The Other Detroit

Wunderkammer Magazine recently commissioned me to write a piece on Detroit for their Politics and Society section. I took the opportunity to write about a side of the city that gets significantly less attention in the popular media—the “other” Detroit, if you will. It ended up being a bit too long to post here in its entirety, but it’s worth a read nonetheless.

An excerpt:

I take Interstate 96 eastbound from Ann Arbor. It’s the first warm day of 2008, and the combination of a bright sun and light breeze makes for a beautiful spring afternoon. After 35 miles of Midwestern nothing, I reach the city limits of Detroit. Small, decrepit housing lines the edges of the Southfield Freeway as I approach the exit for North Rosedale, a neighborhood located on the northwest side of the city. As I pull into the local Community House and park—the only privately owned park in the city—the smell of freshly cut grass is almost intrusive. A youth softball game is underway, and parents lounge in folding chairs. Along the edges of the park, residents—predominantly African-Americans—walk their dogs by large, single-family English Tudors. Almost without exception, each two-story house on each tree-lined street adorns a perfectly manicured lawn and a large wooden front door. It’s a middle-class oasis. A distinctly suburban feel, in fact. But it’s not the suburbs. It’s Detroit.

[...]

North Rosedale Park is the anti-slum. A middle-class majority remained after racial turnover, separating North Rosedale from countless other urban neighborhoods throughout the country. Homes are large, and social cohesion throughout the neighborhood is strong. Residents are tremendously proud of their neighborhood, and perhaps more importantly, committed to the city they call home.

[...]

No story or investigative report has captured this side of Detroit, the North Rosedale side. It’s not the bombed out train station, nor is it the urban prairie. It’s not the empty factory, nor is it the large housing project. It’s not the homeless man pushing his cart down a desolate downtown, nor is it the young woman waiting in line for a welfare check.

No, it’s the daily struggle of the urban middle class, the plight of a forgotten population. It’s the neighborhood where Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm lived briefly before ultimately moving to the suburbs. It’s half a mile from where Detroit historian Thomas Sugrue grew up, a neighborhood his parents hoped to one day “be wealthy enough” to call home. It’s the tree-lined streets, the well-maintained community park. It’s the colorful gardens and golden retrievers. It’s the uneasy, yet unwavering middle class in an otherwise unsettling and unsure urban abyss.

It’s the other Detroit.

Special thanks to my editor, Dara Lind, for her encouraging comments and thoughtful critiques.

The Unintentional Effects of Seemingly Mundane Public Policy

Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, and Ryan Avent recently engaged in a fascinating back and forth discussion regarding the role of highways in the development of contemporary American suburbs.

The precise causality—did highway construction cause suburbanization?—is, of course, debatable. But the discussion points to a larger connection between metropolitan development, inequality, and seemingly mundane, unrelated public policy.

Interstate highway construction owes its development to Cold War paranoia and military mobilization. With the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government devised a transportation plan that would facilitate easy travel for military equipment and soldiers. An extensive highway system, coupled with the affordable production of automobiles and within the context of a consumer-driven economic culture, precipitated suburban housing development.

Of course, that doesn’t exactly explain the racialization of suburban residential patterns. Indeed, it was purposive, intentional, deliberate policies—particularly red-lining and other discriminatory lending policies facilitated by the Federal Housing Authority and officially sanctioned by the federal government—that laid the groundwork for a metropolitan environment initially typified by “chocolate cities, vanilla suburbs.” Within the context of deindustrialization, decentralization, and other impersonal (read: non-deliberately racial) changes in the urban economy, the basis for metropolitan inequality is clear.

That’s not to discount the role of overt racism—you know, like block-busting, racial steering by real estate agents, violent defense of urban and suburban neighborhoods against black “invasion,” and so on—in the creation of racially homogenous suburban neighborhoods. These processes have been well documented by many talented historians. Not to mention racially-charged, failed political struggles over issues like busing and policing that precipitated white flight. And labor market struggles, played out in employment practices and labor union policies. But racism alone can’t explain metropolitan development and residential patterns. No, racism and racial animus shape, and are in turn shaped by, public policy.

