Glimmers of hope in Detroit

[Gob]

Despite decades of decline and mismanagement, there are signs of life in Detroit as private sector companies try to rebuild the city. But is it too late?

Outside the baseball stadium in Detroit the other week a man sold T-shirts printed with white capital letters on a black background: Detroit vs Everybody.

Being a journalist in need of a metaphor, it stuck in my mind.

Later, I met with Matt Cullen, the chief executive of Rock Ventures, which has invested in a number of Detroit-based businesses.

He's a native Detroiter who has spent almost three decades working for General Motors. He's now part of the huge revitalisation effort that's going on in the city's centre.

I told him about the T-shirt slogan and I asked, is that part of the deal, too, the Detroit spirit?

AdvertisementThe BBC's Matt Danzico meets young innovators in Detroit

He laughed, but also winced, because there are at least two ways to read the slogan. One is a plucky, never-say-die, it-will-rise-from-the-ashes kind of attitude. And the other is a late night, very drunk, who-wants-a-fight-before-falling-asleep-in-the-gutter kind of pose.

The latter is probably not how you want to sell America's most troubled city.

There's no escaping the fascination of Detroit. The first time I went, in early 2011, I was quite literally open mouthed at the devastation. Outside the city's abandoned central railway station, on a bitterly cold winter's day, I gawped at the incomprehensibly large building.

The station is part of Detroit's decaying majesty, what is accurately and painfully called "ruin porn".

At one point a limo pulled up and disgorged a couple, he in tuxedo, she in a wedding gown, who spent 20 minutes or so being artfully photographed in front of the monument to the fall of a city. I really thought I'd seen it all.

But I had not. This last visit I headed out from my downtown hotel, down the vast, empty Michigan Avenue to get some food.

In the Corktown neighbourhood there's a funky burger bar, an artisanal coffee shop, a bustling barbecue joint.

There are startlingly few black customers - often none at all - which feels more than a little odd in a city that is overwhelmingly African-American.

But it seems churlish to grumble; that there is somewhere nice to eat and drink and meet a few minutes from the city centre, somewhere the young professionals who are now electing to live in the area might want to spend their start-up dollars, is a triumph in a city short of such things.

As I left, I looked up, and there looming over me in the warm night was the huge, beautiful, abandoned central railway station.

I had a wildly over-romantic surge of hope for the city that so much of America so enjoys giving a good kicking.

There are unmistakeable signs of revival in the private sector, just as the city faces the final showdown with the creditors to whom it owes $15bn (£10bn).

A good deal of this is due to one man, Dan Gilbert, the founder of the Quicken Loans mortgage empire. He has gone against the trend of half a century by moving his white-collar staff into the city.

He and his colleagues have set up venture capital companies and tech start-up incubators.

He and his staff - their eyes ablaze with Motor-City-evangelism - organise design competitions for vacant lots, and spread the word far and wide that, in the immortal lyric of rock musician Ted Nugent, "Detroit City, she's the place to be".

The city centre is buzzing - there is a sense of purpose in the air, of momentum, of money, of enterprise.

Ross Sanders runs Bizdom, a tech start-up incubator that has recently outgrown the building that housed it and has had to move to another office.

At Bizdom I chatted to a couple of start-up twenty-somethings, Erik Torenberg of Rapt.fm, and Michael Sharber of Greenlancer.

Mr Torenberg, a skinny rap enthusiast from New Jersey, said that the first thing his relatives asked when he told them that he was moving to Detroit was: "Is it safe?"

He bursts with enthusiasm for the city.

Mr Torenberg studied at the nearby University of Michigan, but not once ventured into Detroit; now he can't get enough of the place, wants to take me on a two-hour tour, invites me to watch his volleyball game, played in the

But if Detroit is to rise again it will need more than the enthusiasm of the private sector. It will need a properly functioning public sector.

There is no sign of that coming along anytime soon.

"We go into buildings," the fire chief told me, "and grapple with the devil."

He was standing outside his station on a warm summer's evening as a smell of herbs wafted out from the kitchen. Dinner time was coming for his 12-man company.

Erik Torenberg is the co-founder of the website rapt.fm, which enables rappers from across the world to battle each other over the internet. He is sponsored by Bizdom.

The station was in better nick than the immediate neighbourhood; across the way waist-high grass grew untended; a long-closed supermarket was covered with graffiti, its green awning torn and hanging at a crazy angle.

Upstairs, huge noisy fans battled with the summer heat in the company's dormitories. The fire chief had an office out of the 1970s - clipboards and to-do lists covering one wall, a beaten-up desk, an old TV opposite with a washed-out screen.

