As it happens, I was in Detroit this month. I went to see the art and the architecture, domains in which Detroit is still one of the richest cities in the United States.
It’s broken, and it’s broke, and now it’s officially bankrupt, too. But bankruptcy actually is a device for escaping from unpayable debt.
Two-thirds of Detroit’s population have fled in the past 50 years, but there were specific reasons why Detroit fell into decline, and there also are reasons to believe that it could flourish again — not as a major manufacturing center, perhaps, but “major manufacturing centers” probably don’t have a bright long-term future anywhere. There are other ways to flourish, and Detroit has some valuable resources.
The events that triggered the city’s decline are well known. Large numbers of African-Americans from the southern states migrated to Detroit to meet the demand for factory workers during and after the Second World War. Being mostly unskilled, they started in the worst jobs — and even after they had acquired skills, they stayed in low-paying jobs because of racial prejudice.
Spurned by the unions and victimized by a racist police force, they eventually rioted in the summer of 1967. Brutal policing made matters worse and hundreds were killed, but the worst consequence was the fear that the violence engendered. The great majority of the whites just left town.
The big automobile companies also took flight, and the new car plants were built elsewhere. As the jobs disappeared and the population dropped, the tax base fell even faster, for most of the people left behind in the city were poor or unemployed African-Americans. The city no longer could afford to provide good police or medical services, so even more people left.
This vicious circle has lasted half a century, exacerbated by much corruption and maladministration. This month’s declaration of bankruptcy is a brutal measure, for much of the debt being repudiated is the pensions of city employees, but it may give the city’s government enough leeway to begin rebuilding public services. If they are restored, much else could follow.
Let me explain what brought me to Detroit early this month. We were doing what we dubbed the “ Rust Belt Art and Architecture Tour,” driving from Buffalo to Cleveland and then to Detroit, ending up in Chicago.
All these cities took a terrible beating as the industries on which they were built died or moved overseas (except Chicago, which is “too big to fail”). But three generations ago, when they were the industrial heartland of the United States, they were very rich — at just the right time.
The first decades of the 20th century were the heyday of art deco, the most beautiful architectural style of the modern era. That also was the period when newly rich captains of industry could scoop up bucketloads of new European and American art: impressionist, expressionist, abstract, the lot — and they lived mostly in what are now the Rust Belt cities.
So they put up dozens of art deco towers: the Guaranty Building in downtown Detroit is my candidate for the world’s most beautiful office building. They filled their homes with best of modern art — and, in the end, donated most of it to the local art galleries. Even in Detroit, where so much has been lost, more than half of those buildings are still there. So is all of the art.
Other cities would kill for these assets. In a post-industrial economy where people have more choice about where they live, they are assets that can actually attract population — especially since, in Detroit’s case, the people who left didn’t go far. Most of them are still out there in the suburbs that surround Detroit.
The city of Detroit’s population has fallen from 2 million to 700,000 over the past 50 years, but the metropolitan area’s population has stayed stable at around four and a half million for all of that time. The job, really, is to bridge the devastated middle ring of low-income Detroit housing and reconnect the outer suburbs with the city center. Detroit can rise again. It just takes the right strategy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.