Lansing public relations and policy guru Dave Waymire sent out a plea to friends and colleagues last night..
“Take a look at this video… Share it…link it to your web site. Maybe we’ll keep a kid from going to Chicago…Maybe we’ll convince a policymaker to stop attacking our largest city and invest where it’s smart to invest…”
In YouTube’s promotional box next to that inspiring clip of young and innovative professionals fearlessly staking a claim in 21st Century Detroit, another video told a different story of “The Detroit Housing Apocalypse”…
Meantime, the Detroit News’ brilliantly quirky storyteller, Charlie LeDuff, showed how the residents of a healthy neighborhood just off Woodward Avenue had all but evaporated in five short years…
The point is, both versions of Detroit are accurate. The question is, which one will ultimately overtake the other? And when? It’s the question that’s gotta keep Dave Bing up at night. Every night. He wanted the job. Now he gets to figure this out.
As someone who often traveled Detroit’s streets as a reporter over the past fifteen years, I can see a couple sides to this story. On one hand, you could argue that the terror over the vacant building epidemic is a bit sensationalistic. More than a couple neighborhoods were far from healthy when they were populated. And vacant neighborhoods have been at epidemic levels for a couple decades now. Along these lines, you could argue that whole sections of the city may need, and are in the process of, being flattened on a long glide path to being rebuilt. (Coleman Young sometimes thought that way. Remember Poletown?) It takes a bit of imagination and adherence to creative destruction, but you could make the argument that intensified blight puts the city much closer to revival than it was 10 or 15 years ago when so many more neighborhoods were populated, but still only hanging on by sparse social threads now snapped.
But you also have to look beyond the physical tragedy of the boarded up buildings. Where have all the people gone? Chicago, in its boom before the housing bust of recent years, largely pushed poor minorities into a somewhat silent and invisible existence in its inner-ring suburbs. What about Detroit? It didn’t see Chicago’s economic upside, but people are clearly what remained of the working class neighborhoods in droves. As they leave, are they finding greener grass across 8 Mile? Are they dilluting urban political power, or regrowing it beyond Detroit’s borders? And if the city is flattened and remade, for whom will it be remade? Is it destined to be an insular home for mainly African-Americans who either can’t or don’t want to leave? Or, will it more closely resemble the diverse vision in that first video?
Black, white, and Hispanic young professionals in Detroit who’ve participated in the Center’s Community Conversations aren’t blinking at these questions. They’re not expecting much effective help from any government anywhere. But they’ll tell you they relish the challenge and the chance to recreate the American city.
What do you think?
Can they do it?