I thought of the shiny new offices of downtown, all glass and steel, climate controlled with flat-screen TVs and famous-name coffee machines.

Apart from the odd computer, nothing in the station that had been purchased in the last 20-or-so years. And, with all due respect to the company, there was no-one new in it either. Apart from one recent transfer all the men were middle-aged or more.

How long can it go on like this?

In his first report a few weeks ago, the city's new emergency manager wrote of Detroit's public sector being "dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restriction, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifference or corruption".

For 50 years Detroit meant mass assembly, it meant the automobile, opportunity for an uneducated - often black - workforce.

Then it came to represent the decline of the Great City, the collapse of urban government, even the end of the American dream.

There is huge energy in the city. But saving Detroit is not a done deal.

"We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes", goes the city motto.

Or, more pithily, Detroit vs Everybody.

[Crackpot]

That's what I've been trying to tell you bozos. In an odd way Kwame is the best thing that happened to Detriot. He was the straw that broke the camels back and collectively gave the city the impetus to correct the systematic mismanagement that has been ruining the city for years.

[dales]

TooLittleTooLate

[Crackpot]

If it's too late for Detroit it's too late for everyone.

The problems Detroit faces are the same we all face. It's a simple ability to face the things you don't want to face. If facing our faults is too much then we are all lost.

[rubato]

Too late? What meaning could that have?

It is too late to do the right thing in 1975, 1985 &c and knock down the excess housing which was driving a lot of the collapse and decay but whever is done now (and they have started knocking down the surplus) will create whatever success is possible today.

One consideration is that cities often grow and shrink as the geograpic or economic reason for their existence changes. Carthage is no more. (in relative terms) Petra is an archeological site. The former stops on the silk road went back to sleep for 500 years. Central America is full of abandoned cities overgrown with jungle. As the Panama canal is widened for 'supercarrier' container ships part of the reason for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will go away. Cargo from Asia can more cheaply be transhipped directly* to the Gulf or East coast ports rather than being transferred to trains in S. Cal.

One of the most difficult problems is managing a city which is shrinking in size; there was little beneficial experience to guide them when this process started in the 1950s


yrs,
rubato

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-3 ... ction.html

William Pulte says the only way to truly save Detroit and get the housing market functioning properly again is to destroy large swaths of the city as quickly as possible.
Enlarge image Detroit Survival Depending on Destruction of Housing

An abandoned home in Detroit, Michigan, on February 24, 2013. Photographer: J.D. Pooley/Getty Images
Enlarge image William Pulte

Pulte Capital Partners LLC managing partner William Pulte stands for a photograph in one of the 10 blocks the nonprofit Detroit Blight Authority program has cleaned in Detroit. Photographer: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg
Enlarge image Detroit Survival Depending on Destruction of Housing

Trees stand in an area cleaned up by the nonprofit Detroit Blight Authority in Detroit, Michigan. Photographer: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg


Pulte, a scion of the family that created PulteGroup Inc. (PHM), the largest U.S. homebuilder by revenue, has already knocked down 10 blocks on Detroit’s Southeast as part of the proposed nonprofit Detroit Blight Authority program. It’s a preview of the effort he says is needed to get ahead of the metal strippers and arsonists devastating the city’s property values.

“We’re trying to do total blight elimination,” Pulte said, standing in the middle of the blocks his group cleared in February. “You can go tear down one home here and then tear down one in another area, but if you go into one area and take down everything, that’s what really makes a difference.”

Housing markets in Detroit and other rustbelt cities such as Cleveland and Buffalo are hampered by decaying, vacant homes even as sales of existing homes hover around a three-year high nationally. Pilfering of vacant units in urban areas cut the number of U.S. homes with complete plumbing by about 10.4 percent from 2008 to 2011, according to U.S. Census data compiled by Bloomberg, including 66,722 such homes alone in Detroit.
Unmanageable City

Blight has made Detroit unmanageable. As the tax base shrinks, the cost of municipal services such as police and fire protection, bus service and garbage collection, stays the same or even rises. Sparsely populated neighborhoods see increases in crime and fires, including arsons. The state has appointed bankruptcy attorneyKevyn Orr as emergency financial manager to take over the city finances and he has said bankruptcy is an option to lessen the burden of about $15 billion in debt.

“We have a city built for 2 million and only 700,000 people living here,” said John George, who has run the grassroots Motor City Blight Busters organization for the last quarter century, tearing down about 300 dwellings mostly by hand in the city’s impoverished Brightmoor neighborhood. “We have to get rid of what we don’t want, don’t need and can’t use.”

