What happens when the city as a whole isn't healthy? What happens when these pockets of blight spread, merge and take over an entire metropolitan area? This is what has happened in Detroit, Michigan. We've all heard the stories and read the articles for years. A city on the brink, trapped in the perfect storm of economic and industrial collapse. I've been captivated by it for the past few years, reading any article I could find. I found it fascinating how so many things could go wrong for a single city and more importantly, what their plan is to turn things around.
On a recent road trip we found ourselves tracing the roads of Michigan along Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Our trip back took us straight through Detroit and I insisted we stay overnight as I wanted to see first hand what was going on in this city. Ever since I've read the articles that detail their plan to shrink the city, leveling neighborhood after neighborhood I've had a real hard time even grasping the scale of it and even believing that this is really happening. The photos almost seem surreal and couldn't be happening in one of the largest cities in the United States.
It's all very real, and the photos you see don't give justice to the scale of it.
We pulled into Detroit around rush hour. That was the first sign of things. Their rush hour barely that. We entered downtown Detroit and had no problems, no delays, nada and simply found our exit after a series of interchanges. We stayed at the MotorCity Casino, fairly close to the city center and certainly in what I would consider downtown. I truly hope that the 'urban' casino that Cincinnati ends up with in no way reflects anything about this casino. It's nice, it's well managed, has well trained and friendly staff and was very clean, however it brings nothing to its surroundings. It's a self-contained city in itself and I don't see how this benefits or even interacts with the neighborhood that it is part of. This may become a blog post in itself.
The next day we planned on taking a drive to see if we could find some of these demolished neighborhoods. We turned out of the parking structure, went a block and were immediately in the middle of one. A single block from the casino is one of the endless series of neighborhoods that has been flattened to the ground. The city is doing this because the population is dwindling. There are entire neighborhoods where there may be only 1 person per block. With an entire neighborhood consisting of a handful of people, providing police, fire, sanitation become economically unrealistic. In a nutshell, the goal that Detroit laid out in March of 2010 is to shrink the footprint of the city. This means relocating people, demolishing entire neighborhoods and giving the city a fighting chance at survival.
The footprint of Detroit is so massive that you could fit San Francisco, Boston and Manhattan within its boundaries and still have room to spare, however as the 2000 Census Tracts show, the population density is half of what it was in the 50's. Even back in 2000 some area's had population densities near zero or in the single digits. Imagine what the 2010 census data will show. A study in 2008 by the University of Detroit Mercy estimated that 30%, or roughly 40 square miles, of Detroit was completely vacant or abandoned.
I would like to add that while the photo's, statistics and current reality of Detroit seems rather bleak, the story is far from over. They have some concrete plans for action, and while it may seem a bit late, if they can pull any of them off they could be setting Detroit up for a remarkable reinvention.
Interesting articles on Detroit
Detroit: The Death — and Possible Life — of a Great City
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1925796,00.html
Detroit Wants To Save Itself - By Shrinking
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/detroit-wants-to-save-its_n_490680.html
Acres of barren blocks offer chance to reinvent Detroit
Read more: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2008/12/23/acres-of-barren-blocks-offer-chance-to-reinvent-detroit/
4 comments:
Regular reader, but I must quible with your second to last paragraph... Detroit completed comparable projects - the monorail and the Renaissance center 30 years ago (Does anyone oppose the Banks, or do they just oppose how long it took?). Those projects haven't had much impact because Detroit had structural problems with it's economy which the entrenched political interests were unable to address - The city was a very bad environment for new businesses and the economy was completely dominated by the entrenched high-cost union labour car manufacturing oligopoly. With competition that was unsustainable. I think the lesson is that they needed a freer labour market and a more dynamic open economy. I'm not sure a bigger monorail would have made a difference.
Hey! Regular reader here, and I actually moved to a northern suburb of Detroit from Cincinnati a little less than 4 months ago. While I don't know THAT much about Detroit (I've always lived in Cincinnati), one of the reasons the number of people living in the city limits has gone down is the massive appeal of the surrounding suburbs, or "Metro Detroit area" (where I live). It's much of the same suburban flight story we hear over and over again, but because of it, I can say that parts of the Metro area are more of a draw than the city itself. That's kind of sad.
But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I live along what some call the Woodward Corridor: a bunch of small cities connected by US 1, or Woodward Avenue. Cities like Birmingham, Royal Oak and Ferndale are re-inventing the suburban-urban lifestyle in ways I NEVER saw in Cincinnati (and I grew up in the suburbs down there, near Kings Island). I would recommend checking out this video on the Woodward Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6-eAGjU6Is
Other than that, I love watching the re-invention of Detroit. We have nowhere else to go than up, right? In the meanwhile, here are a few more blogs you should keep an eye on for good news on Detroit:
Sweet Juniper: http://www.sweet-juniper.com/
Detroit Moxie: http://www.detroitmoxie.com/
Joe - I agree that Cincinnati and Detroit are quite different situations, both politically and economically. Union labor costs, outsourcing devastated areas that were heavy with automobile manufacturing, so obviously we can't directly compare Cincinnati to the likes of Detroit or Flint.
My issue in general though is that there's a cost associated with doing nothing. All too often people in Cincinnati rebel against anything associated with spending city or county funds and I think they fail to really consider the costs of inaction. OTR is a prime example of it, 30 years of a blind eye to what was happening here. Obviously some aren't happy with what IS happening here, but I think the momentum is overall more positive than negative.
houserlm - very good points. Detroit is a massive sprawl of suburbs once you leave the city center. It felt like it took over an hour to make our way downtown once we began to enter Detroit. With so many inner city issues it may be easier in a lot of cases to just start over outside the city. With them attempting to shrink the city core, I wonder what affects that will have on the suburbs? A buffer zone of farmland between the urban core and the suburbs? Could be a rather interesting setup.
Wow, this was so interesting! Thanks, for posting. From your description and pictures, downtown Detroit seems so post-apocalyptic.
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