A home on Detroit’s “urban prairie.” [Geoff George]
HOW TO SHRINK A MAJOR AMERICAN CITY
THERE WAS NO getting around it: Detroit had too much space. Having experienced a decades-long, ongoing population bleed, the city had begun to feel like an overstretched empire in its decadent phase, sprawling far beyond its means. But after years of obstinate resistance and denial, a new consensus was finally emerging, at least in policy circles, about what to do with those forty square miles of vacant land. Detroit would have to shrink, in some sense of the word, in order to survive. The main obstacle had long been a psychological one: there seemed to be a bone-deep American reluctance to even flirt with the idea of thwarting manifest destiny, let alone embrace the notion of getting smaller. “I teach land use and planning and there’s nothing in there about downsizing,” was how John Mogk, who has spent decades studying urban policy as it applies to Detroit, put it when I dropped by his office at Wayne State University’s law school. “Most of the scholarship relates to development and growth—the assumption is that a population is expanding, so how best do you control it. There’s very little of value at all written about what do you do about decline.”
It was in the air, though—notions of American fallibility, our fading sole-superpower status, China’s rise, India’s rise, unsustainable long-term deficits, all of that. The difference in Detroit was that the contraction would be literal. Mayor Dave Bing had run for office peddling a vision of benevolent retrenchment: condensing the city’s government agencies and its job rolls to bring them more in line with its population. Then in February 2010, as Detroit began grappling with the bleak findings of the census, Bing announced more details of what would euphemistically come to be known as “rightsizing”—a geographic shrinking, not of the city’s borders, but of its population footprint, wherein citizens living on isolated urban prairies would be incentivized to move to denser, more easily serviced neighborhoods. “If we don’t do it,” Bing told the Detroit News, “you know this whole city is going to go down.”
There was talk of a multimillion-dollar federally funded light rail plan to anchor development along Woodward Avenue, of vacant land being bundled and cultivated as public parks or other green spaces, of assessing and ranking individual neighborhoods according to factors such as strength of housing stock, population density, and economic activity. Since the city remained too broke to fund an effort this complex on its own, the nonprofit Kresge Foundation had agreed to pay the salary of Harvard urban planner Toni Griffin, who would oversee what was being called, surely as a means of conjuring images of New Deal largesse—President Obama was still talking up generous stimulus spending and infrastructure building at this point—the Detroit Works Project.
What do you do with a discarded city? Political leaders had been struggling with the issue of sustained blight for decades. Whereas in a normal town, a mayor loves nothing better than to unveil plans for an ambitious civic building project (and, by extension, an enduring monument to mayoral vision and leadership), in Detroit, where all rules about how cities work have been upended, elected officials since the 1960s have sweet-talked constituents by promising to tear down more derelict structures than their predecessors. Most recently, Dave Bing made the leveling of ten thousand vacant homes within four years “a centerpiece of his administration,” in the words of the Detroit News. In early April 2010, the slated demolition of the first of these homes, on the 1100 block of Lewerenz Street in southwest Detroit, was promoted by Bing’s people and covered by the local press as a major media event. In Detroit, this is what passes for a ribbon-cutting ceremony; I was surprised Bing himself didn’t show up in a hard hat, hoisting a sledge hammer, ready to deliver the inaugural blow to the load-bearing wall.1
This was not part of Detroit Works but simply standard mayoral practice, a more or less baseline promise you had to make to get elected. In fact, when the demolitions started, all details pertaining to what, exactly, the Detroit Works Project might encompass were still pure speculation. To assuage the fears of skeptical citizens, the Bing administration promised that the initiative would begin with a “listening” phase of at least forty-five town-hall-style community meetings, taking place over the course of eighteen months. While garnering community input, or at least paying lip service to the idea of doing so, made sense from the standpoint of desirable optics, the lack of urgency implied by such a leisurely approach made the mayor seem wildly out of touch. At the meetings, Bing and his representatives insisted, again and again, that Detroit Works was no Trojan horse hiding another, secret plan to sell large chunks of the city to moneyed suburban interests, a real fear of many Detroiters. And in fact, forget secret plans, there’s no plan, period became the constant public refrain—really, trust us on this one, guys, we got nothing.
