now with fewer updates

* Detroit census

Posted on March 30th, 2011 by admin. Filed under Uncategorized.

Here’s a slightly livelier version of an essay I wrote about Detroit’s census numbers for The Atlantic website.

(The Atlantic version can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/dont-shrink-detroit-super-size-it/73165/)

As with much of the bad news coming out of Detroit, the national media trumpeted last week’s abysmal census reveal with a peculiar mixture of solemn condolence and barely concealed delight. The delight part comes into play whenever something insane happens in Detroit. It’s not exactly Schadenfreude, but more about how, on a basic level of storytelling, there’s just something inherently pleasing in a narrative so consistently fulfilled. These are the sorts of stories people want to read about when they read about Detroit.

The census count, which found the city’s population had plummeted a staggering twenty-five percent over the past ten years - down to a pre-Model T low of 713,000 - was part of an especially beloved subset of the Detroit-as-failed-state storyline, the crazy statistic. Did you know the city possesses enough vacant land to hold the entire city of San Francisco? That the Pontiac Silverdome sold for the price of a modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan? That there are 50,000 stray dogs roaming the streets? The census story raced around the Internet, made the front page of the Times and lots of other papers. Local politicians responded quickly, most essentially demanding a recount; City Council president Charles Pugh insisted (on his Facebook page) that the count was “way low” and told a newspaper that one of the reasons for this had to do with the large number of Detroit residents who happened to be doing prison time in other cities. I’m not a public relations expert, but this struck me as an ill-advised line of argument. Many of the news stories also referenced Detroit mayor Dave Bing’s euphemistic “right-sizing” plan to shrink the city - a plan still quite vague in its outlines, but one which (correctly) hopes to incentivize citizens living on isolated urban prairies to move to denser, more easily serviced neighborhoods.

When the census news broke, though, I remembered a conversation I’d had about a year earlier with a friend who’d held a prominent position in the administration of former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer. We were hanging out in a bar in downtown Detroit, and possibly several drinks into the evening, when our talk turned to the right-sizing initiative. “Man, to me?” my friend 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 right-sizing. 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. [The city was established in 1701 as French trading post.] This place was founded with frontier spirit. And now we’re here in 2010, a bunch of wusses.”

In fact, I’d come to learn, my friend’s riff is a favorite thought experiment of a certain subset of Detroit-area urbanophiles. Sometimes they will 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 are, at best, slim - but daydreaming about the real benefits of such a move can be a tantalizing exercise. The takeaway from the census stories revolved around Detroit plummeting to 19^th place on the U.S. city-size list, behind Austin, Jacksonville and Columbus. (Columbus!) But the Detroit metropolitan area, which we’ll define, for these purposes, as Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, still retains a population of nearly four million. If our territorial-expansion fantasia could have been magically enacted with even two-thirds of this figure, the Greater Detroitopolis would have easily vaulted past Chicago, with its measly two-and-a-half million residents, to be the third-largest city in the U.S., 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 dozens of tiny 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 essential: in February, the westside 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 experienced economic growth (and the benefits of economy of scale), AAA municipal bond-ratings and a broader, more stable tax base. The same could happen in metropolitan Detroit, which sorely needs to attract young people and entrepreneurs in order to fill the void left by the region’s dwindling manufacturing base. Rusk also convincingly argues elastic cities are less segregated and have fewer of the problems associated with concentrated areas of poverty. And though sprawl wouldn’t necessarily be reigned in, the region could finally adopt a sensible transportation policy: at the moment, suburban Detroit maintains its own bus system, separate from the city’s, and a planned $150 million light rail project, slated to run from downtown Detroit up the main thoroughfare of Woodward Avenue, 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, our 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 more difficult to caricature.

Unfortunately, there is a greater likelihood of Ford announcing, tomorrow, that the company has been pouring all of its F-150 profits into a top-secret program to develop a zero carbon flying car, which will be ready for market by the first quarter of 2012, than for any of the above to happen anytime soon. 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 freak out at the possibility of merging with a city so long demonized as a terrifying warzone; the black leadership in Detroit, meanwhile, would surely be loathe to see its own political power subsumed within a majority-white supercity. Even Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s benign proposal to ease the ability of state counties to merge into loose metropolitan authorities has been a non-starter in the Detroit area. “I don’t think anyone would support it,” Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano told the Detroit News.

Oh well. Back in the real world, at least work on the right-sizing initiative is moving forward - if not exactly apace. Over the weekend, a Bing administration official acknowledged the part of the project assessing the viability of various neighborhoods had gone offline for the past thirty days. Funding for the technical team in charge of collecting the data had temporarily run out.

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