Highways made residential development both feasible and desirable in the outer metropolitan fringes, as a suburban populace could easily commute to employment opportunities located within the urban core. It doesn’t exactly explain why individuals and business eventually fled from the inner city (we can thank zoning and tax subsidies for that), but it does illuminate the structure that made such residential patterns possible. It created social and physical distance from which many suburban homeowners could leverage political power, acquire economic resources, and cement inequality.

A policy as simple as highway construction—intended to make military mobility across the nation easier—can nevertheless have dramatic, unintended consequences. Mundane policy may not directly cause, by itself, resulting patterns of disparity; most social phenomena are, after all, multi-causal. Still, it can lay the groundwork—the structure—from which metropolitan inequality materializes.

Direct cause, in this context, matters less than unintentional effect.

Our New Corporate Neighbor Revisited

(Picture is of construction site for new complex to house Costco in East Harlem.)

About a month back, I wrote on Costco’s plans to open up a new store in Harlem. Of course, there was a catch: The store refused to take food stamps, even though nearly 30,000 East Harlem residents receive such assistance. A corporate spokesperson cited the cost of new technology—you know, the same technology that the corner bodegas have installed without a hitch. The same technology that the state provides free of charge.

Unfortunately, I stopped following this case. Fortunately, some of my readers didn’t. It turns out that Costco is beginning to fold under local political pressure, unfavorable media attention, and, well, the recession. Good. In two New York City neighborhoods—Astoria, Queens and Sunset Park, Brooklyn—Costco will being accepting food stamps on a trial basis. If the transition runs smoothly, the Harlem store will adopt the new corporate policy.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that a Costco membership remains $50/year. It goes without saying that this price tag might be a bit steep for some food stamp recipients. That said, I definitely know folks that have been on welfare that can very easily swing 50 bucks a year. With the right information, I really think a substantial amount of Harlem residents will benefit from Costco’s services. Either way, the material effect of Costco in Harlem—in the form of employment opportunities and/or services—has yet to be determined.

Still, this is a positive development, if only symbolic. As Tony has written about a couple of times here at Social Science Lite, symbolic gestures are important. They shouldn’t be treated as the end to inequality, but they’re certainly a start.

Nationwide Urban “Shrinkage” and the Pittsburgh Paradox

This may be one of the few times that Flint, Michigan provides a model for U.S. domestic policy. Unfortunately, it’s kind of a dubious model. According to the UK Telegraph, the Obama administration plans to replicate Flint’s “urban shrinkage” concept throughout the nation, demolishing vacant homes and replacing them with open green space.

I wrote about the general premise of urban shrinkage a few weeks ago. The basic idea is that neighborhood blight (in the form of vacant homes) spreads like an infectious disease. It’s kind of like a tipping point; after a few houses become vacant and deteriorate, the rest of the block declines like a series of dominoes. Of course, there isn’t a whole lot of empirical evidence on exactly how the process works, but it’s pretty intuitive. Continued population decline, particularly in the Rust Belt, is only making this pattern more common. As a result, many civic leaders are shrinking urban landmass in order to offset dramatic population decline and increasing blight.

Genesee County in Michigan—containing the city of Flint—has established the Genesee County Land Bank Authority (GCLBA) to oversee the shrinking of Flint and other urban areas. The “land bank” approach targets areas comprised solely of vacant homes and other empty lots. The GCLBA then goes through a lengthy process of acquisition that hands ownership of foreclosed properties over to the land bank. The homes are demolished, and the resulting empty lots are “redeveloped, handed to neighbors, or returned to nature,” according to the head of the GCLBA. The dominant trend, however, is to return the vacant areas into undeveloped land and thus reduce the size of the city’s populated landmass.

Admittedly, I was a little flippant when I initially wrote about this issue (though, when am I not just a touch irreverent?). I’ve thought about it more, and I’m willing to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt—for now, at least. The plans for acquisition and redevelopment are so vague that it would be premature to levy any judgments. Part of me wants to see the rehabilitation and revitalization of existing homes and neighborhoods, but another part of me recognizes the utility of starting over. The real debates will occur over what to do with the newly empty green spaces. If—and only if—we can specify a clear vision of redevelopment, I might be able to get on board with urban shrinkage. If the plan follows a community-based approach, similar to the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s successful bid for eminent domain here in Boston in the 1990s, I may support the policy.

