{"id":1639,"date":"2015-03-29T18:42:42","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T00:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2015-03-30T07:48:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T13:48:52","slug":"back-from-the-mitten-more-thoughts-about-detroit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/03\/back-from-the-mitten-more-thoughts-about-detroit.html","title":{"rendered":"Back from The Mitten: More thoughts about Detroit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

First item:<\/strong><\/p>\n

For those of you who don\u2019t do Twitter, a Detroiter (besides the one in the comments) got, er, rather upset that I identified Midtown as a rebranding of the New Center area, so I spent some time trying to figure this out.<\/p>\n

I first landed on a Wikipedia map<\/a> that clearly delineated the neighborhoods\/districts and says that everything south of I-94 is \u201cMidtown\u201d; north of there is the New Center area. \u00a0But this just didn\u2019t seem right to me; that places virtually all the city\u2019s cultural institutions (e.g., Orchestra Hall, the Art Institute and History Museum) in Midtown rather than New Center. \u00a0And that name just didn\u2019t sound right to me. \u00a0For a good decade of my life I read the Detroit News daily, and I\u2019ve kept up with my Detroit news (lower case and upper case) since then; I think I\u2019d know what \u201cMidtown\u201d was. \u00a0And, after all, a definition based on an interstate that didn\u2019t exist when these institutions were being built doesn\u2019t make sense either.<\/p>\n

So my husband stumbled upon an article from 2012 that clarifies the mystery to some degree, in an article called, \u201cWould The Real Midtown Please Stand Up?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a quiet turf war going down in Detroit. Or maybe it\u2019s a capital-intensive neighborhood re-branding campaign. It really depends on who you ask. Whatever you call it, one thing is clear: the area of Detroit that runs along Cass Avenue \u2014 from Cass Park to the south and Wayne State to the north \u2014 is changing. It isn\u2019t just the rumble of bulldozers clearing ground for huge new projects like the Auburn Building or the much ballyhooed Whole Foods supermarket. It\u2019s the history, the identity of the place, that\u2019s being forgotten. The area once universally known as the Cass Corridor is finding that its memory, its very existence, is being erased, overwritten and systematically re-categorized under the name Midtown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That being said, I tried to find some older maps of the city, with neighborhoods\/districts labelled, that would tell me what area Orchestra Hall was in before the invention of Midtown. \u00a0Maybe I\u2019ll check the library; even though I\u2019m back home in suburban Chicago, the local history section includes some Detroit items.<\/p>\n

Why does it bug me?<\/p>\n

Mostly, I think, because \u201cMidtown\u201d just isn\u2019t authentically Detroit. \u00a0Manhattan has a \u201cmidtown\u201d \u2014 and an uptown and downtown, presumably initially defined based on \u201cdown\u201d and \u201cup\u201d = south and north, or maybe the \u201cup\u201d was a slightly higher\/less swampy elevation; I\u2019m not sure. \u00a0Now, of course, \u201cdowntown\u201d simply means \u201ccity center\u201d in American English. \u00a0But \u201cmidtown\u201d? \u00a0It just doesn\u2019t feel, well, Detroit<\/em> enough.<\/p>\n

Second item:<\/strong><\/p>\n

My twitter correspondent insisted that Detroit was truly on its way up, to which I said (judging from this person\u2019s picture) that people have been claiming that since before she was born: \u00a0the Renaissance Center, the People Mover, the Poletown plant, and, more recently, the Greektown casinos, were all supposed to herald a revival. \u00a0For a while in the 80s, a warehouse at the edge of Greektown was turned into the sort of venue that was supposed to attract tourists; I remember a fudge shop that hoped to draw customers with its employees making the fudge while singing\/chanting some kind of song.<\/p>\n

Will this be the time that things really \u201ctake\u201d? \u00a0This newly-rebranded \u201cMidtown\u201d area does seem to be drawing the hipsters who might previously have gone to suburban Ferndale. \u00a0Will they stick around once they\u2019re no longer young? \u00a0The Schools of Choice program and the wide availability of charter schools means that the train wreck that is Detroit Public Schools might not be a deal-breaker, but the availability of public services (e.g., police response times) and, of course, general crime rate issues will be a problem.<\/p>\n

