Detroit: Urban Laboratory and New American Frontier
From Marco Channing’s blog, originally published via urbanophile.com
The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.
But as with Youngstown, one thing this massive failure has made possible is ability to come up with radical ideas for the city, and potentially to even implement some of them. Places like Flint and Youngstown might be attracting new ideas and moving forward, but it is big cities that inspire the big, audacious dreams. And that is Detroit. Its size, scale, and powerful brand image are attracting not just the region’s but the world’s attention. It may just be that some of the most important urban innovations in 21st century America end up coming not from Portland or New York, but places like Youngstown and, yes, Detroit.
Let’s refresh with this image showing the scale of the challenge in the city of Detroit proper:
This phenomenon is prompted someone to coin the term “urban prairie” to capture the idea of vast tracts of formerly urbanized land returning to nature. The folks at Detroit’s best discussion site, DetroitYES, posted this before and after of the St. Cyril neighborhood. Before:
After:
“..In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because of the hand of government weighs less heavily.
What’s more, the fact that government is so weak has provoked some amazing reactions from the people who live there. In Chicago, every day there is some protest at City Hall by a group from some area of the city demanding something. Not in Detroit. The people in Detroit know that they are on their own and if they want something done they have to do it themselves. Nobody from the city is coming to help them. And they’ve found some very creative ways to deal with the challenges the result. Consider this from the Dowie piece:
About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.
This might sound awful, and indeed it is. But it is also an inspiration and a testament to the human spirit and defiant self-reliance of the American people. I grew up in a poor rural area where, while hunting is primarily recreational, there are still many people supplementing their family diet with wild game. Many a freezer is full of deer meat, for example. And of course, rural residents have long gardened, freezing and canning the results to help get them through the winter. So this doesn’t sound quite so strange to me as it might to you. The fate of the urban poor and the rural poor are more similar than is often credited. And contrary to stereotypes the urban poor often display amazing grit and ingenuity, and perform amazing feats to sustain themselves, their families and communities.
As the focus on agriculture and even hunting show, in Detroit people are almost literally hearkening back to the formative days of the Midwest frontier, when pioneer settlers faced horrible conditions, tough odds, and often severe deprivation, but nevertheless built the foundation of the Midwest we know, and the culture that powered the industrial age. No doubt in the 19th century many of those sitting secure in their eastern citadels thought these homesteaders, hustlers, and fortune seekers crazy for leaving the comforts of civilization to head to places like Iowa and Chicago. But some saw the possibilities of what could be and heeded the call to “Go West, young man.” We’ve come full circle.”
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This is what happens when cities do not have large enough boundaries to expand on their own when need be.
What ends up happening is that the suburbs hem in the city, offer lower taxes which is easy to do because you have new infrastructure and lots of land available; people move out to the suburbs, because “new” is good while “old” is bad, new schools, young families and quick access via highways or straight access routes.
Contrast that to a city or inner city and it is the reverse. What replaces once thriving neighbourhoods is low income renters and of course crime. Add in a city that turns a blind eye to existing neighbourhoods while letting “developers” build away with low development fees (take the money and run syndrome and don’t worry about tomorrow) and the doughnut effect takes hold.
The city then doesn’t have money to attract new business, taxes need to go higher to pay for ever increasing police budgets, infrastructure repair which then perpetuates people leaving for lower tax havens.
Doesn’t the above sound familiar SD’ers? Sadly this is what happened to Detroit as Mark has shown above. Yet Windsor/Essex is doing the exact damn thing!
Who benefits?
Right now I would say Tecumseh and LaSalle. But already we are seeing people leaving Tecumseh for Lakeshore! When will the Ontario gov’t respond to this insanity and demand sprawl legislation be enacted? When will people realize the stupidity of it all? All the while they lament their taxes when it goes up.
Dave, I think you may be generalizing a bit. Although I don’t want to hand pick and swing the other way, but there are many inner cities that are the desired places to be: Manhatten, London (Eng), Paris, Berlin, Boston, and so on.