Still, I have some reservations. The Telegraph reported that the Obama administration has their eyes on shrinking 15 urban centers, including Syracuse, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. The inclusion of Pittsburgh is slightly troubling. It’s just a little paradoxical to include a city in this economic recovery plan that supposedly has one of the strongest performing metropolitan economies (according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution). Pittsburgh has certainly suffered incredible population decline; in 1950, Pittsburgh was ranked number 12 among U.S. cities in total population, but plummeted to number 52 by the 2000 Census. That said, you'd think that one of the strongest metropolitan economies would be able to redevelop existing land on their own.

The “Pittsburgh Paradox,” so to speak, points to my underlying uneasiness with urban shrinkage. How can Pittsburgh—the supposed model for Rust Belt resurgence—require urban shrinkage? Either the Brooking Institution’s measurement of economic vitality is faulty, or urban shrinkage is a haphazard band-aid for urban decline. If shrinkage is part of our economic recovery plan, why does one of our nations strongest metropolitan economies need the help? Something’s not right here. I'm just a little weary of an economic recovery policy applied applied indiscriminately in cities with both weak and strong performing economies. If Pittsburgh requires urban shrinkage, other cities must require a lot more.

I expressed optimism yesterday in my discussion of the interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities—a new federal initiative that coordinates economic, transportation, housing, and environmental policies in a single, unified effort. Yet “urban shrinkage” looks like the regressive counterpart to the Partnership’s progressive goals and proposals. Shrinking landmass without a clear plan for redevelopment just seems like a hasty, reactionary response to a much larger problem. We don’t build stronger communities by trimming the fat and pretending like it never existed. No, we create economically sustainable communities and metropolitan regions with innovative policy that builds urban neighborhoods. Demolition (read: shrinkage) can be a start on the path to economic recovery, but that can’t be where we stop.

Metropolitan policy isn’t a zero-sum game; we don’t need to destroy some neighborhoods just to preserve others.

France's Urban Utopia

For those that don’t really follow urban spatial arrangements the same way I do, you might not know that metropolitan Europe has an entirely different spatial pattern than metropolitan America. In the United States, most suburban development occurred as a result of middle-class exodus from central cities. The general pattern in Europe is almost exactly the opposite; the poor live in the ‘burbs, while the central city typically houses the bourgeois class. Paris, for example, is like the anti-Detroit: Imagine Bloomfield Hills as a sprawling slum, and downtown Detroit as home to Michigan’s most wealthy.

In Europe, like America, poverty tends to be isolated from areas of employment, role models of behavior, social services, and other rudimentary, daily needs. This social and physical isolation may change in Paris in the next few years, however. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, has recently employed the services of an international team of urban planners and architects in the hopes of fundamentally changing metropolitan Paris. There are plenty of ideas being thrown around, most captured in this excellent New York Times piece. The most genius idea being discussed, however, involves a metropolitan transit system connecting the city of Paris to its poor suburbs.

I recently wrote about the failures of the American public transit system, far too often focusing on levels of density than on the needs of poor folks without access to other means of transportation. I mean, this whole idea that our transportation system needs to be environmentally sound is great, but we can’t forget why we have public transportation: to transport the public. More importantly, a focus on alleviating density ignores the great social need for sound transit in isolated urban and suburban communities with already low levels of traffic. Our transit system should respond to the needs of our most marginalized citizens.

The plan in Paris takes both of these considerations into account. With one carefully planned transit system, Paris’s poor suburbs could become “greener” and less isolated:

Isolated neighborhoods, which now have little green space, would be intimately woven into the city’s fabric. And the parks would link to a vast new greenbelt defining the city’s edge.

In a phrase, this is urban policy at its finest. Sarkozy and his architects are cognizant of the social, ecological and environmental concerns of metropolitan Paris—and they’re actually going to respond to these needs. Novel idea, I know. If Sarkozy is able to implement his plan, it will be the most ambitious reinvention of an urban metropolis in our generation—an innovative plan that may serve as a model for re-envisioning urban America.

Urban..."Shrinkage?"

The aptly titled website “100 Abandoned Houses” accurately assesses one of Detroit’s most pressing problems. The current foreclosure crisis has exacerbated a preexisting, citywide concern, and housing vacancies are rampant. With painfully vivid photos, “100 Abandoned Houses” illustrates the dramatic effect this crisis has had on Detroit’s housing stock.

