Take Detroit’s Urban Policy Reality Tour

Posted by hpayne on July 9, 2013

At Warren Avenue and Central, just across the Detroit border from Dearborn's thriving Arab district, the landscape suddenly turns bleak with abandoned streets and burned-out storefronts.

Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has canceled his planned bus tour for city creditors visiting insolvent Detroit this week, but the idea should not be shelved. Indeed, it should be expanded. A tour of Motown’s mean streets should be a regular feature for policymakers because Detroit is a monument to 45 years of failed liberal urban policy. Beyond the city’s downtown square mile of corporate headquarters and sports stadiums, the tour would reveal Detroit’s apocalyptic, 137 square miles of abandoned buildings, empty lots, and violence-torn neighborhoods.

Call it the Urban Policy Reality Tour. It should be mandatory for every politician in America.

Orr’s arrival has brought the welcome eyes of an unprejudiced outsider. Where many Detroiters are in denial, Orr has expressed shock not just at the city’s finances – but also at the area’s alarming state of neglect.

Detroit is a jarring experience of comprehensive urban blight. In his visits to The Detroit News editorial board, Orr has not hidden his own emotional reaction. I welcome his instinct to explain how the city must cultivate a tax base from its fallow blocks and buildings lest the financial restructuring go for naught. But a creditors-only toiur reinforces the city’s self-image that it is a victim of outsiders. Yes, one can’t discount the loss of auto jobs to automation, but this is what aggressive liberal urban policy was supposed to repair by providing resources and education for families to make the transition to new horizons.

Instead, the liberal dream helped bear the Detroit nightmare.

The policymakers’ tour could go in any direction. North along Hamilton or Cass downtown – once thriving shopping streets now pocked with blight. Or northeast on Gratiot or John R to see decaying warehouses give way to murderous neighborhoods.

But I would insist that the tour guide start the tour – not in Detroit – but on its western border on Warren Avenue in Dearborn. Warren is the commercial heart of Metro Detroit’s 90,000 strong Arab community, heavy with English-challenged immigrants eager for the American dream. The avenue is alive with grocers, restaurants, and appliance stores servicing the neat, safe, working-class neighborhoods behind it. Murders per 100,000 residents: 3.1.

But when Warren Avenue crosses Central Avenue, the western border of Detroit, the landscape dramatically changes. Like someone has flipped a switch, the streets are suddenly abandoned. Storefronts are abandoned, sidewalks choked with grass, neighborhoods pocked with burned-out homes. Murder per 100,000 residents? 54 in 2012.

What has changed? A municipal line.

Detroit leaders like John Conyers insist the difference is racism, but that’s a hard case to make when the minority populations on both sides of the line have felt the heavy slap of intolerance. Indeed, the communities that surround Detroit are an American melting pot of Arab, Jew, Indian and black. Yet Detroit struggles while Metro Detroit prospers.

America has suffocated Detroit with compassion, pouring in billions of dollars beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities Program in 1966. Trouble is, the liberal medicine turned to poison. Welfare assistance such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children ripped apart families from black Detroit to white Appalachia, providing perverse incentives for father and mother to stay unmarried. Today, 80 percent of Detroit children grow up without a father – up from 25 percent in 1960 before Washington’s welfare largesse.

In immigrant-heavy Dearborn family is a fundamental building block for education and work ethic. Across the Detroit border, family has collapsed – a void that breeds every city pathology. Without fathers as role models, young boys drift into the city’s unemployable, 47 percent adult illiterate class. According to academic research, over 50 percent of black men in Detroit are high-school dropouts, 72 percent of them jobless, 60 percent have done prison time. In 1966 the murder rate stood at 13 per 100,000 residents. By 1976 it had climbed to 51 per 100,000 and has hovered there since.

Family wasn’t the only fundamental political leadership neglected. Detroit public schools, despite the highest per pupil expenditure in the state, fail their clients. Resources for basic police and fire service have been starved by payouts to greedy union leadership as 65 percent of the city’s budget will soon go to pension and health benefit costs.

No police, no ambulance service, no safety, no schools, no security. No wonder the middle-class has fled Detroit. That is what Warren Avenue teaches the Urban Policy Reality Tour. Michigan politicians should take it. President Obama should take it.

Policy matters. And without a change in policy, Kevyn Orr’s city restructuring will be futile.

Comments are closed.