Detroit, Wasteland

Posted by on . 18 comments.

In the comments to my last post about Detroit, someone asked whether I’d ever been to Detroit, because I always make it sound like some horrible, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Now, I’m well aware that there are functioning parts of the city, and that millions of people still make the metropolitan area their home. But, you know, it is kind of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Comments

  1. bottomofthe9th says:
    March 11, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    My folks live in Oakland County, and I’ll certainly agree that Detroit is, by and large, a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

    Hell, it was halfway there when we moved to the area in 2000 and the auto industry was booming. Even then downtown was full of burned-out, abandoned buildings in really good locations–I always thought the most egregious were the ones on the right as you exit 10 southbound heading to Comerica Park.

    I often say that what we’re best at in Houston is tearing stuff down, which is a bit glib–but Detroit could really, really use some of that.

  2. Anon. says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    The problem is that, outside the circles of urban historians, people frequently discuss the city that way without any mention of the 80 years of racially oriented policy choices that left parts of it looking that way. Your flippant post here sounds just like what a bunch of white Oakland County suburbanites would say at a barbecue before boasting that they hadn’t crossed the city line in thirty years. Given the decades of struggle and resistance, oppression and organizing, fond memories and lingering pain which are inscribed into that city’s urban landscape, I would think you could find a more sensitive, intellectual, and historically oriented way of discussing the tragedy of the Detroit cityscape, rather than just kicking out snickering little jibes about how it’s a mess.

  3. Alex B. says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    I’ve spent a lot of time in Detroit. There are some excellent old buildings that have been neglected for far too long. Demolishing them is a last resort – they’re not all beyond saving.

    However, I still recall my initial impression on my first visit to the city. “This is a US city? Holy shit.”

    That said, there are still great parts of Detroit proper. Even so, however, I think you’d be pressed to come up with an American downtown that’s been harder hit. There are entire neighborhoods where there’s nothing left, such as the State Fair neighborhood. Take a look at some of these pictures – they might as well be from rural farmland:

    http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=405

  4. Christopher says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    Parts of my family has been from Southeast Michigan (we NEVEr said the D-word) since the 19th century. Settling in Oakland county from New York state in the 1840s, maybe earlier. My mother was born in Pontiac, all of mother’s siblings went to Michigan State, as did my grandfather for a spell. My grandparents met at Pontiac Central High School and returned to the area building a home in the newly subdivided lands of West Bloomfield in 1967. I have relatives in Birmingham, Port Huron, and Rochester Hills.

    I have never, ever, been into the city of Detroit. Not once. The region turned it’s back on Detroit at least in the 1970s. (Although my parents did spend their Wedding night at the Pontchartrain in 1970, it was still consider elegant then.) Theie are industrial cities throughout the region — Pontiac, Port Huron, Deerborn, Toledo — that are majority black with declining fortunes. But it’s Detroit that seems to be the worst of the lot. Perhaps because it never was really industrial. It didn’t even have factories to fall back onto.

  5. thm says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    Also of note: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

    I believe the opening scene in Naqoyqatsi was filmed in Detroit’s industrial ruins.

  6. Alex B. says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:27 pm

    Detroit was never industrial?

    I can see you’re not lying about never traveling inside the city limits.

    There are major assembly plants and factories still operating within the city limits, to say nothing of the smaller operations. That, of course, says nothing of the massive industrial operations just outside the city limits, like the River Rouge plant in Dearborn.

  7. BeyondDC says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    Never been there, but as long as we’re sharing – just play with the aerial imagery from Live Maps. Whole blocks of what were once very dense Chicago-style inner city neighborhoods now totally empty, or maybe with one or two houses left.

    Saint Louis also has a lot of that. Buffalo has a little.

    Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Columbus and Indianapolis all seem to be in much better shape.

  8. BeyondDC says:
    March 11, 2009 at 3:58 pm

    This nonsense in Toledo is just ridiculous.

  9. Christopher says:
    March 11, 2009 at 4:06 pm

    Yes, yes. Detroit has manufacturing within it.

