Round one: Detroit from where the houses are no more
Detroit is a physically large city that is hard to understand and is too often written about by people who have far too simplistic and understanding of the city to do it justice.
Detroit has an area of 138.75 square miles. This is bigger than San Francisco, Manhattan and Boston combined.
In 2010 it had 713,777 people. By 2017 it had fallen to 673,104. This put Detroit as the 23rd largest city in the USA. In 1930 Detroit was the 4th largest city in the US, and as late as 1960 it was the 5th largest city. Even in 2000 it was the 9th largest city in the country.
In 1950 there were 1.8 million people in Detroit, and maybe in 1948 the population had hit 2 million.
While at times much of the population loss has been to the surrounding suburbs, most cities that border Detroit have also seen population loss for decades. Dearborn, the place that shares the longest border with Detroit, has seen its population stabalize with immigrants from Iraq other parts of south-west Asia, but it is rare among Detroit's neighbors. Warren, its neighbor with the longest straight border along 8 mile, has seen almost a third of its population wiped out, and southern Warren in many places is an area that is an extension of all the negaitve social indicators that plague Detroit.
Southfield, Redford Township and to a lesser extent Farmington Hills seem to as of yet constitute a true escape from many of the negative social indicators that plague Detroit for the middle class black population of the city. However it has come at the cost of hallowing out neighborhoods in the city, like the area just north of Emerson Elementary where 7 mile and Evergreen meet. some of this neighborhood was still undevelop forest land when Emerson Elementary opened in 1948. Over the last five years these same streets have seen so many houses razed they are fast back on that path.
Much has been rightly written about the turnaround of mid-town and downtown. To this can be added East Village and West Village and basically everyting south of Jefferson with the exception of the area between Dickerson and Connor, although even that is not nearly as bad off as some areas.
The historic districts such as Boston-Edison, Indian Village, Sherwood Forest and Palmer Woods are upheld by the strong academic life of Wayne State University and the continued vitality of the auto industry.
Rosedale Park and its neighbors have not suffered the hollowing of the areas north of McNichols as of yet, and places like Bagley and Fitzgerald on the west side can be seen as having some positive indications.
Most area west of downtown and south of I-94 have not seen significant drops in population. The same can be said of the area just north of Hamtramck, between Conant and Joseph Campau, south of the Davidson. Once you cross Conant things are harder to see as anything other than bad, and someone should set up in the area between Carpenter, I-75, the Davidson and Joseph Campau a large sign that reads "if you seek an abandoned neighborhood, look around you."
New housing has been more common in the city since 1960 than some will acknowledge. However at least since 1995 outside of midtown, downtown and the river front it has almost all been built with the needs of heavy profits for builders and low costs, and almost never with an eye towards what consumers would want.
There are lots of reasons that middle class blacks leave the city, many the same as why middle class whites left. In both cases seeking to flee crime is probably the top of the list. When testimony meeting includes a member of the congregation in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recounting a bullet having flow into her house, it not only makes the Grosse Pointe residents never consider moving into the city, but also makes them wonder if allowing their husband to work as a high school teacher in the city is reasonable.
My wife, who is African-American, discorages me from going to some gas stations at night.
However the biggest reason to leave the city is that there are few places like Indian Village in it, the houses there are more for super rich than middle income types, and you still have to deal with many city negatives.
The biggest draw back to any house me and my wife might find once we move out of our rented duplex? This is easy to answer, and the answer is it is unlikely to have adequate bathrooms.
Of course there is the occasional outstanding house. There is one on Waveney and Lakewood just a few blocks from my residence. There is one in Belmont Neighborhood not far from John R. King Elementary/Middle school. There is at least one on Connor adjacent to the city airport.
None of this gets one closer to a solution for other problems. Many of those problems I will explore at length in other posts.
The first thing that confronts someone who visits the city of Detroit in my expeirence in talking to some who have visited is a general reaction that the city is ugly. In some ways this is an unfair characterization. Downtown is quite nice looking, in its combination of Art Deco, 1960s civic buildings, the Rensaince Center from the 1970s, and more stuff added since 2000.
Wayne State gets a bad rap from some for being a skyscraper campus, but the two Wane State buildings on Woodward that some who go downtown see are not the main campus. That is over a block west on the other side of Cass. Old Main is a true architectural gem, and while I hate Manoogian Hall and think the auditorian is the worst acousticlly built building in the world, in general the campus is nice if not overly spacious. The biggest issue is too many big roads running through it, including two freeways. The next is the exorbidant price of parking. The third is that parking garages are most of what faces I-94.
This is the next problem that confronts a visitor to Detroit. Other than the stretch of I-75 from Grand Boulevard to where it passes into Hamtramck, almost no where along the freeways in the city has there been redevelopment since the freeways were built. Elsewhere it is essentially open wounds from the traumatic building of the freeways that have not yet healed.