A similar scenario is occurring across the country. But Michigan’s 12.6% unemployment rate certainly isn’t doing the Great Lakes State any favors. I’ve been upfront with my feelings about Detroit, so it should come as no surprise that I find these developments deeply depressing.

This housing problem in Michigan has spawned two very different reactions. The first follows a resident-led, community empowerment approach. The Detroit Free Press recently profiled a handful of Detroit residents that have bought foreclosed homes in their own neighborhoods. These individuals, including North Rosedale Park resident Marsha Bruhn, poured tens of thousands of dollars into these homes, fixing them up and flipping them for a modest profit. These residents care about their communities, and are doing their best to help in the face of daunting challenges.

The second approach is—I kid you not—referred to as urban “shrinkage.” Yes, “shrinkage.” I couldn’t make this up even if I tried. This urban policy of “planned shrinkage” has been around for a while, but has only recently gained widespread support. Essentially, the policy wipes out entire city blocks and replaces homes with green space. The city is able to counter decline by “shrinking” the city’s land mass. Decrepit housing blighting your city? Just bulldoze them and alter your municipal borders!

Flint, Michigan has heeded the call for shrinkage, and city officials are actively pursuing the policy to resist the recession’s onslaught. The New York Times ran a piece on their efforts a few weeks ago, quoting government officials who chose the policy as “a last resort.” A drastic measure was in order, they claimed. Tough decisions lie ahead, they lamented. Which neighborhoods will be “shrunk,” and which will remain? “It will be a delicate process to decide which to favor,” one city official acknowledged. Delicate…well, that’s one way to put it.

Flint’s proposed urban policy sounds a lot like Harvard economist Edward Glaeser’s disposition to urban decline. Glaeser suggests that economic vitality in urban neighborhoods requires housing that will continuously decay and be rebuilt. Detroit, by contrast, contains durable housing—housing that is built to last for decades. Durable housing decays much slower, and as such, impedes a city from the natural process of growth and rebuilding. If this argument sounds confusing, well, it’s because it is: Glaeser claims that urban vitality requires continuous, and cyclical decay. Sounds a bit contradictory to me. And it also seems to ignore that there are actual people living in these houses. You know, actual people that benefit from a stable—not fluid—housing market.

I’m no housing economist—which is part of the reason why I recognize the, shall we say, human aspect of housing development. And this is not exactly one of Glaeser’s strong points. His infamous article, “Urban Decline and Durable Housing,” originally carried the subtitle “Why Does Anyone Still Live in Detroit?” This title is worse than insensitive. It’s more than just a little offensive. This kind of logic—the same logic of “shrinkage”—effectively dismisses generations of history and humanity that defines the very pulse of urban centers. Not to mention the pressing questions: Which neighborhoods will be demolished, and who will make these decisions?

This type of urban “development” is not without historical precedence. Detroit once had a vibrant Black Belt, complete with locally owned shops and businesses. When the federal government needed to demolish a few neighborhoods to make way for an interstate highway, guess which neighborhoods were bulldozed? Well, it was…uh…a delicate process to decide which neighborhoods would stay, and which would cease to exist. Sure, marginalized neighborhoods with the weakest political power were quickly bulldozed, but that doesn’t mean the process wasn’t handled with care.

With 60,000 housing vacancies in Detroit alone, we can’t afford to simply bulldoze away decline, attempting to forget it was ever there in the first place. For Michigan, as well as the rest of the country, the question is this: Do we want to empower and revitalize our urban neighborhoods, or do we want to shrink and decimate them?

Cultural Alienation and Gentrification in San Francisco

(Administrator's Note: This piece was written by guest blogger Steven Brown, an incoming graduate student in Harvard's department of sociology. He can be reached at ksbrown2@gmail.com)

San Francisco is currently engaging in an effort to keep black folks from leaving in droves. But apparently, this is now a new trend. According to this article published last Wednesday on TheRoot.com, this has been happening for quite some time.

The basic argument is two-fold. First, the author describes a common story of gentrification and under-resourced black folk getting pushed out by eminent domain, rising home prices, and shiny new luxury high rise condos. Secondly, and more interestingly, the author briefly mentions a sense of cultural alienation that black San Franciscans may feel.