    (Although my Oakland County family always made the point that we aren’t FROM Detroit, we’re from Pontiac. Which I have been to on a number of occasions. Even though the ancestral home was knocked down to make way for Wide Track Drive. And since my great grandfather was one of the larger electrical contractors in Southeast Michigan — having worked with Kahn on a number of projects and Saarinen at Cranbrook — I imagine that he was in Detroit frequently on business. Mind you that no family has ever had an office in Detroit. Nor have we ever owned property in Detroit in the 160 years we’ve been in Southeast Michigan.)

    But, Detroit was very much designed on a French model. Radiating streets from a central core, manufacturing off shot to mid-sized surrounding cities. While detroit had density, it was largely known for stately boulevards and grand homes. Once the wealthy started moving to the Gross Points, Detroit never grew enough or added enough density to replace the relative low density of much of its inner neighborhoods.

  10. Alex B. says:
    March 11, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    Of course, the vast majority of Detroit’s acreage is residential. But that’s not the point – there was plenty of manufacturing employment to be had within the city, and even more within the neighboring municipalities (even without having to cross 8 mile).

    BDC – I’ve also spent a fair amount of time on the south side of Chicago. It, too, has some of the urban prairie that you’ll see in Detroit. However, as a whole, it’s a far healthier city. No place has the same kind of withering downtown, struggling neighborhoods, and outright rot that you see in the D. And I love the D. I’ve grown quite fond of it since I was there, but there’s no escaping how bad things are. Many cities have rough areas with some urban prairies. Many have some abandoned buildings downtown. Many have old mansions that are decaying before our eyes, but I can’t think of a single one that deals with all of those problems combined as Detroit does, nor on the scale that Detroit does – to say nothing of attacking those problems with Detroit’s limited (and shrinking) resources.

    Live Maps is great, I love the oblique shots – but it makes a lot of bad neighborhoods look a lot better than they are. You can’t see the decay from above. You can’t see which houses are burned out and which aren’t.

  11. bottomofthe9th says:
    March 11, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    Anon–it’s true that Oakland County-ites, and their superior attitude, are not helping things whatsoever. (And I’ll especially join you in agreeing that bragging about how long it’s been since you’ve gone to the city is extremely snotty, not to mention culturally illiterate.) But Detroit is not helping itself, either–the city government is literally worse than Royce’s on The Wire. Oakland County deserves its share of the blame, no question, but they don’t deserve ALL of it, which is how Detroiters frame things.

    Having lived in SE Michigan, I’m always amazed when people call Texas backwoods and racist, because I have never been anywhere more racist than SE Michigan–both Oakland and Wayne counties.

    And that’s why I question Ryan when he suggests that there are productive investments to be made in Michigan–I think the city has deteriorated into such a sociological mess (to say nothing of the economic malaise) that we’d all be better served by just cutting the residents a check for them to take elsewhere. As things stand now, any “investment” will lead to Oakland County saying the black guys in Detroit are too beset by laziness and cronyism to handle it, and Detroit saying the white guys in Oakland County are too superior and judgmental to have a freaking clue what to do with the money. And the thing is, these have become self-fulfilling prophecies–Wayne County IS lazier, and more full of cronyism, than other urban areas, and Oakland County IS snottier than other ‘burbs.

    Better for all of us if they just scatter to places where they can be assimilated into metros with functioning race relations, because I really don’t see how things can be salvaged there. The history is just too much, I think.

  12. KB says:
    March 12, 2009 at 12:42 pm

    Detroit is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s also a very interesting case study, and an area with the potential to become anything in the future.

    Detroit needs to do the equivalent of reverse annexation. They need to get rid of land, concentrate the citizens and services into a smaller area, and start over.

    Meanwhile the areas that are quickly being taken over by nature, can become parks, farms, or almost anything else.

  13. alli says:
    March 12, 2009 at 5:46 pm

    Thanks to that bitch Katrina, New Orleans actually has more blight than Detroit. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

    Let’s save them both.

  14. Matt says:
    May 7, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    I have lived 10 minutes outside detroit my entire 25 years on the planet and i can assure EVERYONE that detroit is a complete and utter disaster.

    DO NOT LIVE HERE OR GO HERE FOR ANYTHING OR ANY REASON.

    Detroit is like a person who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness 30 years ago and has never chosen to get medical attention so he just withers away slowly and horribly.

    this entire region (the midwest) was handed a terminal diganosis in the 70′s. this area was sostupid and did not heed any warnings and just kept building a manufacturing economy with NO sense of where the world was heading.

