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From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 6:42 PM
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Subject: How Detroit, the Motor City, turned into a ghost town
How Detroit, the Motor City, turned into a ghost town
Wall Street is celebrating a recovery in the US
economy, but the future looks increasingly
bleak in America's industrial heartland
by Paul Harris in Detroit
The Observer (UK) - November 01, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/01/detroit-michigan-economy-recessi
on-unemployment
Try telling Brother Jerry Smith that the recession in
America has ended. As scores of people queued up last
week at the soup kitchen which the Capuchin friar helps
run in Detroit, the celebrations on Wall Street in New
York seemed from another world.
The hungry and needy come from miles around to get a
free healthy meal. Though the East Detroit
neighbourhood the soup kitchen serves has had it tough
for decades, the recession has seen almost any hope for
anyone getting a job evaporate. Neither is there any
sign that jobs might come back soon.
"Some in the past have had jobs here, but now there is
nothing available to people. Nothing at all," Brother
Jerry said as he sat behind a desk with a computer but
dressed in the simple brown friar's robes of his order.
Outside his office the hungry, the homeless and the
poor crowded around tables. Many were by themselves,
but some were families with young children. None had
jobs. Indeed, the soup kitchen itself is now starting
to dip into its savings to cope with a drying up of
desperately needed donations. This is an area where
times are so tough that the soup kitchen is a major
employer for the neighbourhood, keeping its own staff
out of poverty. But now Brother Jerry fears he may also
have to start laying people off.
Officially, America is on the up. The economy grew by
3.5% in the past quarter. On Wall Street, stocks are
rising again. The banks - rescued wholesale by
taxpayers' money last year - are posting billions of
dollars of profits. Thousands of bankers and financiers
are wetting their lips at the prospect of enormous
bonuses, often matching or exceeding those of pre-crash
times. The financial sector is lobbying successfully to
fight government attempts to regulate it. The wealthy
are beginning to snap up property again, pushing prices
up. In New York's fashionable West Village a senior
banker recently splurged $10m on a single apartment,
sending shivers of delight through the city's property
brokers.
But for tens of millions of Americans such things seem irrelevant. Across
the country lay-offs are continuing. Indeed, jobless rates are expected to
rise for the rest of 2009 and perhaps beyond. Unemployment in America stands
at 9.8%. But that headline figure, massaged by bureaucrats, does not include
many categories of the jobless. Another, broader official measure, which
includes those such as the long-term jobless who have given up job-seeking
and workers who can only find piecemeal part-time work, tells another story.
That figure stands at 17%.
Added to that shocking statistic are the millions of
Americans who remain at risk of foreclosure. In many
parts of the country repossessions are still rising or spreading to areas
that have escaped so far. In the months to come, no matter what happens on
the booming stock market, hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to
lose their homes.
For them the recession is far from over. It rages on
like a forest fire, burning through jobs, savings and
homes. It will serve to exacerbate a long-term trend
towards deepening inequality in America. Real wages in
the US stagnated in the 1970s and have barely risen
since, despite rising living costs. The gap between the
average American worker and high-paid chief executives
has widened and widened. The richest 1% of Americans
have more financial wealth than the bottom 95%. It
seems the American hope of a steady job, producing
rising income and a home in the suburbs, has evaporated
for many. A generation of aspiring middle-class
homeowners have been wiped out by the recession. "Poor
people just don't have the political clout to lobby and
get what they need in the way Wall Street does," said
Brother Jerry.
There is little doubt that Detroit is ground zero for
the parts of America that are still suffering. The city
that was once one of the wealthiest in America is a
decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline. It
was once one of the greatest cities in the world. The birthplace of the
American car industry, it boasted factories that at one time produced cars
shipped over the globe. Its downtown was studded with architectural gems,
and by the 1950s it boasted the highest median income and highest rate of
home ownership of any major American city. Culturally it gave birth to
Motown Records, named in homage to Detroit's status as "Motor City".
Decades of white flight, coupled with the collapse of
its manufacturing base, especially in its world-famous
auto industry, have brought the city to its knees. Half
a century ago it was still dubbed the "arsenal of
democracy" and boasted almost two million citizens,
making it the fourth-largest in America. Now that
number has shrunk to 900,000.
Its once proud suburbsnow contain row after row of
burnt-out houses. Empty factories and apartment
buildings haunt the landscape, stripped bare by
scavengers. Now almost a third of Detroit - covering a
swath of land the size of San Francisco - has been
abandoned. Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have
sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class
suburbs. Even downtown, one ruined skyscraper sprouts a
pair of trees growing from the rubble.
The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. The
average house price in Detroit is only $7,500, with
many homes available for only a few hundred dollars.
Not that anyone is buying. At a recent auction of 9,000 confiscated city
houses, only a fifth found buyers.
The city has become such a byword for decline that Time magazine recently
bought a house and set up a reporting team there to cover the city's
struggles for a year. There has been no shortage of grim news for Time's new
"Assignment Detroit" bureau to get their teeth into. Recently a semi-riot
broke out when the city government offered help in paying utility bills.
Need was so great that thousands of people turned up for a few application
forms. In the end police had to control the crowd, which included the sick
and the elderly, some in wheelchairs. At the same time national headlines
were created after bodies began piling up at the city's mortuary. Family
members, suffering under the recession, could no longer afford to pay for
funerals.
