A friend of mine sent me this article about Detroit. It's about to disappear soon, so I'll provide a snippet:
In the decade after he finished law school, Dan Varner watched with mounting exasperation as his black, middle-class peers defected from Detroit, beloved city of his birth.He was the relentless city booster telling college-bound teenagers to come home after graduation, the one urging far-flung friends to move here, the man always talking about rebuilding the city while others abandoned it.
Then, one day, Mr. Varner said he realized "there was really no one to have dinner with." He said he "could count on one hand in the four blocks around me the number of men my age who had families." Enough became enough one spring day when he drove his children home past a band of teenage boys chanting profanity.
"As a dad and a husband, you have an obligation to try to provide the best life possible," said Mr. Varner, 35, who in August moved his family to Ypsilanti Township, 45 minutes away. "That was just something we couldn't find in Detroit."
The Varners are emblematic of the exodus that is plunging Detroit's government and school system into a fiscal nightmare, resulting in not just the slashing of staff and services, but also, for the first time, a fundamental right-sizing for a new, shrunken reality. The 139-square-mile Motor City now has a population of 911,000, less than half its 1950's peak.
[Edited to add--George is brilliant. He gave me a permanent link to replace the temporary one. You might not even need a subscription to check the story out.]
Dan Varner is a friend of mine. We went to Michigan together. Though he spent most of his formative years in Southfield (a suburb outside of Detroit), he returned to Detroit after law school, and started Think Detroit when he found that simply being a lawyer wasn't enough. There are few people our age (we're both going to be 36 this year) putting more work into ANY city, than Dan.
And now he's out. Not out of Think Detroit...I just left a message on his answering machine. But out of the city as a homeowner.
We call this the exit option. See, in any institution that has "inefficiencies" people within them have three options.
They can stick with the institution and keep their mouth shut.
They can exert their voice and try to change the institution from within.
They can jet.
Dan hasn't totally chosen the exit option. He is still the CEO of Think Detroit, and I expect him to remain in that position. But he has the means to exit, and recognizes that his voice simply isn't enough. I think this New York Times piece is a hack job designed to get Kwame Kilpatrick voted out of office. The problems of Kilpatrick are the problems faced by Dennis Archer Sr. before him, and by Coleman Young before him. Someone wants Freeman Hendrix in office and is pulling chits to get him there.
BUT with that said, the article still speaks to a fundamental truth that affects urban areas in general, and black urban areas in particular.
Posted by at February 4, 2005 02:49 PM | TrackBackIt won't disappear entirely; this link (via this link generator) should keep it semi-fresh.
Posted by: allaboutgeorge at February 5, 2005 05:41 AM"President Celebrates African American History Month"
[...] I welcome members of the Congress: Senator Chris Dodd, thank you for coming; Rick Santorum; Sam Brownback; and Barack Obama. Welcome. (Applause.) Congressman Mel Watt, the Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus is with us. Thank you for coming, Mr. Chairman. (Applause.) Eleanor Holmes Norton, delegate from the District of Columbia. (Applause.) Jack Kingston from the state of Georgia. Welcome, Congressman, thank you for coming. (Applause.) And, finally, Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick. Now, I've got a report for you: today I was with her son, the Mayor of Detroit, who looked mighty special. (Laughter and applause.) Welcome. [...]
Posted by: George Kelly at February 9, 2005 07:05 AM
This has always been a tough choice, this loyalty to place. I am probably a lot more rootless than most traveling people, not to mention married fathers. I have come to admit that for me, the 'beloved community' exists only in the people and values, not the place.
I still have dreams that take place in the house where I grew up in 90016. But it was very hard to come back home to that real place after my college career in the early 80s. Crack had changed the place for good, and all of the young men who had run the neighborhood were off in five directions, college, military service, jobs elsewhere, pro sports or jail. The place collapsed. By the time the Northridge quake had physically damaged the buildings, the old neighborhood spirit had long gone.
We pulled our mother out and sold the house and sent her to Alhambra, near Pasadena, and soon my brothers followed. By the 90s everybody was gone except the old folks, the single women, and the idiot baby brothers off the tail end of the prior generation. Then it was the teenaged kids of the teen mothers running the block. Nobody anybody respected from back in the day remained. Sure enough and finally there was a murder on our block.
There's a new stability now I think. A new generation of Mexican families moved in. The area finally got cable. The LA Riots changed everybody's attitude. A lot of investment in the CBD came, supermarket chains. But it took a long time. The place is not the same - kids don't ride bikes in the streets any longer - those days are gone.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen anything like my old neighborhood until I visited Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1995 east of Atlanta. That's what I think. It's all distributed, no place stays the same.
I imagine that it must be a hell of a hard deal to watch a city morph like that from the POV of a mayor trying to keep the quality of life right, when they don't really have any control of the economics of the situation. There is an inevitable sadness at the loss.
And yet, though I am defensive and proud of my upbringing, harsh and beautiful as it often was, I recognize that most black communities were artificial creations from the gate, at least the ones in cities like LA. Blackfolks in our neighborhood were from Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere. None of us went to the same church. Our parents didn't visit in the neighbors homes. This was a ghetto in the real sense of 'nowhere else to go'. We were all occupying the middle class houses on the edge of white flight at the foot of the upscale homes of the black rich and famous. It was a place where blackfolks could get VHA loans. Pops' mortgage was through a company called Lomas & Nettleton. I imagine they were fairly special in that they would do business with blackfolks, but like so many other things, that entire company has disappeared in the sands of time.
Ten years prior to our arrival, Crenshaw Boulevard was an 'Auto Row'. As I went through elementary school and middle school, the car dealerships began closing and relocating one by one. The VW dealer, the Dodge dealer, the Lincoln Mercury dealer. Crenshaw Datsun was the last to open in about 1972. It was gone 20 years later. Only Crenshaw Ford remained. Blackfolks bought it, and it's still going strong, but the place is only a fraction of what it was.
Time marches on.
Posted by: Cobb at February 4, 2005 10:39 PM