Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  “Detroit is a temporary autonomous zone,” she said.

  “Like the Zone in Stalker?” I asked.

  “No, not all of Detroit. But it has Zones. The dichotomy between the parts of this city that are very magical and the parts that are miserable can be pretty overwhelming. But it’s precisely these extremes that create the urgency to override the existing reality with something completely different. Detroit in the present moment is a very good vehicle for the imagination.” She gave me a curious look. Her face had a mischievous, elfin quality. “Do you want me to take you to the Zone?” she asked.

  I said, “I would go to the Zone.”

  The following Sunday, Corine picked me up in her ancient, boxy Volvo, a lush Detroit techno track, awash in synthesizer, playing on her stereo.4 We drove past the ruins of the Packard plant, heading deeper into the east side. It wasn’t an especially cold day, but the sidewalks and front yards were mostly devoid of life. We passed a house with no windows or doors; a poster on the front of the house warned “This Building Is Being Watched.” You’d see these posters on forsaken structures throughout the city, their words splashed above a menacing pair of human eyes, presumably meant to scare off scrappers or arsonists, but having the odd effect of making entire rows of ravaged homes resemble scarred, angry faces glowering at passersby, as if the potential home invader were Being Watched by the buildings themselves.

  We eventually came to the edge of a cleared space. This was unlike the other fields we had been driving through, in that there weren’t stray houses dotting the renatured yards—here, for a dozen or more blocks, absolutely everything was gone. Corine turned down the only street not barred with cement barricades. Strewn with detritus, at points nearly impassable, the block made me think of Humvee footage from the early days of the invasion of Baghdad. We maneuvered around shredded tires, jagged stacks of roofing tile, torn panels of Sheetrock, neat little mounds of broken glass, busted pallets, tangles of tree branches, unspooled cassette tapes, VHS tapes still in the box, a broken television, an empty purse, a pair of blue jeans. You could no longer see the sidewalks, the grass had grown so tall. There were one or two stop signs left, and a light post so stripped to the frame a person from a part of the world without light posts would have been hard pressed to discern its purpose. A cat padded out from between two piles of garbage and stared at us calmly before bounding back into the weeds. The one building still standing was an old school, Jane Cooper Elementary. Workers had begun to demolish it, but the job had been halted for months, so only part of the back wall had been torn off. There were no earthmovers or bulldozers in sight.

  The street ended at a fence. Beyond it, we could make out the distant white walls of a factory, still in business. Corine parked the car between a pair of giant earth mounds—the taller of the two rose at least twenty-five feet—and we got out. Nodding, Corine said, “We need to go up there,” and started moving toward the taller of the mounds. Soon I was following her along a sort of goatherd’s path roughed out by previous visitors, which, after dipping into a little valley, eventually climbed a much steeper grade, forcing us to clutch handfuls of grass to prevent ourselves from toppling backwards.

  When we reached the top, though, we had a panoramic view of the Zone. Corine said the mound we were standing on had been formed when the city had bought and plowed over the old neighborhood in hopes of transforming the area into a suburban-style industrial park. But the factory had been the only tenant to move in, and the rest of the cleared lots had been overtaken by grass the color of hay. There were also wildflowers, and those spiny nettle weeds that cling to your socks like Velcro, and scattered bushes and midget trees whose leaves had already gone amber. From up here, it was difficult to believe we were minutes from the downtown of a major American city. The homes in the distance, just outside the Zone, looked like farmhouses.

  I later learned that the total size of the Zone was 189 acres. Its official name, the I-94 Industrial Project, hinted at the big plans once held for the place, a federally designated tax-free “Renaissance zone.” Looking to convert the already largely barren neighborhood into a more development-friendly area, the city had spent $19 million buying up some two hundred properties and plowing them under. Over the course of ten years, beginning in 1999, only one new tenant (Exel Logistics, the white factory) had moved in. Now, with soaring vacancy rates in the city, there was no demand for industrial space, and work on the Zone had come to a halt.

