Detroit gets creative as it reinvents itself.
If a sense of hope is what you’re looking for, most people would tell you to avoid inner-city Detroit in the dead of winter. But here I am, driving through the city’s east side on a leaden December day in the wake of the largest municipal bankruptcy in our nation’s history, searching for signs of life. Heading down Mt. Elliott Avenue, past the ruins of the old Packard plant, past snow-covered fields where homes once existed, past abandoned storefronts and fences looped with razor wire, hope isn’t the word that comes to mind. This was once a vibrant neighborhood. At its center stood that Packard plant, 40 acres of factory filled with 30,000 workers making cars for the luxury market. Around the plant were shops and bars where those workers could spend a share of their wages, and behind them, block after block of houses built so close to one another they seemed to blend together. Detroit was a boom town then, and there wasn’t room to spare.
That was a long time ago. Packard shut its doors in 1958 and much of the neighborhood emptied out with it, the exodus driven partly by the racial tensions that had plagued the city for decades. In 1950, there were 19,000 people living near the plant, about half of them white. By the end of the century, there were 6,600, mostly black. Then those who could afford to leave moved out too. The forces that devastated the area around Mt. Elliott played out across Detroit as the factories that made the city great shut down – not just Packard but Cadillac, Hudson, Lincoln, Dodge, Fisher Body, and Chevy Gear and Axle. The city’s population plummeted from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000 in 2010, and many neighborhoods descended into poverty. Today, 42 percent of Detroiters are poor, a figure higher than that of any other major city in the country.
With Detroit’s tax base eroded by the tides of deindustrialization and depopulation, the city government piled up debt to cover costs. This process culminated in 2005, when Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor at the time, engineered a complex $1.4 billion deal with Wall Street investors. Three years later, the stock market crashed. Detroit’s deal soured. Suddenly the city couldn’t pay its bills.
When they filed Detroit’s petition for bankruptcy last year, the state officials who control the city’s beleaguered finances argued that its $18.5 billion debt was strangling its citizens. They were right. Servicing the debt consumed so much of the municipal budget that City Hall couldn’t maintain basic services. At the nadir, two-thirds of ambulances were no longer running. The public transportation system barely functioned. The public schools were hemorrhaging money, and the police department took almost an hour on average to respond to calls for help. An old joke often circulates among expats in times like these: “Last one out, turn off the lights” – though the humor falls flat when 40 percent of the city’s streetlights have already gone dark.
Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager, has since pieced together a financial settlement that promises to pull Detroit out of debt – a significant step, though it won’t solve the profound structural problems that precipitated the bankruptcy and continue to plague the region. Detroit still needs to rebuild its tax base. It still has to replace some portion of the jobs it has lost. Most of all, it must confront the poverty that still grips so many of its neighborhoods, a crisis that will haunt residents long after the debt is cleared.
Detroiters have been active in the resuscitation of their beloved city, offering hopeful visions of what recovery might look like. Two of Detroit’s most influential businessmen – billionaires Mike Ilitch and Dan Gilbert, the heads of the Little Caesars Pizza chain and Quicken Loans, respectively – have launched ambitious development projects downtown, where an imposing collection of art deco skyscrapers and Jazz Age movie palaces follows Woodward Avenue a mile north from the Detroit River. Ilitch plans to create a massive entertainment zone on the neighborhood’s northern edge, around the historic Fox Theatre and the gleaming baseball stadium where the Detroit Tigers play. (He owns the team.) Gilbert has moved the Quicken offices downtown and filled buildings in the heart of the city with high-tech companies and startups as part of an initiative he calls Detroit 2.0.
His relentless promotion has helped bring the occupancy rate in downtown office buildings up to 85 percent from 74 percent two years ago. Google, Twitter, Uber, and Microsoft Ventures have taken up part of the space, smaller local enterprises have flocked to it, and upscale retailers have followed the money. Residents now walk around with Whole Foods bags over their shoulders, and hip restaurants and bars have drummed up foot traffic around the central business district. Acclaimed watch manufacturer Shinola – named for a shoe polish company that flourished in the early 20th century – aims to preserve the city’s tradition of craftsmanship, slinging leather goods out of a tidy Midtown storefront and cheerfully proclaiming that Detroit is “Where American is made.” But the clearest sign of commercial progress may be the return of the prodigal Starbucks franchise, which had abandoned downtown Detroit six years ago. A new store opened across from the bustle of Campus Martius Park in April.
On Mt. Elliott Avenue, and in the poor communities that have borne the brunt of Detroit’s devastation, blended espresso and elegant watches don’t inspire much hope. For all the excitement Detroit 2.0 has generated, the benefits of large-scale commercial enterprise downtown have largely bypassed the city’s most impoverished populations. Block by block and family by family, many Detroiters have sought tangible solutions rooted in a model of social enterprise more often deployed in the developing world.
On one of the last blocks before Mt. Elliott dead-ends, just a few miles east of downtown and a few blocks north of the river, sits a monastery run by the Capuchin Franciscans, a Catholic religious order that traces its origins back to St. Francis of Assisi. The friars have run a soup kitchen there for 85 years, plus a second kitchen in another poor neighborhood, providing 2,000 meals a day, five days a week, year round. Serving Detroit’s poorest residents, the friars saw that many of them had no way of altering their circumstances. So eight years ago, they started to teach the most at-risk men who came through their doors – recovering addicts and newly released prisoners – how to bake bread and hired them to work in the kitchen. In 2009, the Capuchins opened their own bakery on a barren commercial strip not far from the monastery and staffed it with graduates of the program and regular rounds of new trainees. The next year they added a companion program in urban agriculture, a popular use for many of the city’s vacant lots, this time targeting the chronically unemployed.
The Capuchins aren’t alone or even especially distinctive in their pursuit of sustainable transformations. Detroit has become a hub for hyper-local nonprofits and development initiatives committed to building the connections that tie residents to their communities. One puts young people to work repairing houses in low-income areas. Another trains women as lactation consultants to help new mothers breastfeed their babies. Yet another hires low-income high school students to plant and maintain trees in their neighborhoods. These programs operate on a minute scale, and cash flow is a constant challenge – the soup kitchen’s budget comes entirely from donations, including some from local Rotary clubs – though innovative strategies such as crowdsourcing and microlending are helping to link ideas and resources. And the results, while meaningful, are hardly grand. One woman who completed the Capuchins’ agricultural training program makes ends meet by taking care of the vegetables in her elderly neighbors’ gardens. It’s ordinary work, and it doesn’t draw much attention – except from the handful of residents who eat better because she’s there to help.
“There’s tremendous potential in people,” says Brother Jerry Smith, the soup kitchen’s executive director. “They’re capable of solving their own problems. We are trying to help them see possibilities and remove barriers.” In the process, they’re offering new possibilities for Detroit, envisioning a city grounded not in the industrial economy that once defined it or in the glittering landscape of Detroit 2.0, but in something smaller, simpler, and more intimate. A city of corner bakeries instead of food deserts, a city that replaces blighted buildings with community gardens, a city of neighborhoods pulled out of poverty one loaf of bread, one bunch of greens, one life at a time. It will take more than money to restore the frayed bonds of community across Detroit and build a better city from the bottom up, but down on Mt. Elliott, there is hope. — Kevin Boyle