Still, the very prospect of such a comprehensive reckoning with land use, depopulation, sprawl, and the future of the American city felt like an important moment, one with potential application for the aging metropolises, large and small, which in aggregate made the present-day state of our union so atypically morbid. If anything like the rumors were true, Bing’s plan could end up being one of the boldest reimaginings of urban space in modern U.S. history.
* * *
People liked to compare the amount of vacant land in Detroit to equivalent-sized spaces. All of Paris could fit into Detroit’s forty square miles of nothing, or two Manhattans, or a slightly shaved Boston. Such formulations, though, inevitably led one to imagine a contiguous landmass, severable as a rotten limb, or possibly something to be cordoned off and beautified, like a Central Park—which, of course, was not the case. Vacant parcels were spread throughout the city, closer in spirit to tumors riddling a body.
When enough of those parcels happened to cluster together, you had urban prairies: entire neighborhoods nearly wiped from the map, the inevitable result of a place built for two million servicing less than half that number. An exemplary swath of prairie had crept within walking distance of Service Street; some call the neighborhood I’m talking about South Poletown—Polish factory workers populated the area several decades ago—but I started thinking of it as Upper Chene, after Chene Street, which runs straight up from the Detroit River. On the two-mile stretch of Chene itself, once a thriving commercial strip, you could count the viable, operating businesses on two hands. Several of the now unrecognizable storefronts, having burned and partially collapsed years earlier, looked like funeral pyres left untouched as a monument to the dead. On the residential streets, entire blocks had gone to field. The remaining houses ranged, schizophrenically, from obvious drug spots to beautifully kept-up brick ranches, from old wooden bungalows to foreclosed properties scrapped to the joists by copper thieves.
Once I shucked my trepidation at venturing into such lonely and forbidding territory, I began taking long bike rides around Upper Chene. On summer afternoons, the insect noise could be deafening, and though the people sitting out on their porches would stare, I soon learned that country rules applied here, too—if you smiled and gave a little wave or a head nod, you’d generally get the same back, saving, of course, the dope boys, whose hard-gazed dedication to radiating inscrutability and menace convinced me to drop the smiling part. Mostly, though, the menace was due to the absence of people, and thus far more rural than urban, putting me in mind of Seventies exploitation movies like The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which naive cityfolk venture down the wrong dirt road and find themselves on the business end of a meathook.
The scrappers were everywhere. One Sunday morning in broad dayright, on a desolate stretch of Grandy, I rode past a guy pulling pipes twice the length of his body and loading them out of the basement of a foreclosed home into a white minivan. A few blocks later, a couple of entrepreneurs came driving in the opposite direction in a pickup truck, its bed overflowing with twisted pieces of metal, including what looked to be a number of shelving units.
In another field, at Chene and Canfield, Tyree Guyton, the artist from Heidelberg Street, had arranged a bunch of discarded shoes in the shape of a river; shortly after he’d laid out his installation, I’d noticed some kids from the neighborhood wading right through the middle of it like anglers. When I asked what was up, they said, “Free shoes!” A little girl warned me that it was hard to find your size, or even a matching pair. A few blocks away, just past the Church of the Living God No. 37, a white pit bull began barking furiously at me from the yard of a home that I’d thought abandoned. When I got closer I noticed a young man in a crisp Tigers cap staring coldly at me from one of the front windows.
I bicycled down a block of Dubois with just a single house left standing, almost dead center of one side of the street. The whole of the other side had turned feral, forested by a tangle of unmowed grass and gnarled trees. Despite its isolation, the two-story wood frame house had been neatly maintained, with a handsome gray paint job and a lush garden of rose bushes and fruit trees surrounded by a picket fence. A round-faced man in a bright red T-shirt and Bermuda shorts sat on the top steps of the porch. I stopped and said hello. His name was Marty. When I got closer, I noticed he had a cane next to him on the porch. The writing on Marty’s flip-flops proclaimed him Big Slugger #1 Dad.
Marty used to work in the auto industry and also at Thorn Apple Valley, a sausage plant near Eastern Market that closed in 1998. I’d made frequent deliveries to Thorn Apple Valley as a teenager; my dad sold them sausage casings. Marty and I bonded over this odd coincidence, though we figured out we’d probably never met back then. “I did things with pigs—live pigs,” he told me, widening his eyes theatrically to signify, You really don’t want to know. He told me anyway: while he’d never butchered, he’d had the karmically unpleasant job of herding the soon-to-be-slaughtered pigs into the abattoir, using a whip. He’d gotten into the habit of naming his favorite pigs and keeping them in the back with him as long as possible, though eventually they all had to go.