Detroit died because of race and the subsequent administrations didn’t care enough beyond their own wallets to fix it. Windsor is dying because administrations didn’t want to accept ideas from beyond their borders and got caught in a one horse town with no diversification to buffer the economic down turn.
People are exiting the city for greener pastures, but most are heading for the Prairies and Foothills with little trust or confidence in the current mayor and council, or the next one.
It’s nothing to do with urban sprawl. The main issues are having an integrated plan and a willingness to move forward in a cooperative and mutually beneficial method. Windsor and the region would do well to emulate the attitudes and procedures of the above mentioned cities and leave the animosity behind.
Amen.
I may be generalizing a bit but I would state that people will move to “greener pasures for two main reasons.
1) jobs (which Detroit still have many of, but which the entire Windsor region doesn’t).
2) taxes.
I think the hatred of both this mayor and council clouds some people’s perspectives. I doubt very few are willing to move away because of a mayor or council.
In your example of Detroit I will certainly agree race had a part to do with it (no not the riots as the exodus had already begun a decade prior). But the biggest factors at the time (and now) is that the suburbs were a place to go because they were new (new is good for the sheople of N. America), taxes were obscenely low and Detroit was considered to be getting”old”.
We don’t have the race issue here in Windsor but we certainly have the other two problems (ie, new is good, low taxes in our suburbs as compared to “old” Windsor).
You’re right that economic prosperity is the main reason people relocate, but those pastures have to be substantially better than their current situation to be an impetus to move. People aren’t going to leave a city if they have the underlying confidence that where they are is good enough or that they will be lead out of these bleak times by the city fathers.
In Windsor’s case, those leaving for the burbs already have jobs and are seeking to cut costs (taxes). Those leaving for other provinces are the people who have lost confidence in this locale and the ability of this mayor and council to forge a solution. What’s left are those unemployed without the means to leave and who are not actively contributing to the local economy.
Businesses will continue to follow the exodus as economic profit is better elsewhere while the mayor continues to fiddle, playing his restructuring shell game instead of putting in place incentives for investment.
I think you, Dave, and I are on the same page.
I posted this story in News today:
Toronto now bedroom community for 905, report finds
http://tiny.cc/lJWcJ
In part, here is some of the above story:
If you ask Les Liversidge why he left Toronto for Markham, he is quick to answer: “It was the business taxes, principally the tax bill on the building itself that did it.”
Four years ago, the 55-year-old lawyer owned a building in north Toronto out of which he ran a small firm that practised occupational safety and workers’ compensation law. His dilemma was property taxes — they had gone through the roof.
Taxes are one factor — albeit a major one — that have helped push the city of Toronto down the list on the FP/ Canadian Federation of Independent Business rankings of entrepreneurial cities. Toronto is now dead last on a list of 96, while suburban Toronto, known as the 905 district, sits at 33. The evidence is clear that businesses, some with a need to stay close to Toronto, are opting for the suburbs.
At one point, Mr. Liversidge said he was paying $4,000 to $6,000 in taxes on the 1½-storey building he occupied from 1992 to 2005, but a new assessment on the property put the tax at $65,000 to $70,000. Increases were capped by legislation but, even with the cap, his bill jumped to $27,000.
He could see the writing on the wall.
Mr. Liversidge owned a property that was only going to get more expensive to run.
There was no decision. He picked up his practice, which includes four employees, and moved to Markham — about seven kilometres away.
First, Toronto is no “bedroom community”. That is nothing but a sensationalist headline. People move both ways in the GTA: suburb to core, core to suburb.
Second, Toronto is never a good example to use when it comes to property taxes. Many properties had assessments that were 50 years old. Instead of doing something about it, past Toronto Councils sat on their hands. It wasn’t until the Province changed to market value assessment that Toronto got caught with their pants down.
Third, it’s not property taxes that went through the roof. It’s property assessments that went through the roof. The system is supposed to be balanced. If assessments go up, the tax rate is supposed to fall. That didn’t happen in Toronto, because their City Council was unable to control spending. They just hired 1,000 new employees this year - and now they have to cut their net operational budget by 10% over the next two years.