  An article in Crain’s Detroit Business estimated that 130 private parcels remained scattered across the site, making it impossible for the city to market larger parcels of land to developers, barring eminent domain. Beyond that, a prominent local realtor noted in the article, industrial vacancy rates had risen so precipitously that even if developers were given the land for free, it wouldn’t make economic sense to embark upon any new construction. Conrad Mallet Jr. of Detroit’s Economic Development Corporation, the body that initially spearheaded the project, told Crain’s, “Let’s call a 4-H club and say, ‘Plant some corn.’ There is no one coming to an I-94 industrial park.”

  As Corine and I climbed back down to her car, the clouds hung low, shifting their weight at a sluggard’s pace and doing funny things with the light. It was getting ready to storm. We drove over to Jane Cooper Elementary to look around and just then the sky opened up, so we ran inside to take cover. The part of the school that had not been demolished was still largely intact. The hallways, emptied, felt like tunnels, and despite the middle-school-yellow paint job, now faded and dusty with plaster, I thought of the noirishly lit chase scene in the sewers at the end of The Third Man. A fluttering noise came from one of the classrooms. Corine poked her head inside. There was a math book lying open on the floor, and when the wind gusted into the room—the back wall of the classroom was completely missing—it made the pages flap like the wings of a bird.

  Other signs of the school’s past life hung on, all through the building. We saw shattered trophy cases, and piles of textbooks still neatly stacked on shelves, and another book on the floor, titled Critical Thinking That Empowers Us to Choose Nonviolent Life Skills, and a flooded gym, the climbing rope still hanging from the ceiling, only now over water, which captured ghostly reflections of the denuded basketball hoops, “like a meditation pool,” Corine said, tossing in a pebble.

  By the time we made it back outside, not only had the rain passed completely but the sun had reemerged, astonishingly bright after the storm. We had exited from the back end of the school, where the demolition had begun. What had once been the rear of Cooper Elementary was now piled into an enormous heap of brick and rubble. From here, we could stare back into the school’s rooms as if it were a doll’s house opened in cross section. Suddenly it felt quite warm in the sunlight. In the rubble, I saw a giant bucket of Elmer’s Sno-Drift Paste, empty. “Man, in spring?” Corine said. “It’s crazy what starts blooming.” She had thought of making a sound recording of the birds and insects. “Even today,” she said, “just listen.” Corine cocked her head and we took in the shrill, chirrupy hum all around us.

  * * *

  While all that vacant land failed to make Detroit attractive to developers, it did further the city’s reputation as the nation’s premier urban laboratory. Politicians from other cities began weighing in: Dan Kildee, a county treasurer from Flint, with a push for “land banks” that would amass, bundle, and ultimately redevelop delinquent properties; New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, with the suggestion that Detroit swell its population ranks with immigrants. A local nonprofit had a similar idea to Bloomberg’s, only with college-educated young people, launching a plan called “15x15” meant to lure 15,000 new residents under the age of 35 to Detroit by 2015. The American Institute of Architects proposed clusters of dense “urban villages” surrounded by green space. In a more radical vein, Lansing public policy consultant Craig Ruff called for “repurposing” the city as “the world’s greatest bio-urban hub,” with bicycle paths instead of highways, g
reen space where factories once loomed, and locally grown food and handcrafted goods replacing anything you could buy at Walmart. Other farm-related proposals involved a winery on Belle Isle. The prize for most symbolically problematic solution must be awarded to Jai-Lee Dearing, a City Council candidate I’d gone to high school with (though we hadn’t known each other at the time) who suggested bundling a bunch of the plots and selling them to black-owned cemeteries.

  All these ideas should have fueled the ambitious Detroit Works Project. But unaccountably, by the fall of 2010, the Bing administration’s slow rollout of the plan was proving an unmitigated fiasco. The initial public meetings drew spillover crowds, which the administration admitted to being unprepared for, and the city officials present adamantly refused to provide any specifics of the plan, the mayor’s PR team having apparently decided to adopt a Denny’s suggestion box strategy—they would pretend to listen. Video stations where Detroiters could record their thoughts on the future of the city were set up throughout the venues, though the suspension of disbelief required to think Bing and company might actually weigh the opinions of a retired autoworker with a high school education alongside those of a team of urban planners from Harvard struck many as ludicrous, if not vaguely insulting.