I asked Marty if he’d be willing to move if the neighborhood got rightsized. He shook his head. “This is our house for generations. We pay our taxes. That’s not happening.” Someone opened the gate at the side of the house. “Who’s back there?” Marty asked. It turned out to be his aunt, who also lived in the family home. She tended the flowers and this afternoon was pulling a red wagon laden with gardening supplies. “I do it as much as I can,” she said. Marty said the house had been in his family for fifty years. “Sixty-four years,” his aunt said. “My mother bought this house when I was three months old.”
“You got to analyze this,” Marty said. “These are some rough times we living in. Most of our jobs went overseas. I ain’t never seen an economy like this, ever.” He’d lived on the block his entire life, watching the neighborhood disappear around him: the barbershops, bars, ice cream parlors, all gone. “This neighborhood used to be straight,” he said. He squinted at the thicket of trees across the street. “You get used to it, though. One thing, it’s quiet here. Don’t be all that crazy stuff around here. I like the serenity of my environment. To me? All this is a big plasma screen. You just have to be strong and keep God with you. What does the Bible say? ‘You’re in this world but not—’ No, wait.” I said I thought it was “of this world but not in it,” and he nodded, right, right. Though later, I realized I’d screwed up the quote. Of course we were all in it.
* * *
Detroiters are rightfully wary of top-down urban renewal plans. The city’s wild budgetary and population woes date back to the peak of the auto industry, when workers from Europe and the rural South flooded the city, hoping to reap the benefits of Fordism. In 1919, James Couzens, the longtime financial manager of Ford, was elected mayor. Couzens had built the company’s extensive dealership network and was the primary architect of the five-dollar workday, which had sparked the mass migration of labor to Detroit in the first place and created a problem for Couzens unimaginable to Dave Bing: a city with far too many people. In the ten years prior to Couzens’s election, Detroit’s population had more than doubled, leaving thousands of citizens, according to Robert E. Conot, “packed into leaky and unheated barns and shacks without plumbing” or into slapdash tent cities.
The desire to escape this Boschian tableau was a sensible one. Workers in Detroit also happened to be making enough money to buy the very cars they were building, which promoted mobility, as did the new, rapidly expanding highway system being built in large part because of the lobbying efforts of their employers.
With, of course, the notable exception of one demographic group. Detroit’s African American population, which doubled between 1940 and 1950, was generally restricted, through redlining tactics, to living in packed slum housing in neighborhoods like the roughly sixty-square-block Black Bottom. These neighborhoods had the city’s oldest housing stock—Sugrue again: “tiny, densely packed frame homes jerry-built by poor European immigrants in the mid and late nineteenth century”— and thanks to discriminatory banking practices that severely restricted loans to minorities, black residents had difficulty raising money to prevent the slums from further degrading. Pressure to build new housing projects met with deep neighborhood resistance.
But the builders of Detroit, having radically changed nearly every aspect of the lives of Americans—where we could live, how much we could earn, how far we could travel—believed there was a solution. As far back as 1939, General Motors, in its massively popular Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, had begun predicting what a techno-utopianist’s “city of the future” might look like. Not surprisingly, GM’s vision included fourteen-lane expressways and elevated civilian walkways to double the available width for car traffic below.2 The film accompanying the exhibit, To New Horizons, set in the “wonder-world of 1960,” imagined “an American city replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system,” where “along both banks of the river, beautifully landscaped parks replaced the outworn areas of an older day” and “on all express-city thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.” As the camera panned over a diorama of the future city, the narrator portentously intoned, Man continually strives to replace the old with the new!
Directly behind and to the west of my loft is the neighborhood that used to be Black Bottom. Beginning in 1946, Mayor Edward Jeffries condemned 129 acres of Black Bottom in the name of progress, uprooting nearly two thousand black families. As presaged by Futurama—almost to the year!—a freeway was eventually routed through the former neighborhood, “displac[ing]” the bulk of this specific “outdated slum area,” including Hastings Street, the vibrant center of working-class African American life in Detroit (famously name-checked by John Lee Hooker in “Boogie Chillen”). The rest of Black Bottom became Lafayette Park, a cluster of identical podlike “homes of the future” designed in the International Style by Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe. The stark, glass-fronted town houses and high-rise apartment buildings received mixed reviews as architecture; but in any event, they weren’t built for poor people. As is often the case with the promises bundled into large-scale civic development schemes, construction of its lower-income housing was slated for the back end of the timetable and ultimately wound up dropped altogether.