Incredibly, despite such need, things are getting worse
as the impact of the recession has bitten deeply into
the city's already catastrophic finances. Detroit is
now $300m in debt and is cutting many of its
beleaguered services, such as transport and street
lighting.
As the number of bus routes shrivels and street lights
are cut off, it is the poorest who suffer. People like
TJ Taylor. He is disabled and cannot work. He relies on
public transport. It has been cut, so now he must walk.
But the lights are literally going out in some places,
making already dangerous streets even more threatening.
"I just avoid those areas that are not lit. I pity for
the poor people who live in them," he said.
The brutal truth, some experts say, is that Detroit is
being left behind - and it is not alone. In cities
across America a collapsed manufacturing base has been
further damaged by the recession and has led to
conditions of dire unemployment and the creation of an underclass. Richard
Feldman, a former Detroit car- worker and union official turned social
activist, sees disaster across the country. Sitting in a downtown Detroit
bar, he lists a grim roll call of cities across America where decline is
hitting hard and where the official end of the recession will make little
difference.
Names such as Flint, Youngstown, Buffalo, Binghamton,
Newton. Feldman sees a relentless decline for working-
class Americans all the way from Iowa to New York. He
sees the impact in his own family, as his retired parents-in-law have
difficulties with their gutted pension fund and his disabled son stares at
cuts to his benefits. The economic changes going on, he believes, are a
profound de-industrialisation with which America is failing to come to
terms.
"We are going to have to face the end of the industrial
age," he said. "This didn't just happen last October
either. It's been happening here in Detroit since the
1980s. Detroit just got it first, but it could happen
anywhere now."
The busy highway of Eight Mile Road marks the border
between the city of Detroit and its suburbs. On one
side stretches the city proper with its mainly black population; on the
other stretches the progressively more wealthy and more white suburbs of
Oakland County. But this recession has reached out to those suburbs, too.
Repossessions have spread like a rash down the streets of Oakland's
communities. Joblessness has climbed, spurred by yet another round of mass
lay-offs in the auto industry. Feldman recently took a tour down Eight Mile
Road and was shocked by what he saw: "I went door-to-door north and south of
Eight Mile and I could not tell the difference any more. I did not believe
it until I saw it."
Professor Robin Boyle, an urban planning expert at
Detroit's Wayne State University, believes the real
impact of the recession will continue to be felt in
those suburbs for years to come. For decades they stood
as a bulwark against the poverty of the city, ringing
it like a doughnut of prosperity, with decrepit inner
Detroit as the hole at its centre.
Now home losses and job cuts are hitting the middle
classes hard. "Recovery is going to take a generation,"
he said. "The doughnut itself is sick now. But what do
you think that means for the poor people who live in
the hole?"
That picture is borne out by the recent actions of
Gleaners Community Food Bank. The venerable Detroit
institution has long sent out parcels of food, clothing
and furniture all over the city. But now it is doing so
to the suburbs as well, sometimes to people who only a
year or so ago had been donors to the charity but now
face food shortage themselves.
Gleaners has delivered a staggering 14,000 tonnes of
food in the past 12 months alone. Standing in a huge
warehouse full of pallets of potatoes, cereals, tinned
fruit and other vitals, Gleaners' president, DeWayne
Wells, summed up the situation bluntly: "People who
used to support this programme now need it themselves.
The recession hit them so quickly they just became overwhelmed."
In Detroit many people see the only signs of recovery
as coming from themselves. As city government retreats
and as cuts bite deep, some of those left in the city
have not waited for help. Take the case of Mark
Covington. He was born and raised in Detroit and still
lives only a few yards from the house where he grew up
in one of the city's toughest neighbourhoods. Laid off
from his job as an environmental engineer, Covington
found himself with nothing to do. So he set about
cleaning up his long-suffering Georgia Street
neighbourhood.
He cleared the rubble where a bakery had once stood and
planted a garden. He grew broccoli, strawberries,
garlic and other vegetables. Soon he had planted two
other gardens on other ruined lots. He invited his
neighbours to pick the crops for free, to help put food
on their plates. Friends then built an outdoor screen
of white-painted boards to show local children a movie
each Saturday night and keep them off the streets. He
helped organise local patrols so that abandoned homes
would not be burnt down. He did all this for free. All
the while he still looked desperately for a job and
found nothing.
Yet Georgia Street improved. Local youths, practised in vandalism and the
destruction of abandoned buildings, have not touched his gardens. People
flock to the movie nights, harvest dinners and street parties Covington
holds. Inspired, he scraped together enough cash to buy a derelict shop and
an abandoned house opposite his first garden. He wants to reopen the shop
and turn the house into a community centre for children. To do it, he needs
a grant. Or a cheap bank loan. Or a job. But for people like Covington the
grants have dried up, the banks are not lending, and no one is hiring. There
is no help for him.
It is hard not to compare Covington's struggle for cash
to the vast bailout of America's financial industry.
"We just can't get a loan to help us out. The banks are
not lending," he said. On an unseasonal warm day last
week, he stood in his urban garden, tending his crops,
and gazed wistfully at the abandoned buildings that he
now owns but cannot yet turn into something good for
his neighbourhood. He does not seem bitter. But he does
wonder why it seems so easy in modern America for those
who already have a lot to get much more, while those
who have least are forgotten.
"It makes me wonder how they do it. And where is that
money coming from?" he asked.
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