Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

The city, that is.

Detroit, once one of the wealthiest industrial cities on earth and the sixth-largest city in the United States as recently as 1970, is as broke as it is broken.  The city, now reduced to a shadow of its former self, filed for bankruptcy after several failed attempts to remain solvent.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. Detroit is still known as the city of auto manufacturing, the Motor City.  Its entire economy has long been based on making cars and the parts that go in them, largely because no one ever thought the money would stop rolling in - thanks to America's love affair with the automobile but also thanks to the federal government's autocentric transportation policy, which turned this once-beautiful country into a huge housing subdivision punctuated by shopping malls and office parks. But no one ever counted on foreign automakers making better cars at a lower cost, or the inability of GM, Ford and Chrysler to adapt to changing tastes.  The industry has recovered, but the city hasn't.  After the 1967 riot that caused President Johnson to send the U.S. Army in after the Detroit police and the Michigan state militia couldn't quell it, white people moved out of the city as quickly as possible.  Despite a sizeable black middle class that remained in the city, Detroit became largely populated by poor blacks who suddenly couldn't get a job.  The intense competition from German and Japanese automakers in the seventies began the  American car industry's decline even as blacks were taking control of Detroit's city government.  How ironic is it that Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, took office just as the American economy in general and its industrial economy in particular started going in a tailspin?

With white Republicans in control of the Michigan state government and Detroit being a black-majority Democratic city (Kevyn Orr, the city's emergency finance manager, is black, and he was appointed by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, a Republican)  the city's predicament will largely continue to be seen in racial terms.  While there is a good deal of truth to race being a key factor here, though, its automotive legacy remains the key reason for its decline, and not just in terms of losing market share to the Japanese.  The early success of the carmakers caused Detroit's once-diverse industrial base to rely on cars alone, as manufacturers of other products couldn't afford to match the high wages that fellows like Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan were paying their workers.  (By the sixties, auto assembly line workers were making more money than college professors.) The result? Nothing for the local economy to fall back on when the unthinkable happened and the car business contracted.  The physical layout of the city itself was altered irrevocably when expressways were built within the city limits to allow residents to leave to work in armament plants during the Second World War, which were placed outside the city for safety and security reasons.  Pretty soon, those same highways would allow Detroiters to leave permanently, for the suburbs.  The result is a city of decaying skyscrapers, the gleaming GM Renaissance Center building, and a couple of sports arenas, beyond which lie pockets of empty spaces punctuated by an occupied house or two and several more vacant houses . . . along with neighborhoods marred by crime and drugs.  

Perhaps this bankruptcy will provide an opportunity to recover what has been lost.  Detroit can never be the big industrial city it used to be, but it can grow again and revive to become a liveable place again.  The city benefits from its strategic location on the Detroit River connecting it with the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway - its name, properly pronounced "day-TWAH," is the French word for "strait," as the river connects Lake St. Clair with Lake Erie - and it has a vast infrastructure just waiting to be updated and reused.  It can become the center for a new kind of manufacturing - perhaps those so-called "green jobs" people keep talking about - and its empty spaces can be made whole again.  In order for this to happen, though, people have to return from the automobile suburbia north of Eight Mile Road, the city's northern boundary.  And they're going to have to do that whether they like it or not.  America can no longer endure the costs of a way of life relying on the very product Detroit is known for - the car - and we have to get back to a living pattern of walkable neighborhoods, public transit, and the high-density residential and business districts commonly associated with cities and towns.  Detroit, if given the chance to become a liveable city that works the way cities are supposed to work, can lead the way again.

Detroit wouldn't be what it is today without the automobile, and I mean that with all the irony that implies.