* * *
I happened upon another failed urban renewal plan by accident, through a young Dutch photographer named Corine Vermeulen. In 2001, Corine had moved to the city to attend Cranbrook, the famous art and design school whose past instructors had included Charles Eames and Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Her work avoided predictable images of grit and decay, instead focusing on what kept the city alive: inner-city beekeepers, lowrider car enthusiasts, storefront mosques, pastoral scenes of the urban prairie. “I feel like Detroit is the most important city in the U.S., maybe in the world,” she told me one night, utterly serious. “It’s the birthplace of modernity and the graveyard of modernity. My American experience is Detroit. Detroit is America for me.”
At a certain point, she brought up Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, her favorite film, explaining how much of the movie is set in a mysterious postindustrial netherworld called “the Zone”—a desolate, forbidden place that also offers supernatural promises of transcendence, at least according to the titular Stalker, who has agreed to guide the film’s other two main characters, called only the Writer and the Professor, into the Zone in order to fulfill their deepest desires. Yanking a book by the anarchist writer Hakim Bey out of her bag, Corine began to tell me how Bey’s theories of anarchic “temporary autonomous zones” connected with Stalker and, ultimately, Detroit, where anything could happen.3
“Detroit is a temporary autonomous zone,” she said.
“Like the Zone in Stalker?” I asked.
“No, not all of Detroit. But it has Zones. The dichotomy between the parts of this city that are very magical and the parts that are miserable can be pretty overwhelming. But it’s precisely these extremes that create the urgency to override the existing reality with something completely different. Detroit in the present moment is a very good vehicle for the imagination.” She gave me a curious look. Her face had a mischievous, elfin quality. “Do you want me to take you to the Zone?” she asked.
I said, “I would go to the Zone.”
The following Sunday, Corine picked me up in her ancient, boxy Volvo, a lush Detroit techno track, awash in synthesizer, playing on her stereo.4 We drove past the ruins of the Packard plant, heading deeper into the east side. It wasn’t an especially cold day, but the sidewalks and front yards were mostly devoid of life. We passed a house with no windows or doors; a poster on the front of the house warned “This Building Is Being Watched.” You’d see these posters on forsaken structures throughout the city, their words splashed above a menacing pair of human eyes, presumably meant to scare off scrappers or arsonists, but having the odd effect of making entire rows of ravaged homes resemble scarred, angry faces glowering at passersby, as if the potential home invader were Being Watched by the buildings themselves.
We eventually came to the edge of a cleared space. This was unlike the other fields we had been driving through, in that there weren’t stray houses dotting the renatured yards—here, for a dozen or more blocks, absolutely everything was gone. Corine turned down the only street not barred with cement barricades. Strewn with detritus, at points nearly impassable, the block made me think of Humvee footage from the early days of the invasion of Baghdad. We maneuvered around shredded tires, jagged stacks of roofing tile, torn panels of Sheetrock, neat little mounds of broken glass, busted pallets, tangles of tree branches, unspooled cassette tapes, VHS tapes still in the box, a broken television, an empty purse, a pair of blue jeans. You could no longer see the sidewalks, the grass had grown so tall. There were one or two stop signs left, and a light post so stripped to the frame a person from a part of the world without light posts would have been hard pressed to discern its purpose. A cat padded out from between two piles of garbage and stared at us calmly before bounding back into the weeds. The one building still standing was an old school, Jane Cooper Elementary. Workers had begun to demolish it, but the job had been halted for months, so only part of the back wall had been torn off. There were no earthmovers or bulldozers in sight.
The street ended at a fence. Beyond it, we could make out the distant white walls of a factory, still in business. Corine parked the car between a pair of giant earth mounds—the taller of the two rose at least twenty-five feet—and we got out. Nodding, Corine said, “We need to go up there,” and started moving toward the taller of the mounds. Soon I was following her along a sort of goatherd’s path roughed out by previous visitors, which, after dipping into a little valley, eventually climbed a much steeper grade, forcing us to clutch handfuls of grass to prevent ourselves from toppling backwards.
