The travails of Detroit
By John Reed
Published: March 6 2009 18:35 | Last updated: March 6 2009 18:35
You expect snow in Detroit in winter, and this time there was plenty. I waded through drifts, sweeping mounds of it off my car, and gunning the engine in slush to get the wheels going again. Detroit and Wayne County, which encompasses the city and many of its biggest suburbs, is out of money, so the ploughing and salting of roads here is as patchy as it is in England – although blizzards in south-eastern Michigan are hardly once-in-18-years events.
Weekends are particularly bad. Side streets are not cleared at all, giving downtown driving a Mad Max quality. One sleety evening on the border of Detroit proper and Dearborn, my rented Ford Focus skidded on black ice and hit a concrete roadside barrier. A 911 call to get help driving home (my car was fine, but I had lost my glasses) provided a sobering lesson in Detroit’s fragmented polity: after being shunted between emergency services in the two municipalities, both of which were inundated with similar requests, I gave up and drove myself back down Ford Road – very slowly, squinting.
I had come to Detroit for the auto show. I stayed on for seven weeks, at first living in a condo near the Ford Motor Company’s suburban “Glass House” headquarters, where the telephone rang repeatedly with robo-calls from a bill-collection agency chasing a previous tenant. Then came a downtown loft – set in an almost cinematically American landscape of half-deserted art deco towers, steam rising from manholes and a daytime population split between office workers and vagrants.
In January, Detroit saw its municipal bonds downgraded to junk status by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, both of which expressed doubts about the city’s ability to close a $300m budget deficit. In early February, Kwame Kilpatrick, the former “hip-hop mayor” (so dubbed by comedian Chris Rock after Kilpatrick entered office aged 31, with a diamond earring and endorsements from a number of rappers) was released from jail after serving a 120-day sentence for perjury and assault. He flew to Texas for a job interview, and soon afterwards, the city held a primary poll for an election to replace Ken Cockrel, his caretaker successor. Meanwhile, federal investigators were probing a “pay-to-play” sleaze scandal involving the alleged bribery of other city officials by a company called Synagro, relating to a $1.2bn sewage sludge disposal contract, and a corpse was found in an abandoned Detroit warehouse, encased face down in ice, legs protruding like popsicle sticks. It turned out several men had been playing hockey around the body. In a city where the headlines pretty much write themselves, the story ran under the words “Frozen in indifference.”
The story seemed an apt metaphor for a city enduring the collapse of its century-old car industry, only to be met with a public reaction in other parts of the US best described as a collective shrug. In late January, Chrysler, whose year-on-year sales plunged by 55 per cent in January, began re-opening its north American car plants after a near-two-month shutdown, then promptly said it was closing at least three of them again. This came shortly after the company, alongside General Motors, formally became a ward of the state, collecting its $4bn share of the $17.4bn emergency federal bridging loans approved for the two ailing companies in December. When GM’s dismal 2008 sales figures came in, the company finally fell behind Japanese rival Toyota in the long-watched race to become the world’s top-selling carmaker – although there were no victory parties in Tokyo as GM’s nemesis said it was heading for its first full-year loss since 1950.
For decades, scribes from America’s coasts and beyond have been parachuting into Detroit to marvel at its horrors. The city never fails to deliver colourful copy: the urban decay, the $1 houses that still go unsold, the tragicomic city politics. Jerry Herron, a writer and scholar at Detroit’s Wayne State University, likens journalists’ morbid delight at Detroit to that of Victorian travellers reaching Pompeii. “City of the dead, city of the dead,” Thackeray wrote. The words might as well apply here.
. . .
Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.
Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition.
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