Saving Detroit

Part I

For years now, the question has been: what in the world do you do with Detroit? Or: does Detroit have a future? Or put it another way: should Detroit have a future, or should this poor, empty, echoing, poverty-stricken, job-bereft shell of a city simply be allowed to decay, to become one of history's cast-offs, of interest only to future archaeologists curious about the Midwestern industrial age and where it ended? 

For Detroiters, this is no academic question, and so they've come up with an answer. It's called "Detroit Future City," a painstakingly compiled plan, 184 pages long, written by a planning team appointed by Mayor Dave Bing, laying out what Detroit should—or must—do if it's going to survive. 

Now the fighting begins. The Detroit Works Long-Term Planning Team, which did the report, stresses that, so far, it's a set of recommendations, not diktats. It plans public programs and other fora aimed at persuading Detroiters—both residents and politicians—to buy into it. Given Detroit's dysfunctional politics, this is an uphill slog. 

"Detroit Future City" is long and detailed. Much of it will interest only the people who live there. But it's worthwhile considering the broad outlines and assumptions behind it, because the problems that beset Detroit—vanished industry, declining population, crippled public services, a depressed quality of life—apply to other Midwestern cities, such as Cleveland, Flint, Youngstown, Dayton, Rockford, and others. Detroit is part of the "shrinking city" debate—the argument that a once-thriving city with a shrunken population can become a decent place to live for a lot fewer people. 

Here are the main ideas: 

• Detroit, once about 2 million people, has closer to 800,000 now. It can stay that size, but not get much bigger.
• About one-third of Detroit's 139 square miles have become mostly vacant, bombed-out and deserted neighborhoods. It makes sense to take away city services, persuade the few remaining residents to relocate and turn the land over to forests, ponds—even farms. Yes, the plan is to plow up part of a once-great city and return it to farms.
• There are other parts of the city with a denser population, more residents, more stores, more prosperity. Public funds, including transportation and education, would be focused on these areas.
• City centers are important. Direct funds toward making it stronger.

A few other conclusions jumped out of the report at me: 

First, much of this isn't new. The Brookings Institution in Washington has published papers in recent years, most of them dealing with troubled old Ohio cities, making the same suggestions—abandoning the poorest and emptiest neighborhoods and focusing resources on downtowns and on more stable neighborhoods. This seems to be the new orthodoxy, and we can expect it to pop up in Cleveland and other cities. 

Second, it makes economic sense. Tax-supported city services—police, schools, fire departments, sewers, water—which were designed for a vast area housing a big population are unaffordable when the population has shrunk by half or more and the inhabited area is imploding. Something's gotta give. 

But third, the human cost here could be more than the Brookings and Detroit planners reckon. It's not just the chore of persuading old Mrs. Smith that she has to abandon the house where she's lived for forty years, or lose her electricity and water. It's the fact that, while the city may be able to rehouse Mrs. Smith, many of its other residents have nowhere else to go. 

The unstated upshot of the plan is to write off large numbers of poorer residents, of whom Detroit and similar cities have many. As Harvard's Edward Glaeser has pointed out, many people live in Detroit because they can't afford to live anywhere else. This means that they live in the worst neighborhoods because they can't afford anything better. 

The plan would wipe out their neighborhoods and encourage these people to move to better neighborhoods, where services will be focused. But they would live there now if they could afford it. The plan, in essence, destroys the only home they can afford, without providing the means they need to find another. Presumably, they'll just pick up and leave town. 

(To be sure, the plan calls for a sharp increase in the number of jobs in Detroit: Aaron Renn's blog shines some reality on these dreams. These jobs would be in four areas—health and education, industry, local entrepreneurship, and digital/creative. Well, every city is chasing eds and meds: since both are largely government-financed, it seems unlikely that squeezed state, local and federal budgets will finance a boom here. Industry, as we've read, may be recovering but isn't creating many jobs, especially the high-skilled jobs that Detroit's poor could fill. Some entrepreneurship is promising. But, again, the poorest of the poor in Detroit's worst neighborhood seems poor prospects for digital or creative jobs.)   

In short, it's a middle-class plan, aimed at turning Detroit into more of a middle-class city, with good neighborhoods and a vibrant downtown, while pulling an already tattered rug out from under the poor. 

This is not necessarily a thumbs-down on the "Detroit Future City" plan. Rather, this states the dilemma. For cities like Detroit, created to serve an industry that's gone away and designed for a purpose that no longer exists, there may be no solution that is both economically realistic and humanitarian. Cities like Detroit lack jobs, industry, decent schools, money and hope, and no plan can restore these. But they house refugees from an earlier era who are unlikely to cope in this new era. 

Detroit is an extreme case of a malaise that affects too many Midwestern cities. For that reason, the "Detroit Future City" plan—a desperate attempt to find a way out—is worth our attention. 