When we reached the top, though, we had a panoramic view of the Zone. Corine said the mound we were standing on had been formed when the city had bought and plowed over the old neighborhood in hopes of transforming the area into a suburban-style industrial park. But the factory had been the only tenant to move in, and the rest of the cleared lots had been overtaken by grass the color of hay. There were also wildflowers, and those spiny nettle weeds that cling to your socks like Velcro, and scattered bushes and midget trees whose leaves had already gone amber. From up here, it was difficult to believe we were minutes from the downtown of a major American city. The homes in the distance, just outside the Zone, looked like farmhouses.
I later learned that the total size of the Zone was 189 acres. Its official name, the I-94 Industrial Project, hinted at the big plans once held for the place, a federally designated tax-free “Renaissance zone.” Looking to convert the already largely barren neighborhood into a more development-friendly area, the city had spent $19 million buying up some two hundred properties and plowing them under. Over the course of ten years, beginning in 1999, only one new tenant (Exel Logistics, the white factory) had moved in. Now, with soaring vacancy rates in the city, there was no demand for industrial space, and work on the Zone had come to a halt.
An article in Crain’s Detroit Business estimated that 130 private parcels remained scattered across the site, making it impossible for the city to market larger parcels of land to developers, barring eminent domain. Beyond that, a prominent local realtor noted in the article, industrial vacancy rates had risen so precipitously that even if developers were given the land for free, it wouldn’t make economic sense to embark upon any new construction. Conrad Mallet Jr. of Detroit’s Economic Development Corporation, the body that initially spearheaded the project, told Crain’s, “Let’s call a 4-H club and say, ‘Plant some corn.’ There is no one coming to an I-94 industrial park.”
As Corine and I climbed back down to her car, the clouds hung low, shifting their weight at a sluggard’s pace and doing funny things with the light. It was getting ready to storm. We drove over to Jane Cooper Elementary to look around and just then the sky opened up, so we ran inside to take cover. The part of the school that had not been demolished was still largely intact. The hallways, emptied, felt like tunnels, and despite the middle-school-yellow paint job, now faded and dusty with plaster, I thought of the noirishly lit chase scene in the sewers at the end of The Third Man. A fluttering noise came from one of the classrooms. Corine poked her head inside. There was a math book lying open on the floor, and when the wind gusted into the room—the back wall of the classroom was completely missing—it made the pages flap like the wings of a bird.
Other signs of the school’s past life hung on, all through the building. We saw shattered trophy cases, and piles of textbooks still neatly stacked on shelves, and another book on the floor, titled Critical Thinking That Empowers Us to Choose Nonviolent Life Skills, and a flooded gym, the climbing rope still hanging from the ceiling, only now over water, which captured ghostly reflections of the denuded basketball hoops, “like a meditation pool,” Corine said, tossing in a pebble.
By the time we made it back outside, not only had the rain passed completely but the sun had reemerged, astonishingly bright after the storm. We had exited from the back end of the school, where the demolition had begun. What had once been the rear of Cooper Elementary was now piled into an enormous heap of brick and rubble. From here, we could stare back into the school’s rooms as if it were a doll’s house opened in cross section. Suddenly it felt quite warm in the sunlight. In the rubble, I saw a giant bucket of Elmer’s Sno-Drift Paste, empty. “Man, in spring?” Corine said. “It’s crazy what starts blooming.” She had thought of making a sound recording of the birds and insects. “Even today,” she said, “just listen.” Corine cocked her head and we took in the shrill, chirrupy hum all around us.
* * *
While all that vacant land failed to make Detroit attractive to developers, it did further the city’s reputation as the nation’s premier urban laboratory. Politicians from other cities began weighing in: Dan Kildee, a county treasurer from Flint, with a push for “land banks” that would amass, bundle, and ultimately redevelop delinquent properties; New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, with the suggestion that Detroit swell its population ranks with immigrants. A local nonprofit had a similar idea to Bloomberg’s, only with college-educated young people, launching a plan called “15x15” meant to lure 15,000 new residents under the age of 35 to Detroit by 2015. The American Institute of Architects proposed clusters of dense “urban villages” surrounded by green space. In a more radical vein, Lansing public policy consultant Craig Ruff called for “repurposing” the city as “the world’s greatest bio-urban hub,” with bicycle paths instead of highways, green space where factories once loomed, and locally grown food and handcrafted goods replacing anything you could buy at Walmart. Other farm-related proposals involved a winery on Belle Isle. The prize for most symbolically problematic solution must be awarded to Jai-Lee Dearing, a City Council candidate I’d gone to high school with (though we hadn’t known each other at the time) who suggested bundling a bunch of the plots and selling them to black-owned cemeteries.