On the other hand, it is easy to find the ugly in Detroit. A little harder today than when "King" Kwame Kilpatrick left the mayor office for a term in the state penitentiary, some do to the work of Ken Cockerel Jr, and much under the Mike Duggin administration. However some signs promising to knock down buildings have been present for years, apparently falling through the cracks and forgotten, and the promise of two weeks from a given date to take down a specific house is often not honored.
This would not be as much a problem if burned out relics of houses did not sit for 3 years or more before even preliminary removal work was done. It would not be a problem if there were not so many blocks with more empty lots than build on ones, and more abandoned houses than lived in ones.
There are multiple icons of abadoned Detroit. One, the 12-story Grand Central Station, is being redeveloped by Ford Motor Company to be the center of its mobility and self-driving car operations. This will probably accelerate making Corktown into a yuppy paradise, and maybe complete the transformation of Briggs the home of the Appachian whites into North Corktown, the home of yuppies.
From the standpoint of the city tax base this is probably good. From the standpoint of the current residents of Briggs, it is not clearly good.
The Hudson's Building, with its 26 story department store that stood for a decade abandoned, is gone and a new building isgoing in. However there is still an abandoned high rise by Northwestern High School. There is still one at Drexel and Jefferson. The Packard Plant still sits in its glory of abandonment.
Detroit was always a city more of single-family homes than apartments. The exodus of factories to the suburbs mostly preceeded the people. Mayor Coleman Young brought multiple large scale factories into the city in the early 1980s. These did not stem the tide of negative results and may have in the case of the Poletown Plant accelaerated them. The city did not make space for the new technical and information jobs then emerging, and lost out to Warren, Southfield, Troy and Auburn Hills as well as Ann Arbor in that respect.
Tech Town and the revitalization of downtown has reversed that trend some, but playing catchup still occurs.
The true emblem of abandoned Detroit is the abandoned house and its kin the squatted in house. The city has lots of both of them. Collapsed in roofs, missing proches, broken windows, boarded up buildings on and on. In most neighborhoods the largest abandoned thing is a school. That is another subject. What is almost never abandoned is streets themselves. Even streets that go nowhere and having nothing on them are still there, only just starting to see grass poke through. Blocks where there are no houses at all, some that have literally been turned into farms, still exist.
And so we close about where we started. San Francisco with less than 47 square miles of land has 884,000 people. The key to this difference is in many places, but one is on Trinity Street in the northwest of Detroit, between McNichols and 7 Mile. In the center of that block one finds deep lots more common to outer suburbs, and still some abandoned. There is space in Detroit that is almost quasi rural. There is in the northwest areas that seem almost suburban, but they have seen lots of flight. Herein lies the emptiness.
Detroit has an area of 138.75 square miles. This is bigger than San Francisco, Manhattan and Boston combined.
In 2010 it had 713,777 people. By 2017 it had fallen to 673,104. This put Detroit as the 23rd largest city in the USA. In 1930 Detroit was the 4th largest city in the US, and as late as 1960 it was the 5th largest city. Even in 2000 it was the 9th largest city in the country.
In 1950 there were 1.8 million people in Detroit, and maybe in 1948 the population had hit 2 million.
While at times much of the population loss has been to the surrounding suburbs, most cities that border Detroit have also seen population loss for decades. Dearborn, the place that shares the longest border with Detroit, has seen its population stabalize with immigrants from Iraq other parts of south-west Asia, but it is rare among Detroit's neighbors. Warren, its neighbor with the longest straight border along 8 mile, has seen almost a third of its population wiped out, and southern Warren in many places is an area that is an extension of all the negaitve social indicators that plague Detroit.
Southfield, Redford Township and to a lesser extent Farmington Hills seem to as of yet constitute a true escape from many of the negative social indicators that plague Detroit for the middle class black population of the city. However it has come at the cost of hallowing out neighborhoods in the city, like the area just north of Emerson Elementary where 7 mile and Evergreen meet. some of this neighborhood was still undevelop forest land when Emerson Elementary opened in 1948. Over the last five years these same streets have seen so many houses razed they are fast back on that path.
Much has been rightly written about the turnaround of mid-town and downtown. To this can be added East Village and West Village and basically everyting south of Jefferson with the exception of the area between Dickerson and Connor, although even that is not nearly as bad off as some areas.
The historic districts such as Boston-Edison, Indian Village, Sherwood Forest and Palmer Woods are upheld by the strong academic life of Wayne State University and the continued vitality of the auto industry.
Rosedale Park and its neighbors have not suffered the hollowing of the areas north of McNichols as of yet, and places like Bagley and Fitzgerald on the west side can be seen as having some positive indications.
Most area west of downtown and south of I-94 have not seen significant drops in population. The same can be said of the area just north of Hamtramck, between Conant and Joseph Campau, south of the Davidson. Once you cross Conant things are harder to see as anything other than bad, and someone should set up in the area between Carpenter, I-75, the Davidson and Joseph Campau a large sign that reads "if you seek an abandoned neighborhood, look around you."