But Detroit is more than its city center and the people of Detroit consist of more than urban hipsters. \u00a0It\u2019s simply difficult to fathom what the solution to the depopulated areas is. \u00a0(And these Detroiters are real Detroiters, and their socioeconomic situation can\u2019t just be subtracted out to measure \u201chow is Detroit doing?\u201d)<\/p>\n

In one respect, it\u2019s tempting to say, \u201cdemolish the homes as they become abandoned, and hope that the city-center revival spreads outward and inspires a new generation to build on these vacant lots.\u201d \u00a0And the solution that some Detroit boosters are promoting is urban farming. \u00a0But it is tremendously difficult to deliver city services to areas that are both poor and very low in density. \u00a0All of it: \u00a0police and fire protection, bus service, streetlights, city sewers, road maintenance. \u00a0(On our drive last week, we passed through two intersections, blinking yellow, with signage that they were being studied for traffic light removal.) \u00a0Look at a map of a suburban bus system \u2014 only a few routes, mostly concentrated on those areas with large apartment complexes \u2014 and then consider that Detroit, even before the population crash, was a city of single-family homes, and now a bus system is all the more difficult to sustain. \u00a0These areas simply cannot be self-supporting in terms of city services, and the denser and the more affluent parts of the city \u2014 well, there just aren\u2019t enough of them. \u00a0Do we just say, \u201cuntil such time as the city\u2019s population recovers (presuming this happens someday), someone else \u2014 the state, the feds \u2014 has responsibility for them\u201d?<\/p>\n

(By the way: \u00a0this isn\u2019t an issue for school funding, even though Detroit has serious troubles here too<\/a>: \u00a0unlike most areas, money is collected and allocated statewide.)<\/p>\n

Third Item:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Detroit is, of course, not the only city to have lost population over time.<\/p>\n

Take a look at these tables, compiled from wikipedia and other readily-available data.<\/p>\n

Most populous cities in the U.S., 1950, and their population change to 2013<\/strong>
\nNew York City \u00a0 \u00a0 7%
\nChicago \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0-25%
\nPhiladelphia \u00a0 -25%
\nLos Angeles \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a097%
\nDetroit \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0-63%
\nBaltimore \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0-34%
\nCleveland \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0-57%
\nSt. Louis \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0-63%
\nWashington \u00a0-18%
\nBoston \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 -19%<\/p>\n

Three cities have had pretty similar drops in population: \u00a0Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis.<\/p>\n

So I looked at these three individually:<\/p>\n

\"3-29-2015<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you make of this?<\/p>\n

In the first place, St. Louis\u2019s population crash happened a bit earlier, as it lost almost half of its population before 1980. \u00a0Detroit and Cleveland had similar patterns, except that Detroit lost a full fifth of its population quite recently, in the half decade from 2005 \u2013 2010 (after, according to my twitter correspondent, the revival was already underway).<\/p>\n

Of course, what I haven\u2019t shown here is that both Cleveland and St. Louis started out at about half the size of Detroit, so that, even if relative declines were similar, the absolute number of abandoned dwellings is greater in Detroit, by far.<\/p>\n

In any case, why aren\u2019t we reading reports of the devastation in these two \u201csister cities\u201d to Detroit? \u00a0I can make a couple guesses, for now, anyway:<\/p>\n

In the first place, a certain portion of the housing, in any case, was destroyed intentionally, in urban renewal-type projects, similar to the demolition of Chicago\u2019s major public housing complexes in favor of fewer units of mixed housing. \u00a0There were, of course, similar demolitions for interstate highways, new ballparks and parking lots, and so on. \u00a0(My St. Louis great-grandmother\u2019s childhood home, per census records, is now a freeway.)<\/p>\n

And in the second place, to the extent that the housing was multifamily, a city can de-densify in a less noticiable way. \u00a0Again, my great-grandmother\u2019s home was an alley apartment, 1290 1\/2 Palm Street or some such. \u00a0My mother grew up in a two-flat in the city (yes, they were part of the exodus in the 50s, moving out to a suburb, adjacent to Ferguson, actually). \u00a0I could imagine that it\u2019s easy for these multifamily buildings to become single-family with a bit of remodeling. \u00a0But Detroit has a much greater proportion of single-family housing than other cities.<\/p>\n

But that only gets you so far. \u00a0Anyone else know more?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First item: For those of you who don\u2019t do Twitter, a Detroiter (besides the one in the comments) got, er, rather upset that I identified Midtown as a rebranding of the New Center area, so I spent some time trying to figure this out. 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