All these ideas should have fueled the ambitious Detroit Works Project. But unaccountably, by the fall of 2010, the Bing administration’s slow rollout of the plan was proving an unmitigated fiasco. The initial public meetings drew spillover crowds, which the administration admitted to being unprepared for, and the city officials present adamantly refused to provide any specifics of the plan, the mayor’s PR team having apparently decided to adopt a Denny’s suggestion box strategy—they would pretend to listen. Video stations where Detroiters could record their thoughts on the future of the city were set up throughout the venues, though the suspension of disbelief required to think Bing and company might actually weigh the opinions of a retired autoworker with a high school education alongside those of a team of urban planners from Harvard struck many as ludicrous, if not vaguely insulting.
At the first of the rightsizing meetings, held at a Baptist megachurch on the city’s far west side, Bing himself showed up late, creeping into one of the confusing “break-out sessions” where citizens were supposed to be giving their feedback. “I didn’t come here to speak,” Bing said, sidling up to the podium. “I came to listen. We have some ideas, but I don’t want to force them on the community. I’ve got to go to other rooms, but I want to make sure you speak out.”
Beside Bing, the moderators had arranged several easels holding variously shaded maps of the city that were far too small to read and a stack of oversized cue cards listing a series of condescending questions concerning what the future Detroit might look like. These included:
What will we be driving?
Where and how will we be shopping?
Will we live in bigger or smaller houses?
What will schools look like?
How and where will we be spending our free time?
Another cue card read: “Detroit’s neighborhoods are clean, safe, and walkable.” One of the hapless moderators quickly clarified, “This is what the city should look like by 2030.”
A woman shouted, “Who’s checking that there’s gonna be a city in twenty years?”
After the first meeting’s lambasting in the local media, certain tweaks were made. At the follow-up, held at the Serbian National Hall, Bing made a formal address to the crowd. Though falling short of pounding the podium with his fist, he attempted to work up a folksier, man-of-the-people rapport with the audience, ending with a practiced Bush 41-style applause line: “Not gonna happen on my watch!” As Bing spoke, his face was projected on a giant screen behind him; over his left shoulder, the right hand of the sign-language interpreter occasionally loomed into the frame, looking like a disembodied ghost hand readying to give the mayor a judo chop or vicious throttling if he said the wrong thing. Eventually, someone tightened up the camera shot to cut it out.
The speech was so boring I began to pay special attention to Bing’s body language, which was how I noticed, every so often, the mayor’s habit of drawing one of his long fingers gently across his forehead, just above his eyebrow, as if he were smoothing a stray hair. I realized this must be Bing’s “tell,” though I couldn’t single out, based on this speech alone, which portion was the bluff.
It later emerged that relations between Mayor Bing and Rip Rapson, the head of the Kresge Foundation, which had been funding much of the initiative, including Toni Griffin’s entire salary, had soured. Griffin, an outsider who’d tried to import a team of consultants, had never been trusted by many in the city. Nor had Rapson, a white guy from suburban Troy, Michigan, who talked about a “suite of coordinated investments” that could foster a green economy, who referred to vacant land as “a canvas of economic imagination” and envisioned what he called “neighborhoods of choice.” The Bing administration became nervous, both about the power Rapson hoped to exercise and on the simple level of public relations, and so despite the Kresge Foundation’s largesse, the city tried to freeze out Griffin and declined to include Kresge officials in the announcement of the federally funded light rail project. Rapson, in turn, began to threaten cutting funding.
After months of delay, Bing finally announced the lame opening phase of the plan, in which neighborhoods eventually would be ranked one of three ways—steady, transitional, or distressed—and be allocated services accordingly, the idea being to shore up the first two types of areas and persuade residents to move out of the last ones. The administration also announced an initial three-neighborhood “demonstration area” in which such service changes would be implemented. Stable neighborhoods would receive the bulk of $9.5 million of federal money designated for home rehab and development, along with increased code enforcement—trash pickup, mowing of vacant lots, the lighting of streetlamps—while the focus in distressed areas would be on demolition of vacant homes.