New housing has been more common in the city since 1960 than some will acknowledge. However at least since 1995 outside of midtown, downtown and the river front it has almost all been built with the needs of heavy profits for builders and low costs, and almost never with an eye towards what consumers would want.
There are lots of reasons that middle class blacks leave the city, many the same as why middle class whites left. In both cases seeking to flee crime is probably the top of the list. When testimony meeting includes a member of the congregation in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recounting a bullet having flow into her house, it not only makes the Grosse Pointe residents never consider moving into the city, but also makes them wonder if allowing their husband to work as a high school teacher in the city is reasonable.
My wife, who is African-American, discorages me from going to some gas stations at night.
However the biggest reason to leave the city is that there are few places like Indian Village in it, the houses there are more for super rich than middle income types, and you still have to deal with many city negatives.
The biggest draw back to any house me and my wife might find once we move out of our rented duplex? This is easy to answer, and the answer is it is unlikely to have adequate bathrooms.
Of course there is the occasional outstanding house. There is one on Waveney and Lakewood just a few blocks from my residence. There is one in Belmont Neighborhood not far from John R. King Elementary/Middle school. There is at least one on Connor adjacent to the city airport.
None of this gets one closer to a solution for other problems. Many of those problems I will explore at length in other posts.
The first thing that confronts someone who visits the city of Detroit in my expeirence in talking to some who have visited is a general reaction that the city is ugly. In some ways this is an unfair characterization. Downtown is quite nice looking, in its combination of Art Deco, 1960s civic buildings, the Rensaince Center from the 1970s, and more stuff added since 2000.
Wayne State gets a bad rap from some for being a skyscraper campus, but the two Wane State buildings on Woodward that some who go downtown see are not the main campus. That is over a block west on the other side of Cass. Old Main is a true architectural gem, and while I hate Manoogian Hall and think the auditorian is the worst acousticlly built building in the world, in general the campus is nice if not overly spacious. The biggest issue is too many big roads running through it, including two freeways. The next is the exorbidant price of parking. The third is that parking garages are most of what faces I-94.
This is the next problem that confronts a visitor to Detroit. Other than the stretch of I-75 from Grand Boulevard to where it passes into Hamtramck, almost no where along the freeways in the city has there been redevelopment since the freeways were built. Elsewhere it is essentially open wounds from the traumatic building of the freeways that have not yet healed.
On the other hand, it is easy to find the ugly in Detroit. A little harder today than when "King" Kwame Kilpatrick left the mayor office for a term in the state penitentiary, some do to the work of Ken Cockerel Jr, and much under the Mike Duggin administration. However some signs promising to knock down buildings have been present for years, apparently falling through the cracks and forgotten, and the promise of two weeks from a given date to take down a specific house is often not honored.
This would not be as much a problem if burned out relics of houses did not sit for 3 years or more before even preliminary removal work was done. It would not be a problem if there were not so many blocks with more empty lots than build on ones, and more abandoned houses than lived in ones.
There are multiple icons of abadoned Detroit. One, the 12-story Grand Central Station, is being redeveloped by Ford Motor Company to be the center of its mobility and self-driving car operations. This will probably accelerate making Corktown into a yuppy paradise, and maybe complete the transformation of Briggs the home of the Appachian whites into North Corktown, the home of yuppies.
From the standpoint of the city tax base this is probably good. From the standpoint of the current residents of Briggs, it is not clearly good.
The Hudson's Building, with its 26 story department store that stood for a decade abandoned, is gone and a new building isgoing in. However there is still an abandoned high rise by Northwestern High School. There is still one at Drexel and Jefferson. The Packard Plant still sits in its glory of abandonment.
Detroit was always a city more of single-family homes than apartments. The exodus of factories to the suburbs mostly preceeded the people. Mayor Coleman Young brought multiple large scale factories into the city in the early 1980s. These did not stem the tide of negative results and may have in the case of the Poletown Plant accelaerated them. The city did not make space for the new technical and information jobs then emerging, and lost out to Warren, Southfield, Troy and Auburn Hills as well as Ann Arbor in that respect.
Tech Town and the revitalization of downtown has reversed that trend some, but playing catchup still occurs.
The true emblem of abandoned Detroit is the abandoned house and its kin the squatted in house. The city has lots of both of them. Collapsed in roofs, missing proches, broken windows, boarded up buildings on and on. In most neighborhoods the largest abandoned thing is a school. That is another subject. What is almost never abandoned is streets themselves. Even streets that go nowhere and having nothing on them are still there, only just starting to see grass poke through. Blocks where there are no houses at all, some that have literally been turned into farms, still exist.
And so we close about where we started. San Francisco with less than 47 square miles of land has 884,000 people. The key to this difference is in many places, but one is on Trinity Street in the northwest of Detroit, between McNichols and 7 Mile. In the center of that block one finds deep lots more common to outer suburbs, and still some abandoned. There is space in Detroit that is almost quasi rural. There is in the northwest areas that seem almost suburban, but they have seen lots of flight. Herein lies the emptiness.
Comments
Post a Comment