No longer in Paris

I’ll admit it: I still have a soft spot for Detroit.

It’s not so much of a love for the American automobile or for Motown music, although both are important parts of the city’s impact on our nation and our culture. But growing up as I did in the Rust Belt, the fortunes of my hometown and its much larger neighbor to the north were intertwined in any number of ways because we, too, were dependent on the auto industry. On a cultural basis, I grew up watching and rooting for their professional sports teams (still do) and was close enough to be within their media footprint. Maybe Mark “The Bird” Fidrych,  the onetime Top 40 blowtorch CKLW,  J.P. McCarthy,  Ted Nugent,  Bob Seger, and hilarious Highland Appliance commercials weren’t household names and cliches in these parts, but we in Toledo knew who and what they were.

Yet Detroit has come to be known now as the very symbol of urban decay, a place where rotting buildings are giving way to urban farmscapes and half the population left in the last half-century. It’s in that vein that I read a piece today by Amanda Melson.

Melson uses the age-old scapegoats of continual Democratic city governance and the rise of Big Labor to paint a picture of a city in decline, and to a certain extent she is correct. But were they the only culprits?

Starting in the middle of the last century, Detroit was among many large cities which saw the expansion of its core area come to a halt as it ran into growing suburbs spread like acorns around the parent tree. The idea of spreading out and getting away from the cramped city center to a place where the kids could play in the yard and go to school in a modern building with all the conveniences was enticing to those very laborers who worked 40 hours a week in the auto plant and saved up their money so their children could have a better life in the suburbs of Oakland or Macomb counties, or even “downriver” toward Monroe, with the hope of them someday being able to attend college up the road in Ann Arbor or East Lansing. The price of a daily commute on I-75, I-94, or I-96 was worth the cost of having a place of their own far from the city center which was already crumbling.

Those who remained became the victims of that so-called “urban renewal” touched upon by Melson; the first of what is now a third or even fourth generation of poverty doomed to a meager existence because of poor schools and a lack of good job opportunities since most of the original Detroit-area auto plants have long since closed up shop. Of course, the same thing was happening in my hometown on a smaller scale – we left our home in the city to live on five rural acres with the intention of having a place where three active boys had room to play. And to some extent the same story can be written for any number of Rust Belt cities; places like Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Flint, or Gary. But Detroit is most interesting because of the depth to which it’s succumbed from the height it achieved.

It’s also intriguing as a case study of a donut in reverse and a theory gone wrong. Granted, it’s been close to a decade since I set foot in the city, but my recollection is there are small parts of Detroit which are livable and lively. They’re centered around the edifices of a new century: the three casinos in downtown Detroit and two new midtown sports facilities: Comerica Park for the Tigers and Ford Field for the Lions. But all that investment doesn’t seem to have impacted the city as a whole like it was supposed to – if you walk a mile away from these places, not only would you be taking your life into your hands but you would see the squalor of a city abandoned.

So now we introduce the idea of “right-to-work” to the Detroit area. While the unions and Barack Obama whine that it will bring about a race to the bottom for wages, I look at things differently. Consider the skill level of the average would-be Detroit worker who’s never really had the responsibility of going to a job each day and creating a product or performing a service above a menial level. Do they honestly create enough value to be worth union scale? If this encourages a little bit of investment in Detroit I see that as a good thing, even if the Democrats are cut out of a few thousand dollars’ worth of largess through confiscated dues.

But I don’t see that as being much more than a drop in the bucket as long as the general attitude remains that the world owes Detroit a living. It’s a model of governance which has failed its remaining citizens miserably, yet those pool souls don’t understand that they’re the root of the problem because they make the same choices their most recent ancestors did yet believe the results will be better.

That insanity isn’t confined to Detroit, but they make the best poster children for the theory. Follow their path at your peril.