Gentrification is happening, but that argument seems a bit too tidy. Just look at Philadelphia, New York, and especially Chicago where gentrification has displaced minorities on a very large scale for decades. Black people may be moving out, but they still represent significant percentages of those cities and most other major cities in the U.S. Using census data, a comparison between Manhattan and San Francisco highlights a few interesting points. Both are cities by the water of similar physical size and similar costs of living. Manhattan’s median home value is over twice San Francisco’s, and the cost of rental property for both places is about same, relative to cost of living. And the percentage of black people living in Manhattan remains steady, despite the fact that the percent of black people in poverty there is a lot higher than in San Fran (31% vs. 23%).

So why would Manhattan retain so many black folks even though may be financially just as hard, if not tougher to live there? Cultural and historical relevance. Harlem USA is right there at the northern tip of Manhattan, and Harlem will forever be associated with black cultural and political relevancy. And it's not just Harlem; there’s the Southside in Chicago and West Philadelphia (born and raised, on the playground is where…no?...okay, nevermind). To be clear, the numbers of black folks in all these places are steadily declining, but that cultural identity – one that is distinctly black – still strongly affects how we continue to think of these places.

Not to say San Francisco doesn’t have a black cultural center, but it’s not nearly as pronounced as in other places. This is complicated by the Bay Area’s history as a place where tolerance is more broadly defined, and not just so black and white (literally and figuratively speaking). And I imagine it would to difficult to establish such a strong presence when competing for resources, space, and attention with Latinos, the LGBT community, and Asians (Asians make up 31% of San Francisco’s population).

It can be lonely as one face in the midst of the crowd. And in such a small space, with a number of cultural and ethnic groups vying to establish their own thriving community, some groups will fail to be as strong as others, making the lonely face even lonlier. This isolation could be a pull factor exasperating the push factor of gentrification. Given the situation in San Fran, Oakland is looking pretty good nowadays.

Sports Stadiums and Urban Revitalization

Two coinciding events have put the city of Detroit, at least temporarily, back in the national spotlight: debates over the auto industry bailout and Michigan State University’s ascent to the Men’s College Basketball Championship Game, held at Detroit’s Ford Field. In the above clip from ESPN, a few former Michigan sports stars reflect on changes in the city and the impact of sports on civic pride.

The clip points to a very interesting relationship between sports and the economic vitality of a depressed city. There was some talk in the week leading up to the National Championship game about what an MSU win would mean for the spirit of Detroit, a city boasting a 12% unemployment rate leading up to the game. The implicit assumption is that the magical power of sports can uplift a city, inspiring poor urban dwellers to pick themselves up by their bootstraps as they find redemption, solace, and joy in their team’s victory.

This sports euphoria certainly has some merit. The scene at Shea Stadium in New York after 9/11 was an important moment that inspired a nation. More generally, the common love for a home team can cross racial, ethnic and class lines at precisely the times of greatest racial, ethnic, and class strife. However, the business of sports doesn’t exactly help the economic vitality of urban centers. In the clip, Detroit mayoral candidate and former Detroit Pistons star Dave Bing makes the astute observation that people rarely visit Detroit unless it’s for a sporting event. Such is the case for many cities facing dramatic economic decline--take Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Baltimore as just a few examples. The presence of a sports stadium does little to bring in sustained resources to these cities. Their spatial proximity to highways makes parking manageable and efficient, but it also makes fans’ stays brief. The fact that it’s easy to get to Comerica Park in Detroit also makes it easy to leave when the game’s over.

Some sports arenas, like The Palace at Auburn Hills where the Detroit Pistons play, aren’t even in the cities they represent. What about when a new corporate sponsor takes over the rights to house a sports team, what happens to the old stadium? We don’t even need to leave our example of Detroit to answer that question. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, two groups of urban planners spoke to my Urban and Community Studies course. They were discussing the fate of Detroit's Old Tiger Stadium, the now vacant stadium that became obsolete after the construction of Comerica Park. The first group of urban planners proposed a center for cultural activities and youth baseball leagues, while the second group wanted to use the space for high-end boutiques and shops. Each made a solid case for how the vacant sports stadium could aid in urban revitalization efforts. In the end, neither proposal fully came to fruition, as the city decided instead to demolish the entire site.

As much as one can argue that sports can lift the spirit of an economically depressed city, so too is their a strong argument that sports stadiums only add to the marginalization of America’s most needy cities.