  At the first of the rightsizing meetings, held at a Baptist megachurch on the city’s far west side, Bing himself showed up late, creeping into one of the confusing “break-out sessions” where citizens were supposed to be giving their feedback. “I didn’t come here to speak,” Bing said, sidling up to the podium. “I came to listen. We have some ideas, but I don’t want to force them on the community. I’ve got to go to other rooms, but I want to make sure you speak out.”

  Beside Bing, the moderators had arranged several easels holding variously shaded maps of the city that were far too small to read and a stack of oversized cue cards listing a series of condescending questions concerning what the future Detroit might look like. These included:

  What will we be driving?

  Where and how will we be shopping?

  Will we live in bigger or smaller houses?

  What will schools look like?

  How and where will we be spending our free time?

  Another cue card read: “Detroit’s neighborhoods are clean, safe, and walkable.” One of the hapless moderators quickly clarified, “This is what the city should look like by 2030.”

  A woman shouted, “Who’s checking that there’s gonna be a city in twenty years?”

  After the first meeting’s lambasting in the local media, certain tweaks were made. At the follow-up, held at the Serbian National Hall, Bing made a formal address to the crowd. Though falling short of pounding the podium with his fist, he attempted to work up a folksier, man-of-the-people rapport with the audience, ending with a practiced Bush 41-style applause line: “Not gonna happen on my watch!” As Bing spoke, his face was projected on a giant screen behind him; over his left shoulder, the right hand of the sign-language interpreter occasionally loomed into the frame, looking like a disembodied ghost hand readying to give the mayor a judo chop or vicious throttling if he said the wrong thing. Eventually, someone tightened up the camera shot to cut it out.

  The speech was so boring I began to pay special attention to Bing’s body language, which was how I noticed, every so often, the mayor’s habit of drawing one of his long fingers gently across his forehead, just above his eyebrow, as if he were smoothing a stray hair. I realized this must be Bing’s “tell,” though I couldn’t single out, based on this speech alone, which portion was the bluff.

  It later emerged that relations between Mayor Bing and Rip Rapson, the head of the Kresge Foundation, which had been funding much of the initiative, including Toni Griffin’s entire salary, had soured. Griffin, an outsider who’d tried to import a team of consultants, had never been trusted by many in the city. Nor had Rapson, a white guy from suburban Troy, Michigan, who talked about a “suite of coordinated investments” that could foster a green economy, who referred to vacant land as “a canvas of economic imagination” and envisioned what he called “neighborhoods of choice.” The Bing administration became nervous, both about the power Rapson hoped to exercise and on the simple level of public relations, and so despite the Kresge Foundation’s largesse, the city tried to freeze out Griffin and declined to include Kresge officials in the announcement of the federally funded light rail project. Rapson, in turn, began to threaten cutting funding.

  After months of delay, Bing finally announced the lame opening phase of the plan, in which neighborhoods eventually would be ranked one of three ways—steady, transitional, or distressed—and be allocated services accordingly, the idea being to shore up the first two types of areas and persuade residents to move out of the last ones. The administration also announced an initial three-neighborhood “demonstration area” in which such service changes would be implemented. Stable neighborhoods would receive the bulk of $9.5 million of federal money designated for home rehab and development, along with increased code enforcement—trash pickup, mowing of vacant lots, the lighting of streetlamps—while the focus in distressed areas would be on demolition of vacant homes.

  Still, it all felt vague. A private effort by deep-pocketed Marathon Petroleum to move five hundred families out of the southwest Detroit neighborhood where the company wanted to expand its oil refinery came with a price tag of $40,000 per household; Robin Boyle, a Detroit urban studies professor, did the math and figured moving only 5 percent of existing Detroit households, at the same cost as Marathon, would result in a bill of $600 million.

