
Missing Detroit: My Dad and the disease of blight - rmason
http://beltmag.com/missing-detroit-my-dad-and-the-disease-of-blight/
======
rmason
The author of the article, Amanda Lewan, is a friend of mine. With a partner
she runs two coworking centers in the city.

It's the millennials that are rebuilding Detroit. Granted it may be
billionaires funding it but the people on the ground doing the work are young.

You may find it hard to believe but Zagat rated Detroit ahead of New York, San
Francisco, Dallas, Houston and Chicago as one of the hottest food cities in
America.

[https://www.zagat.com/b/the-26-hottest-food-cities-
of-2016](https://www.zagat.com/b/the-26-hottest-food-cities-of-2016)

~~~
closure
The author doesn't state her father's age or when he lived on Linnhurst.

My father, now 82, lived on that block from birth until his late 20s or early
30s. He went back 20 years ago for the first time in 30 years and was shocked
and saddened by what he saw.

~~~
rmason
My father is 100 and the houses he lived in as a kid (the majority of that
time on West Grand Boulevard) are all gone. All those houses and that of my
great grandfather were all there in 2007. In fact the house my 5x great
grandfather built in 1855 was there in the late nineties.

In Detroit the recession of 2008 was called Katrina without the water. My
friends in New Orleans find that hard to believe but when you see the
devastation that was wrought on entire neighborhoods you'd believe it.

This blog documents it as well as most:

[http://www.goobingdetroit.com/](http://www.goobingdetroit.com/)

------
curiouscat321
The Metropolitan area surrounding Detroit has done a remarkable job masking
the city.

Take Oakland County, the largest surrounding county by population. It has the
highest per-capita family income in the Midwest and one of the highest in the
nation. To some extent, the rich metropolitan area had very little incentive
to help out the city of Detroit.

~~~
sAuronas
It works the opposite way: cities operate on a zero-sum basis, especially when
an MSA is declining in population the way many Rust belt cities are. Detroit
may be the epicenter of the MSA but the other cities have all the incentive to
see Detroit - and other cities - suffer so that they can maintain the engine
of "flight to quality". Perhaps race is no longer the primary driver of this,
as realtors cannot legally use race as reason to sell homes in the
hinterlands, but the motion is decades in the making. Unless the Federal
government gets involved (again), many US cities while barely function and
their nearest and oldest suburbs will suffer a worse fate for not having the
same level of infrastructure and sense of permanence to buttress them from
sloppy decay (sorry that's a gin and tonic line).

~~~
Retric
New infrastructure is often vastly cheaper to build than existing
infrastructure is to maintain and adapt. So, letting some city's die IMO has
value.

DC is probably the classic example of a city best abandoned. We already moved
capitals once, and frankly we would be well served by doing so again. DC was
designed to be hard to move around in and guess what, it's hard to move around
in.

Detroit, while not nearly as bad as some, really does not fit the needs of a
modern population.

PS: It can literally be 10 times as expencive to build infrastructure in
existing city's.

------
ZeroGravitas
I went looking for the reason that Detroit became the home of the US auto
manufacturing industry in the first place (short version, central location
with access to labor, finance, transport, coal, suppliers) and found this
interesting online book:

[http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Overview/R_Overview...](http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Overview/R_Overview1.htm)

It covers the history and talks about multiple transformations of Detroit over
the decades. I thought the part about the car plants themselves moving to the
city suburbs thanks to the workers (at least the white ones) having access to
cars was particularly interesting.

------
kapitza
What's so remarkable about this piece is that it says nothing at all about
this "disease of blight." What is blight?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight)

The article reads as if everyone was expected to know. But in fact, no one
seems to know. Or talk about it.

It seems pretty clear that Detroit was not reduced to ruins by a plant
chlorosis. So what happened? Did the same leaf fungus attack elsewhere, or was
this a Detroit-specific disease? Is there a cure -- some kind of pesticide? A
gene? Will a new GMO Detroit rise again?

In the medieval world, the Roman Forum became known as the Campo Vaccino --
"cattle field." Perhaps if you'd asked the medieval Romans how the center of
the civilized world became a cattle field, they'd have given the same answer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval)

~~~
Animats
Version 1: Detroit declined because the US auto industry declined, due to
foreign competition. US auto production peaked in 1973, at 10 million cars.
Today, 4 million.

Version 2: Detroit declined because it became a black-majority city. 83% black
today, blackest big city in the US.

~~~
kapitza
Version 1 (unless broadened) does not explain why exactly the same symptoms
(if not always as extreme) appeared in many other American cities, not
specializing in auto production, at the same time.

"Due to foreign competition" is also contentious -- an equal and opposite
contentious statement would be "due to free trade," ie, attributing these
events to an human political decision, rather than an abstract force of
history.

Version 2 still contains the passive voice. Notice that both these versions
trail off into "no one is responsible." This is consistent with a political
memory hole.

It also seems deeply problematic (in a number of respects) to argue that
Detroit declined because African-Americans moved there. Surely the _proximate_
cause of the decline is not that a new population arrived, but that the old
population departed?

Here's a clarifying thought-experiment. Imagine that Detroit was a city-state,
and you were its absolute monarch, crowned originally in 1965. Then deliver
the explanation as if you were talking to your bondholders. Extra points if
you can use the phrase "our incredible journey."

~~~
superuser2
If you think foreign competition was a major factor, the responsible parties
are the executives and engineers of the Detroit automakers, for being worse at
their jobs than their Japanese and German counterparts.

~~~
a3n
Or, the quality of all cars sold in the US increased, including American cars.
I suspect that the number of cars sold per capita, regardless of origin, has
remained very roughly the same since Detroit's better days.

Those executives may have done a great job, improving the quality of their
cars to the point that they can sell as many as they do today, in a wider
competitive environment.

~~~
Animats
_I suspect that the number of cars sold per capita, regardless of origin, has
remained very roughly the same since Detroit 's better days._

In the US, down about 25% since 1976, actually. This reflects cars lasting
longer.

[1]
[https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/12/0...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/12/01/light-
vehicle-sales-per-capita-our-latest-look-at-the-long-term-trend)

~~~
a3n
Which is a good thing. I still have my 25 year old, first owner honda civic.

So, all things being equal ...

------
bobsgame
I'll fix it.