Part II

A Detroit businessman with immensely deep pockets and an equally deep love for his town, has taken it upon himself to rebuild the blighted heart of that tragic city. Dan Gilbert is putting his money where his heart is, but his project, called Opportunity Detroit, raises both hope and questions. 

Does a city without a vibrant center have a future? But is a vibrant center enough to revive a virtually moribund city? What is the relation between the business-dominated core of a city and the largely working-class people outside it? More to the point, can even Dan Gilbert save Detroit? 

Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, and his story was told in a two-page spread in The New York Times. Basically, it says he’s already pumped $1 billion into buying buildings and other real estate, has a light rail system and other projects in mind and is funding a host of start-ups through his own venture capital firm, all with an aim of bringing business, people, and life to the two-square-mile area that is (or was) downtown Detroit. 

There are several things to be said about this. First, he’s both fabulously wealthy and fabulously dedicated. This kind of well-heeled focus can make a difference, as we’re seeing in some other recovering cities, such as Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the philanthropic drive of the Van Andel and DeVos families has revived the center of an admittedly much smaller and less damaged city. 

Second, city centers do count. Cities can exist with a blighted center: many, such as Cleveland, tick along on the residual commerce from suburbs. But a truly vibrant city needs a vibrant center, a place where the best minds and biggest money from the urban area—and, increasingly, from around the globe—can come together to build the core of a future. Suburbs, for all their malls and lawns, have never filled this gap. 

So good luck to Gilbert. If he succeeds in his two-square-mile project, he will have taken a first step toward bringing Detroit back from the dead. 

But only the first step. Detroit needs more, much more. And if Gilbert has any idea where he goes from here, he’s not saying. 

As everybody knows, there’s more to Detroit’s plight than an empty downtown. Its one big industry, car-making, has mostly gone away. Its official unemployment rate is over 18 percent: the unofficial rate is probably two to three times as high. Only one-fourth of the boys in its high schools graduate in four years. 

Five to eight thousand homes are abandoned every year: the figure would be higher except the city continues to attract people—the poorest, least educated, and most unskilled—because it’s such a cheap place to live. 

The latest news from Detroit is the appointment by the state of an emergency manager to run the city. The city’s finances are so far out of control that its democratic-elected government has been stripped of much of its power: no other major American city has fallen so low. 

But key to Gilbert’s challenge is the sheer size of the city—138 square miles.  This is big enough to have held 2 million people, which Detroit did in its heyday, and now holds only about one-third as many, 700,000. This means it is a medium-sized city stuck with bills for services for a city three times as large. Much of what’s left is crumbling, ill-served, dangerous, filled with people with no economic present or future. One of Detroit’s major problems is shrinking itself, by turning much of its area into parkland or farmland and concentrating the remainder of its population into an economically coherent space. 

This vast challenge puts Gilbert’s two-square-mile project into context. Even if he succeeds in revitalizing the center, it will be no more than a well-groomed tail wagging an awfully skinny dog. 

So should Gilbert just give up? Not at all. About thirty years ago, Chicago was nearing a Detroit-style collapse. Much of its heavy industry had gone. Residents were fleeing to the suburbs. Whole neighborhoods emptied out. 

But Chicago worked hard to keep its downtown, the Loop, alive. Not that it was the glittering core that it is today. But at least it still held the big banks, the markets, some major stores, and corporate headquarters. When the city began to revive in the late 1980s, it had a base for that revival. Much of Chicago’s growth since then has involved a steady expansion of the Loop-based prosperity. 

First, the Loop was revived, creating jobs. Then the people who held those jobs began to move back into the city. This led to stores serving them and, in time, some decent schools for their children. The process is far from complete and may never be. But the result, as unequal as it is, is better than Detroit.   

Chicago, unlike Detroit, never was a one-industry town. Nor did it lose virtually all its white population, as has Detroit. Its crucial location as a transport hub remained, as did its major universities and other assets. It went down, but not so far as Detroit, and it didn’t have so far to climb back. 

The Times mentioned some skeptics, mostly black leaders there, who fear that Gilbert will create “two Detroits, one for those who are downtown and one for those in the neighborhoods.” This is precisely what’s going to happen—in fact, must happen, at least in the short and medium term—if Gilbert’s plans succeed. 

Right now, Chicago is a city marked by inequality, between those who live in the Loop-based prosperous Chicago, and those, including much of its black population, that live beyond this fortunate core. Someday, all of Chicago may share in this vitality, but not yet. And it’s not going to happen quickly. 

If Detroit revives, it will not revive all at once. The industry and jobs aren’t there. If Gilbert succeeds, the first result will be a prosperous core that will probably be mostly white, surrounded by a desperate city that is mostly black. Maybe, from this core, a more just city can grow. But the challenges, not least the racial politics, are daunting, to say the very least.