[Econoline]

A few weeks ago I happened to be talking to a (middle-aged, white) native Michigander--whose job involves something computer-related that can only mystify an old fart/blue collar worker like me--who told me that he had moved from Grand Rapids to downtown Detroit within the past year and absolutely loved it there. Apparently some parts of Detroit are not just coming back, they already are back.

[rubato]

From recent reports downtown Detroit has a very low vacancy rate. Now when they can do the same for the other 95% of the city they'll have something.


yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

Downtown is great the problem is Detroit is huge.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I would think that as downtown succeeeds, the success will expand outward.

[dales]

As far outward on a very limited scale.

As I've stated before, the city should be condensed and the rest of the land turned over for ag uses.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Yuppies love fresh veggies.

[Crackpot]

And then shit like this happens.

http://m.michiganradio.org/?utm_referrer=#mobile/13129

[Lord Jim]

Here's one way to reduce the surplus real estate:

City on fire: The Detroit Fire Department versus what's left of their city

By Pete Fisher ,Northumberland Today
First posted: Saturday, June 01, 2013 02:00 AM EDT

DETROIT — Firefighting in Detroit is a whole different world.

In a city that once had a population of two million but is now at just under 800,000, the buildings, life itself, is decaying rapidly.

Street after street of storefronts, homes, churches, factories are simply abandoned.

The former Packard Automotive plant, which is reportedly the largest abandoned plant in the world, topping 3.5 million square feet, is eerily silent. The only people who visit the area now are tourists. There is a van offering guided tours around the gutted ruins. [Well, at least there's a new venue for tourism revenue..."Come to Detroit and visit the ruins"] But not after dark.

It's also impossible to drive through the streets of Motor City for five minutes without seeing structures charred by fire. Arsonists are busy here.

So are firefighters.

One-third of the Detroit Fire Department halls have been shut down through budget cuts. Despite gunshots ringing out nearby and packs of roving wild dogs looking on, police rarely attend fires.

Mostly, firefighters simply do their best to make sure the flames from burning abandoned buildings don't damage surrounding structures. They knock down flaming walls, contain the heat, and douse their own equipment so it doesn't get damaged.

Fire just speeds up the course of the crumbling decay of Detroit.

"It's a city with no laws," admits seasoned fire photographer Ted Roney. "Nobody cares about anything."

Nobody but those trying to keep the remains safe for the remaining.

More images:

http://www.torontosun.com/2013/05/31/ci ... their-city

[Lord Jim]

I will say one thing that has impressed me about Detroit though...

Despite all the blows the place has taken, they've some how managed to hang on to all of their major big league sports franchises...

No doubt this is due in large part to participation by folks in the more prosperous suburbs, but it still shows some level of community dedication....Towns in much better shape have seen their big time sports teams move on to greener pastures....

[dales]

Adopt a building pgm....yours to do with the building as you wish....renovate of burn down.....your choice.

[Econoline]

In the story CP linked, I was intrigued by the headline of another story at the bottom off the page--in particular I wondered WTF could they mean by the term "pet coke piles"? (Several absurd images came to mind. )

Wow. Just wow. (As if we didn't already have enough reasons to dislike the Koch brothers, the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Alberta tar sands strip mines....)

[Rick]

Detroit will never recover until the stigma of 8 Mile Road is over come...

[Crackpot]

You've been away a long time

[dgs49]

Detroit has a cancer that cannot be mentioned and cannot be cured in less than a full generation. It has a large population of people to whom a "middle class work ethic" is as foreign and incomprehensible as sanskrit. It is a population where disastrous lifestyle choices - those that condemn oneself and one's immediate progeny to incurable poverty and ignorance, basically for life - are not only tolerated but The Norm. It is a population that renders the streets dangerous, the schools both dangerous and superfluous, and the housing stock (where they live) worthless.

There are tremendous assets in Detroit, and I like that part of the world. And for that reason, there will certainly be pockets of prosperity in the city, enriched culture, culinary joy, and small-scale beauty. Nice neighborhoods, even. But these are merely oases in a large desert of well-deserved misery and despair.

Suburbanites tolerate the city when they come there to work, attend sporting events and conventions and cultural events, but they depart immediately thereafter and wouldn't be caught dead there without a good excuse, and probably wouldn't be caught dead on a typical sidewalk without an armed escort.

They are the victims of the government that they have elected, but Mayor Jesus H. Christ could not resolve the endemic problems that condemn this city to a slow and lingering death. It's ironic because there is a good bit of prosperity in the suburbs and in Windsor. Eh?

[Econoline]

As I've stated before, the city should be condensed and the rest of the land turned over for ag uses.

Yuppies love fresh veggies.

There you go. Detroit could be well-positioned to become the first American city that is completely self-sufficient in terms of food and water.

Dave - have you ever actually been to Detroit? Recently?