Over the past few months or so I've had to correct the record on Detroit. About what it is, about what it was, about what it can be. I expected to have to correct the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Detroit News even.
But I didn't think I'd have to correct Colorlines.
In The Old Lessons of Detroit, Imara Jones appears to understand at least some of what's going on now in Detroit. Jones understands that Detroit is only 1/3 its 1950 population size. By name checking Steve Rattner Jones appears to support Rattner's idea of a government sponsored bailout. And Jones gets the human costs of Detroit's failure.
But Jones' totally ignores the role of white flight and structural racism in detailing the reasons for Detroit's failure, placing most of the burden in the city's "decision" to hitch its sails to the auto industry.
Through a combination of an over-reliance on a single, formerly all-powerful industry and two generations of unsteady political leadership, Detroit remained stuck and resistant to change. The Washington Post’s Keith Richburg, a Detroit-native, said that the city was “kept alive by pride, a nostalgia for its former glory, and an illusion that revival was just around the corner.”
The essential problem is that Detroit has remained the capital of an industry which built America but is now a shadow of its former self: the car industry. And nothing in the city has shown up to replace it. That’s because automobiles were so dominant for so long that they crowded out the city’s economic imagination.
Jones' choice of Detroit expats is peculiar, given that Richburg's written that slavery was the best thing to happen to him and other African Americans.
The passage below is the most important passage of the article.
The U.S. economy decoupled from Detroit, and the world based on the churning out of goods along an assembly line went away. Manufacturing as a portion of the U.S. economy is now two-thirds smaller than when Detroit was at its height. Outpaced by global competition, the Big Three car makers’ percentage of even the U.S. market has fallen by 50 percent since 1950. And Detroit has slid down in the ranking of American cities to be 18th in size.
Yet even with global economic realignment, Detroit’s longterm collapse was not preordained.
With better leadership the city could have made the painful transition that so many other cities have made during the global economy’s transformation from one based on manufacturing to one based on services and technology. Pittsburgh moved from a one-industry steel town to one now dominated by medical and education services. Minneapolis is now home to leading brands like 3M, Target, and Best Buy. Even hard-hit Indianapolis is making a go at reworking itself from a rustbelt town into a distribution and pharmaceutical hub.
Between 1940 and 1970 Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its time, by 1980 or so this changed, "due in part to policy changes in Washington."
I've already focused on three important dynamics one has to consider when studying Detroit's condition: racial exclusion in Detroit metropolitan development, the increased reliance on bond-rating agencies, and decreased revenue sharing as a result of federal policy.
I want to further unpack the first dynamic a bit.
The form US metropolitan development takes is due to the GI Bill, the federal highway system, and federal subsidies to manufacturers. The GI Bill gave veterans the ability to buy cheap (new) housing. The federal highways system connected urban cores to suburban and rural areas (as well as to other cores). Subsidies to corporations gave manufacturers like Ford and GM the wherewithal to modernize and relocate plants.
What role does race play here?
The homes vets bought had to be new housing. And by federal dictate, the new housing had to be in the suburbs. The money could neither be used to rebuild homes in cities, nor be used to build NEW homes in cities.
This policy exacerbated racial inequality in Detroit by allowing white vets to build racially exclusive suburbs and to gradually accumulate (and hoard) wealth in them–wealth generated by their distance from African Americans. The newly created highways gave them the ability to locate these suburbs further and further away, increasingly reducing their connections to the city. Finally these highways, gave whites more access to the fleeing manufacturers. Blacks ARE able to accumulate more political and social power as a result–as whites move from Detroit black political and social power within the city increases. Given the wealth whites hold however, the political and social power they acquire becomes weaker and weaker. Black empowerment was in effect a hollow prize.
Now according to Jones, if Detroit would've have less corrupt leadership and followed the lead of Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis, Detroit could've conceivably been in a far better situation than it is now. Each of these cities experienced population loss as a result of corporate and middle class flight. And each of these cities has indeed made a resurgence of sorts.
But none of these cities have a black population percentage higher than 27. These cities are and always have been majority white. In fact, when it even looked like Indianapolis would tip, political officials merged it with its surrounding suburbs in 1970.
Detroit could have conceivably followed the path of Pittsburgh and Minneapolis only if it somehow maintained its status as a predominantly white city. And the only way it could have conceivably followed the path of Indianapolis would be to have merged with its suburbs…around the time it elected its first black mayor.
Neither of these scenarios are plausible.
I expect this type of coverage from a range of publications. I'd expect it from the Wall Street Journal. I'd expect it from Forbes. I'd expect it from the National Review. I'd expect it from The Detroit News given its conservative editorial slant.
I do NOT expect a color-blind article about Detroit's past, present, and future from Colorlines.
What exactly is the government supposed to bailout in the wake of 40 years of intensifying lack of black economic imagination, organization, and development? Bailouts are for operations with sustainable long-term viability that have hit a bad patch. Detroit has declined into nothing more than a bad patch, period – there’s nothing there to bailout.
The consequences of 40 years of “faking it till you make it” are going to play themselves out with no surcease.
You make it seem as if Detroit is sui generis. It isn’t. The intensifying lack of economic imagination, organization, and development you note is endemic among American local, state, and federal governments, endemic among American financial and social institutions. What’s happening in Detroit will be coming soon to a city near you.
According to Bro.Feed, Philadelphia is next http://withintheblackcommunity.blogspot.com/2013/08/with-population-declines-of.html
Kansas City is where Jesse Clyde Nichols invented both automotive shopping malls and developed neighborhoods with restrictive housing covenants in the 1920’s.. The urban core of Kansas City is Haiti in our backyard. There is no more money, there are no more resources, and there is no political will to bailout little Haiti. It is the source of the overwhelming majority of property crime and crimes of violence internally and in its surrounds.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been flushed down that rathole (18th and Vine district a dismal failure) and there will be no more. What will instead happen, is wholesale demolition, a squeeze-out of the 95% renter demographic, and ultimately resale and reclamation of the 64 square miles of land to folks who don’t want to live out in the exurbs anymore.
