. My money [[such as it is) is on small-scale civic initiatives. Carbon copies of the Friends of Spaulding Court, the SOUP people, GSCC, and such.

Of course, then you get that whole "gentrification" fight. What happens to the people who are getting priced out of the market? It's like urban flight in reverse.

Yes, it would be nice to avoid something that is outwardly the opposite of what older generations did [[cross-post to Nolan Finley thread? ;-) but is really just more of the same. Mind you, any carbon copy of the Friends of Spaulding Court I would advocate probably takes the form of owner-occupied apartments, or something like that [[I can only assume that's what they're doing, it's what I'd be doing), and accomplishes that goal.

[DetroitDad]

I have yet to read the thread entitled Detroit: “There Is NO ‘Plan’!” at the time of writing this, though that title really describes how I see Detroit. For we are a ship lost at sea, with no one manning the helm. What exists instead of a captain, is a crew in mutiny, fighting over the treasure on board, ignoring the sea of icebergs, sharks, and treasure that surround them all.

Plainly put, our region has no respected governing body or group to coordinate the efforts of local governments, companies, and citizens who organize themselves into organizations. It is for this reason that while some of us are failures on a micro level, all of us are failures on a macro level.

Beyond that key issue;

• Metro Detroit communities do not seem to know why they are failing, or don't seem to be aware of their full potential as a team.
• How Metro Detroiters value time.
• Opportunity cost
• Decay of civic duty and virtue.
• The city and regions size.
• The addition of too many people at one time from other places [[no loyalty to local culture and values).
• Technological advances that have made our model obsolete.
• Apposing ideals of different groups.
• Rejection of environment by citizens.
• Inability to protect citizens.
• Erosion of government and citizen base.
• Resource depletion.
• Diminishing returns on investments due to social complexity.
• High taxes and other costs of living that end up forcing people to be on the public dole, or live elsewhere.
• Inevitable cause and effect scenario due to earlier success.
• Natural progression of action needing motivation [[crisis precipitate change).
• A society that believes heavily in luck or faith alone.

[dadinup]

I've only looked at your outline, and I really don't see flaws, nor do I have anything to add to the list. This one is quite thought provoking. Example, how did Wyandotte pull it off? So why can't Detroit?
Interesting. Written by someone who gives a shit.

[DetroitDad]

I've only looked at your outline, and I really don't see flaws, nor do I have anything to add to the list. This one is quite thought provoking. Example, how did Wyandotte pull it off? So why can't Detroit?
Interesting. Written by someone who gives a shit.

Dadinup, I don't know. I would love to hear what others think about that question.