Back from the Dead and Very Much Alive . . . Detroit

I was living in Livingston County, Michigan where all the white folk go. Don’t get me wrong some of the other counties east of Livingston County were nice places too. We were in white suburbia and distant from the City of Detroit. Not so distant as to ignore the city decaying. We watched and whined as the rest of the state complained about it too.

You have to understand a basic premise. Without Detroit, Michigan would have been growing veggies for the rest of the nation. It was there the big three started off. It is there; the big three automotive companies still have a presence. It is around them, the small tooling and parts companies located. Japanese companies like Yazaki located not too much further west of them. They want to sell parts and domestic automotive, the big three wanted them nearby.

If you want to sell parts to them, you are going to be nearby and also have warehouses near the plants which use those parts. Detroit is back and so is automotive although the industry still, still has some things to learn and adjust too.

Detroit needs another good mayor like Dugan who will run for Governor of Michigan.

“Tomorrow’s Election Is Hugely Important for Detroit,” Politics and Prejudices and other musings

Thirteen years ago, Detroit was at its lowest point in history. The city was insolvent, bankrupt and had been taken over by the state, which appointed an emergency manager to run it. The city was largely a rundown slum. Two-thirds of its peak population had left. There was a very real possibility that retirees would lose their pensions and that the treasures of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the finest museums in the country, would be auctioned off to pay the creditors.

That didn’t happen, because of some good and unselfish people who worked across party and class lines to save the city and lead it out of bankruptcy. The next year, in a stunning display of political maturity and savvy, the mostly Black voters of Detroit elected as mayor a white political boss from the suburbs because they thought he was the guy who could get the job done and save the city, and to a great extent, he did.

But now Mike Duggan is voluntarily leaving Detroit’s Manoogian Mansion, and running for governor instead. Tomorrow, primary election voters will choose two finalists, one of whom will be elected mayor on November 4th.

Incredibly, the city clerk estimates that fewer than one out of every five registered voters will bother to show up. What many don’t realize is that the importance of this election would be hard to exaggerate. While the city’s $3 billion budget is balanced, it wouldn’t take much to topple the city into the red again, and if that happened, it is unlikely that there would be another bailout.

If it doesn’t make you uneasy that two of the leading candidates are a 32-year-old who talks a lot about her connections to hip-hop artists and a minister with a violent past and another full-time job, I think it should.

Detroit is in far better shape than I imagined it would be a dozen years ago. But its recovery is still very delicate, and its future on the edge of a knife.

The city can’t afford to get this wrong, and its voters can’t afford not to vote.

Jack . . .