    Now its all going to shiit and everyone around here acts like they could never smell the shiit they were standing in their entire lives.

    Detroit is horrendously violent, drug addicted, and full of filthy racist animals. the black community in detroit is the main reason that it has gotten so bad. they have constantly shown themselves to be racist, ignorant, and unable to complete even the simplest municipal tasks. detroit has killed itself off and they blame the “white devils” in the suburbs for taking all the money out of detroit.

    detroit MUST be burnt to the ground (preferably with all its residents still with in the city). you cant fix this city as it currently stands because its people are just as screwed up as the city is.. you need to burn it all down and start over, and if possible repopulate the city with capable, educated, and trustworthy people of all colors.

  15. Abbey says:
    May 20, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    I grew up in a black neighborhood in Detroit for 14 years(I’m white) and continue to work there a few days a week. I have only experienced mild racism and only because it was often assumed that I would be prejudiced against them. I am well-educated and am not a filthy racist animal. Neither is anyone I know who is from there. On the contrary, people struggle, so they’re accepting of differences and are grateful for what they’ve got.

    Comments like yours tell me you haven’t really spent any quality time in Detroit, and if you have, you must have certainly been wearing your racist asshole goggles because anyone with any common sense who HAS been to Detroit knows that the people are full of heart. Yeah, we got problems. But it makes no sense to villainize an entire population based on generalizations. Hell, I feel bad I even have to tell you that’s it’s never going to be OK to nuke a US town with its inhabitants caught unawares, no matter how high the crime rate.

    I mean, I could just as well say that comments like yours also make me want to visit your hometown, close as it may be to Detroit, and burn it to the ground. Preferably with you in it. See how much sense that makes?

    Trust me, you’re part of the problem.

  16. layedofffactoryworker says:
    May 30, 2009 at 5:32 pm

    Detroit is a disaster and its only going to get worse. Blame the Democrats for using entitlement programs to get votes without caring about the harm they were doing. Blame the greedy unions for driving up the cost of doing business. Blame the auto industry for making garbage vehicles while they spent their money on marketing.I am a working guy and a USMC veteran I have only bought American cars ever. I never will again. My Dodge Dakota had mechanical problems the whole time I owned it. The Fuel system finally gave out. I sold it for parts. It was only ten years old.
    Oh, and by the way Matt, those people in Detroit are human beings, when you talk about destroying them along with the city how is anybody supposed to take you seriously.

  17. WAYNE says:
    October 26, 2009 at 10:19 am

    I AM FROM NORTH CAROLINA, AND I HAVE FREINDS IN YOUR STATE,IT IS SO FUNNY TO SEE YOU GUYS TRYING TO PICK ON ONE CITY WHEN THAT WHOLE STATE ( MICHIGAN )IS IN TROUBLE. AND TALK ABOUT THE CRIME , YOU HAVE STEVEN GRANT AND THAT KID AND HIS FREIND CUTTING THAT GUYS HEAD OFF, I THINK THAT HAPPEN IN YOUR SUBURBS, NOT IN DETROIT. IF I WAS A DETROITER I WOULD BE AFRAID TO MOVE IN THOSE SUBURBS!

  18. Jenna says:
    March 9, 2011 at 7:06 pm

    It is disturbing to me how many people have such strong opinions about a city that they haven’t even given a chance. Especially to those of you who are writing with such a snide tone about how your family NEVER set FOOT in Detroit, God forbid! That to me, is the ultimate disappointment. You should be proud of where you are from, and embrace the vibrant city that was once the fourth-largest city in the U.S. as well as a driving force in the U.S. economy for all of the 20th century.

    What Detroit needs, what Michigan needs, what the United States of America need, is a better attitude. People need to move forward. We are at the dawn of a new generation, a more proactive generation, that is capable of cleaning up the mess left over from the period of industrialization, not only in Detroit but MOST of America’s major cities that were based on big companies like Ford.

    And for those of you who care to know, I was born and raised in Midland MI, one of the wealthiest cities in Michigan, and I am PROUD to say that I love Detroit, I spend time volunteering there and do everything I can to spread awareness to prevent uninformed comments like those on this page.