  And what about the rest of the city?

  * * *

  Of course, “rightsizing” did not necessarily have to mean “shrinking.” As the debate over Detroit Works festered, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a lifelong Detroiter who’d held a prominent position in the administration of former mayor Dennis Archer. We were hanging out in a bar downtown, and possibly several drinks into the evening, when our talk turned to Bing’s initiative.

  “Man, to me?” the political operative scoffed. “That’s hustling backwards. It betrays who we are.” When I wondered what the alternative might be, he said, “We should be doing the opposite of rightsizing. How did Philly grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. How did LA grow? Grabbed up the suburbs. Think about it: Detroit is fucking older than the country. This place was founded with frontier spirit. And now we’re here in 2010, a bunch of wusses.”

  In fact, my friend’s riff was a favorite thought experiment of a certain subset of Detroit-area urbanophiles. Sometimes they reference David Rusk, the former Albuquerque mayor whose book Cities Without Suburbs makes the case for the economic vibrancy of “elastic” cities (like Houston, Austin, Seattle, and Nashville) whose central hubs have the capability to annex or otherwise regionalize their surrounding suburbs into a unified metropolitan area.

  In Detroit, the chances of something like this ever happening were slim—okay, nonexistent—but daydreaming about the real benefits of such a move could be a tantalizing exercise. The takeaway from the census stories revolved around Detroit plummeting to nineteenth place on the U.S. city-size list, behind Austin, Jacksonville, and Columbus. (Columbus!) But the Detroit metropolitan area, which I’ll define for these purposes as Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, still retained a population of nearly 4 million. If our territorial-expansion fantasia could be magically enacted with even two-thirds of this figure, Greater Detroitopolis would easily vault past Chicago, with its measly 2.5 million residents, to be the third-largest city in the United States, behind New York and Los Angeles. This would translate into more state and national clout (and allocated funds, many of which are based on population) and eliminate the need for much of the wasteful duplicate spending inherent in maintaining multiple separate municipalities, especially at a time when many of these suburban communities, just as broke as Detroit, have been announcing their own cutbacks of nonessential services. (Along with services that strike many as fairly essen
tial: in February 2011, the west side suburb of Allen Park announced plans to eliminate its entire fire department.) When Indianapolis enacted a similar “Unigov” city-suburbs merger in the late sixties (under Republican mayor Dick Lugar), the region enjoyed economic growth (and the benefits of economy of scale), AAA municipal bond ratings, and a broader, more stable tax base.

  Rusk also convincingly argues that elastic cities are less segregated and have fewer of the problems associated with concentrated areas of poverty. And though sprawl wouldn’t necessarily be reined in, the region could finally adopt a sensible transportation policy. (The planned light rail project will nonsensically stop at 8 Mile Road, the suburban border.)

  Beyond all of that, consider the branding implications. Unlike the New Detroit of RoboCop infamy, this New Detroit would no longer find itself sitting near the top of those annual “World’s Most Dangerous Cities” lists, thanks to the juking a trebled population would do to the existing crime stats; similar dilution would occur with statistics involving vacant property, unemployment, and packs of wild dogs. Detroit would become, on paper, a city like any other, with scary neighborhoods and safe ones, and much harder to caricature.

  There are a number of reasons why this will never, ever happen. For one thing, Michigan has laws making such annexation extremely difficult. And even if the laws could be changed, long-nurtured, largely racial city-suburb resentments would never allow for such bedfellowing. White suburban residents would reel from the possibility of merging with a city so long demonized as a terrifying war zone; the black leadership in Detroit, meanwhile, would surely be loath to see its own political power subsumed within a majority-white supercity. Even the idea of a regional sales tax, which could help provide money for costly undertakings like Detroit Works, remains a nonstarter in the Detroit area. “Why should I pay for the city’s mistakes?” noxious Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson asked the website Remapping Debate. “Tax base sharing is anathema to me.”