The sad state of Detroit

Where was I when the Twin Towers fell in New York City?

Detroit; not in the city of Detroit, but in Metro Detroit. I had a brief stint as the Director of the Writing Center at the University of Detroit Mercy, in inner city Detroit.

When I took up a teaching job in an University in the plush demesnes of the cities of Rochester Hills and Auburn Hills, I spent a summer teaching a class to first-generation college goers from Detroit's inner cities.

University of Detroit Mercy was less like a college campus and more like a gated community with a degree of security at the gates that would put the security measures of an Institution in post-9/11 New York City, to shame. We were advised never to step out of campus, even if for lunch. There was nothing to step out to, as I found out. The streets were empty (which is a byword for "danger"), unkempt (sporadic garbage collection), stores and ramshackle houses lay abandoned, in ruins or were boarded up.

Along both sides of Jefferson Avenue, known as a scenic drive, would be more of the same: stores that were boarded up and side walks sprouting weeds. The one structure that stood beautifully was Fox Theatre, but the area surrounding Fox Theatre was in disrepair. 8 Miles road, made (in)famous by Detroit's native son, Eminem, was a replica of what the eponymously titled movie said it was--pretty run down.

My experience of Detroit was limited, but then again, the city was discussed only as a negative space, to be rescued, despaired about or avoided. Overt and covert expressions of anti-Detroit sentiments hovered in the periphery of my consciousness.

Detroit was a city that was dangerous, Detroit was a city that was dangerous because it was Black, and Detroit was a city that has fallen into hard times and would gradually become untouchable if it wasn't emptied of Blacks. 

Having experienced Metro-Denver and Greater-New York--as urban geographies that centered around the commercial and cultural hub of cities, "Metro-Detroit" sounded like a misnomer to me. Detroit could have very well been named "Metro-Troy" or Metro-Madison Heights" (I lived in Madison Heights, which bordered the city of Troy, cities dominated by the auto companies).

Today, Detroit has become the center of a whole discourse on economic mudslide, depopulation, and a site for ruin-porn. Perhaps Detroit's all abysmality has reached a tipping point, else the Michigan Governor would not have come up with this plan for Detroit's economic revival.

Michigan's Governor is a Republican and a businessman; he wants to populate Detroit with 50,000 highly educated immigrants from China and India over the next 5 years. His conviction is that the flow of knowledge, cultural and real capital that will ensue as a result of immigration will stabilize Detroit into an economically viable city once again.

At first I thought this was a fictional plan, part of a story based in Detroit. Having bumped into the plot of Chang Rae Lee's On Such A Full Sea recently--a plot that plays with the consequences of populating a city with outsiders--I thought perhaps Detroit, would make for a good place in a story that's about socially engineered de- and re-populations.

Can a city, in which I have lived, albeit briefly and a bit cursorily, become so hopeless as to descend into the state of a metaphor?

Businessmen like Snyder (the case of Michael Bloomberg, the visionary Mayor of New York City for 12 years, is different as he's a rarity), tend to see complex organisms like cities like corporations; while an infusion of high calibre knowledge-workers can resurrect a struggling corporation with new life, the same can't be foretold of a city or a nation, at least not in a mere five years.

A New York Times Editorial reasonably scolds the plan as disrespectful and accuses the Governor of treating the city as a blank slate upon which a rebuilding experiment can be launched. 

Where do the native Detroiters fit in this picture of rebuilding? The Blacks don't figure at all. It seems like yet another plot (not a fictional one) is being hatched to dislocate the Blacks from a city which they have taken to be their own since the time of its glory days as a "motor city."

The thoughts of a plot to dispossess natives brings me back to my tangential experience of Detroit's inner city through the kids I taught. Lovely kids, as I remember them taking my class seriously and laughing and sharing ideas and a hope that they would in the near future be going to college.

I feel sad.

P.S. just read that the idea to revive Detroit through repopulating it with immigrants, belongs to Michael Bloomberg. Last year Mayor Bloomberg had suggested the following on Meet the Press: That all immigrants be allowed to come into the U.S. under the condition that they reside in Detroit for a minimum of 10 years. He was criticized as a fascist, because repopulation has a fascistic stink.

The fill-cities-with-immigrants ploy is taken up seriously, especially by Rust-Belt cities like St Louis and Dayton, which are losing populations because of the recession.