Still, it all felt vague. A private effort by deep-pocketed Marathon Petroleum to move five hundred families out of the southwest Detroit neighborhood where the company wanted to expand its oil refinery came with a price tag of $40,000 per household; Robin Boyle, a Detroit urban studies professor, did the math and figured moving only 5 percent of existing Detroit households, at the same cost as Marathon, would result in a bill of $600 million.
And what about the rest of the city?
* * *
Of course, “rightsizing” did not necessarily have to mean “shrinking.” As the debate over Detroit Works festered, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a lifelong Detroiter who’d held a prominent position in the administration of former mayor Dennis Archer. We were hanging out in a bar downtown, and possibly several drinks into the evening, when our talk turned to Bing’s initiative.
“Man, to me?” the political operative scoffed. “That’s hustling backwards. It betrays who we are.” When I wondered what the alternative might be, he said, “We should be doing the opposite of rightsizing. How did Philly grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. How did LA grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. Think about it: Detroit is fucking older than the country. This place was founded with frontier spirit. And now we’re here in 2010, a bunch of wusses.”
In fact, my friend’s riff was a favorite thought experiment of a certain subset of Detroit-area urbanophiles. Sometimes they reference David Rusk, the former Albuquerque mayor whose book Cities Without Suburbs makes the case for the economic vibrancy of “elastic” cities (like Houston, Austin, Seattle, and Nashville) whose central hubs have the capability to annex or otherwise regionalize their surrounding suburbs into a unified metropolitan area.
In Detroit, the chances of something like this ever happening were slim—okay, nonexistent—but daydreaming about the real benefits of such a move could be a tantalizing exercise. The takeaway from the census stories revolved around Detroit plummeting to nineteenth place on the U.S. city-size list, behind Austin, Jacksonville, and Columbus. (Columbus!) But the Detroit metropolitan area, which I’ll define for these purposes as Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, still retained a population of nearly 4 million. If our territorial-expansion fantasia could be magically enacted with even two-thirds of this figure, Greater Detroitopolis would easily vault past Chicago, with its measly 2.5 million residents, to be the third-largest city in the United States, behind New York and Los Angeles. This would translate into more state and national clout (and allocated funds, many of which are based on population) and eliminate the need for much of the wasteful duplicate spending inherent in maintaining multiple separate municipalities, especially at a time when many of these suburban communities, just as broke as Detroit, have been announcing their own cutbacks of nonessential services. (Along with services that strike many as fairly essential: in February 2011, the west side suburb of Allen Park announced plans to eliminate its entire fire department.) When Indianapolis enacted a similar “Unigov” city-suburbs merger in the late sixties (under Republican mayor Dick Lugar), the region enjoyed economic growth (and the benefits of economy of scale), AAA municipal bond ratings, and a broader, more stable tax base.
Rusk also convincingly argues that elastic cities are less segregated and have fewer of the problems associated with concentrated areas of poverty. And though sprawl wouldn’t necessarily be reined in, the region could finally adopt a sensible transportation policy. (The planned light rail project will nonsensically stop at 8 Mile Road, the suburban border.)
Beyond all of that, consider the branding implications. Unlike the New Detroit of RoboCop infamy, this New Detroit would no longer find itself sitting near the top of those annual “World’s Most Dangerous Cities” lists, thanks to the juking a trebled population would do to the existing crime stats; similar dilution would occur with statistics involving vacant property, unemployment, and packs of wild dogs. Detroit would become, on paper, a city like any other, with scary neighborhoods and safe ones, and much harder to caricature.
There are a number of reasons why this will never, ever happen. For one thing, Michigan has laws making such annexation extremely difficult. And even if the laws could be changed, long-nurtured, largely racial city-suburb resentments would never allow for such bedfellowing. White suburban residents would reel from the possibility of merging with a city so long demonized as a terrifying war zone; the black leadership in Detroit, meanwhile, would surely be loath to see its own political power subsumed within a majority-white supercity. Even the idea of a regional sales tax, which could help provide money for costly undertakings like Detroit Works, remains a nonstarter in the Detroit area. “Why should I pay for the city’s mistakes?” noxious Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson asked the website Remapping Debate. “Tax base sharing is anathema to me.”