Mexicans, Somalis, Vietnamese and others not lacking in either intact family structure and or economic organization, imagination and initiative will take over that 64 square miles moving in from the near northeast neighborhood and that will be that. Central location and being the 2nd largest rail hub in the U.S. has future value for this locality as a going concern. (why Google invested $400 Million on high-speed Internet here)
There’s nothing of value in Detroit outside of capital goods and property left over from its heyday. No amount of nostalgia or wishful thinking is going to change that simple fact. It’s too late. The 2nd/3rd line inheritors phukked it up beyond all recognition or possibility of recovery. What good is political power in Haiti?
What happens in Detroit on the negative side will gradually spread. The solutions will as well. Detroit sits on the largest body of freshwater on the face of the planet. It’s one of the few truly international cities the nation has given its proximity to Canada. It has enough room for 1.4 million more people and has fertile land. You know the climate change data better than I do…where would you rather live in 30 years, Kansas City or Detroit?
There is no such inevitability to the spread of Detroit’s defects. The solution is what I described in Kansas City. It will be privatized, depopulated (rid of its current demography) and possibly (but not certainly) reclaimed and repurposed by new inhabitants.
The pink elephant is “what becomes of its utterly failed and cratered current demography?” What has become of the inhabitants of the lower 9th ward once dispersed hither, thither, and yon?
Dr Spence:
If I labeled you a “Non-White White Supremacist” would you be willing to accept it – per the arguments that you have made?
You talk about “White Flight” and “Structural Racism”.
Can you find one Black or Progressive political operative that warned Black people in Detroit that in their collective role as “The New Establishment For The City” – they will need to assume the primary role as the purveyors of:
* The Education System – that will train up Black children into the management and technical roles that have been moved out (Due To Racism)
* The Economic Development Engine – that will establish a local market place for exchange and a (municipal) export market place where they sell more than they consume
* The Societal And Cultural Diameter – in which the people are kept in line with the community goals that they all must agree to IF they are to receive the fruits for their labor?
Do you see, Dr Spence – Detroit WAS what the Black Progressive Political Rhetoric IS today – The use of SMOKE AND MIRRORS about a fabulous future – IF they remain Congregationally Unified and “Vote For Their Salvation”.
This theft of the “Black Community Governance Culture” – which should have put a check upon the usurpation of “Black Hopes And Dreams” by demanding incremental course correction when the short term results (in series) were not lining up with the GRAND VISION that the residents who were left chose to by into.
I personally took from your account of Detroit that you have little confidence that any large Black congregation of people – anywhere within the Black Diaspora have any chance of making it without WHITE FOLKS if they are absent OR due to WHITE STRUCTURAL RACISM – if they are present.
Again I ask you to show the Black Progressive Voices of Detroit or any other Mission Accomplished City that was HONEST to their “Black Investors” about the risks that were before them and how they must MANAGE THEIR INSTITUTIONS AND HUMAN RESOURCES lest it all come crumbling down.
Instead we see that the Americanized Blacks are more given to accept diversionary conspiracy theories.
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTNWpA4674zI1nu58O4saLvdDeN93dezG8I7B474AtJXlYR9gXf
Yet when the talk about the $300 million owned to the city by the state as the “Grand Fix” for Detroit was making its way through the “Black Media” and “Activism” community – when we later learned that the city was insolvent to the tune of $18 BILLION – voices like yours did not make the case that the “Embedded Confidence Men” that rile up the Black constituents as was the case this past spring – are net thieves of the “Black Community Governance Culture”.
Are you sure that the White Folks and the “Black Flight Progressives” did not leave for good measure – to protect their valuables – since you appear to have little interest in doing so?
Why do you place “white flight” and “structural racism” in quotes? Did I? Is it that you don’t believe these dynamics are the primary causal factors in Detroit’s current condition? You appear to put far more responsibility on black elites themselves, perhaps for not recognizing how prescient James Boggs’ commentary was.
If this is true, then that’s all good. I have been and will continue to be critical of black elites to the extent they make decisions that withhold resources from other blacks.
However in this case, a counter-factual is necessary. Find me a city with the same general demographic characteristics of Detroit that actually was able to create a different set of institutional arrangements, and as a result of those arrangements get different results. If you can do so, then I can–as the author of the Colorlines article did–put full responsibility on Detroit’s political leadership.
lol, Bro. Feed didn’t go for the “counter-factual” redirect, and instead doubled down on the Mugabe-ization of Detroit theme http://withintheblackcommunity.blogspot.com/2013/08/follow-up-dr-lester-spence-and-how.html
data is a hard taskmaster.
Lol, move out the way so I can see this “data”. Your counterfactual challenge wasn’t seking data, rather, it was leading toward a planned response. An easy counter to that is that there are no exceptions to the rule that the negroes who acquired political control of urban cores systemically failed to institutionally and economically develop the same.
Put bluntly, breath and britches cain’t make shit but conversation. THAT’s the hard and Haiti-headed taskmaster right there. Nobody is going to pony up to repair the past 40 years of negroe epic fail. Not gonna happen. Geriatric 2nd/3rd line inheritors STILL won’t let go of political control of what they’ve mismanaged into the pavement. So they’ll either die and be carried out, or their constituents dispersed by natural disasters and/or malign neglect. Whichever comes first, hits hardest, and effects the necessary change on the ground.
“There are no exceptions to the rule…”
That’s data.