Edwin St. Aubin, the real estate agent related to one of the city’s founding families, confessed that he could not envision a mass suburban repatriation anytime soon. “These people would rather live in a shack in a field than go anywhere near downtown,” he said. “They’ve completely insulated themselves from that economy.” Lowering his voice, he said, “You talk to some of these old developers? They’d want to line up bulldozers—” We were sitting in a restaurant, and here, he put his hands together, his fingers touching and his palms facing his chest, and slowly moved them across the white tablecloth. “And get rid of everything. Start over.”
In the eighties, St. Aubin had been married to a German woman. They spent one New Year’s in the former West Berlin, and he recalled sitting on a rooftop watching a spectacular fireworks display and then glancing east and seeing nothing but darkness. At the time it made him feel like he was staring into Detroit from the suburbs. “That’s exactly what it’s like here,” he said, “only there’s no wall.”
* * *
As for Detroit Works, by April 2012, the planning team had announced … more meetings. “At least” sixteen more, to be followed by the launch of “a Strategic Framework Plan for Detroit’s future.” Detroit Works officials declined interview requests, though the team did post a number of “policy audits” on its website, completed during the earliest stages of the project, and reflecting “the observations and analysis of the technical team at that time.” Buried in the text, a list of neighborhood typologies laid out by one of the working groups hinted at the possibilities inherent in a fully realized vision of Detroit Works. The high-density City Hub, with high-and mid-rise buildings, would receive priority for regional rail and bus service, while in the Urban Homestead Sector:
a family lives in a large, older home surrounded by a natural landscape, growing vegetables to sell at a farmers’ market. In return for giving up services such as street lights, the homeowner would get lower taxes (in exchange for experimenting with alternative energy and, where possible, using well water).
In low-maintenance Naturescapes, devoid of homes, pipe-encased creeks would be re-exposed and wildlife would flourish; in Green Venture Zones, on the other hand, vacant land and industrial buildings would be converted to fish hatcheries, hydroponic and aquaculture centers, nurseries, small market farms, and other enterprises; Green Thoroughfares would transform lesser-used highways and boulevards into “green gateways,” presumably akin to New York’s successful reclamation of the High Line elevated train line.
All grand visions. But with the city’s financial status in such turmoil that a state takeover was being threatened, the only thing Detroit Works could promise was an end-of-summer deadline for presenting its Strategic Framework to residents and “whomever may be in charge of the city at that point.”
1 John Adamo Jr. owns and operates the biggest demolition contractor in the city, the Adamo Demolition Company. If one family’s immigrant story stands as an allegory for Detroit’s past century, it is the Adamos’. John Adamo Jr.’s grandfather, a builder, emigrated to Detroit from Alcamo, a town in Sicily, in the early 1920s, just as the auto industry was exploding. A newly flush class of workers wanted to expand their homes, many of which had “Michigan basements”—a crawl space beneath the cinder blocks on which the houses rested. Here, Adamo’s grandfather discovered his niche. “He’d get under the houses,” Adamo told me, “jack them up a couple of feet, and put guys under there with shovels and picks to dig a full basement.”
By the time Adamo’s father took over the business in the 1960s, however, expansion had stalled. “At some point,” Adamo said, “he thought, ‘Man, if I had a wrecking license, I could take down a few of these houses.’ ” Within a few years, the demolition company had grown large enough to be incorporated, while the long-withering construction side of the business was slowly phased out. After the riots, Adamo said, the number of city demolition contracts went through the roof. “Timing is everything, I guess,” he noted drily.
Detroit demolition guys, Adamo added, were always thinking about how to take down buildings. He and his demo friends, in fact, had a running joke going: if they’d never been to your house before, the first thing they’d do would be to look around and ballpark how many loads of debris the building would yield. Oh, yeah, one of them might say. You’ve got yourself a ten-load house.
2 By the time of Futurama II, the sequel launched for the 1964 New York fair, the future included fantastic “road-building machines” that could cut through the jungle laying concrete and steel highways at the rate of a foot a minute.
3 Corine had never heard of Geoff Dyer, but in his collection Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he makes the same connection, sprinkling his account of a trip to the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival with references to Stalker and the Zone.
4 Being European, Corine had been drawn to Cranbrook in the first place partly out of her fanatical appreciation of techno.