Dream Cruise in Detroit?

According to a Nolan Finley story in today's Detroit News regional bigwigs have been having serious talks about expanding the annual Woodward Dream Cruise to include other communities in the area including the city of Detroit. Seems that the event has grown into a monster that the current host communities can no longer handle without some additional help. Officials are also looking for ways to capture more income on the one-day event which is essentially a break-even proposition. This year's cruise is Aug. 18. For cruise info go to http://www.woodwarddreamcruise.com/.

Land Use One Key to City's Future

There is no magic solution that will cure all of Detroit's ills and return it to its more livable past. But we still have to look for a set of interlocking solutions that will revive the city and make it once again attractive to existing and new residents.

One of those solutions lies in the reclamation and re-use of its vast acres of open space created by the abandonment of neighborhoods. According to a recent article in Harper's magazine, one-third of Detroit's 120 square miles is now open space where housing or commercial establishments once stood.

Some efforts to make use of this space have been underway for several years such as urban farming , small parks, and new housing. While commendable and holding promise, these efforts thus far are spotty. New housing in the neighborhoods is essentially replacement housing that will be purchased by current upwardly mobile residents who already live in the city and who will be leaving older housing that will eventually be demolished. This is different than the new lofts and condos popping up downtown that attract young, high-income residents who come from the suburbs or are job transplants from another city.

It might be too late to redevelop all the vacant land available today. We might have to find a way to physically "shrink" the city to accommodate its future residents that in about 10 years will number between 750-800,000, if current census trends continue. This population decline does not have to be a bad thing if the city's demographics change to include more upper middle class and affluent residents. But it would also include a massive selling to or trading-for-services with Wayne County to rightsize the city to fit its new, smaller population. A police force and fire department that with time will likely get smaller will not be able to patrol today's 120-square-mile city that once held nearly two million people.

Today's Detroit Free Press, has a front page feature story talks about the cost of duplicated public services in the suburbs and pros and cons of merging them to save money and improve delivery. This is always a cantankerous issue with often bitter debates about local home rule and local autonomy. Given Detroit's social history, any talk of merging or selling public services is usually stonewalled. Perhaps the time has come to get real.

Last Word on the Riots

For weeks I've been waiting for the right moment to weigh in on this month's Big Story -- the 40th anniversary of the "riots" that took place in Detroit the week of July 23, 1967. Journalists, historians and academicians have been tapping feverishly at their keyboards to render their weighty opinions of what really happened and the affect it has had on our great city. I've been reading as much as I can -- the Detroit News has been running a special section called "Panic in Detroit." I've read Jack Lessenberry in Metro Times, Paul Lee in the Michigan Citizen, Jack Anderson in the Chronicle, Julia Vitullo-Martin in the Wall Street Journal, and many more. There is nothing I can add to this body of work, so I will just throw out a few observations:

The riot-rebellion did not kill the city. There is no question that the riot-rebellion was the single-most hurtful event in the devastation of Detroit, but the city's decline was already in motion. White flight began in the fifties. The suburbs and shopping malls were already growing rapidly. The expressways were already in place, criss-crossing through the city, sucking the dollars and life out of it, after destroying wide swaths of viable neighborhoods and dislocating thousands of mostly lower class whites and blacks. The riot-rebellion expedited a process that was already happening. It just poured gas on the fire.

We'll never know what Detroit would have been like had the riots never occurred. If they hadn't, perhaps today's Detroit would be about 65 percent black, rather than the 90 percent it is. It makes me mad to have to say it, but a better balance between black and white would have meant a stronger tax base, something we lost with the flight of the white (and now black) middle-class.

Without the riot-rebellion, possibly 30 percent of the commercial development that occurred along the Northwestern-Lodge corridor and in other parts of Oakland County in the past 40 years would have taken place downtown. Then, downtown never would have hit the skids that it did in the late seventies before slowly recovering to what it is today. Without '67, our neighborhoods would still have had serious problems, but the entire city would not look like today's "one huge ghetto" -- except for maybe five pockets of good neighborhoods that we have now. Without '67, the school system perhaps would have fared better, but I really don't know.

And reliable sources say maybe we would not have lost Motown Records had the riot-rebellion not happened. According to the Wall Street Journal story: "The riots had propelled one of the greatest black economic engines the country had ever known -- Motown Records, founded in 1959 -- to eventually depart for Los Angeles. After receiving a taunting phone call that Motown would burn to the ground by Halloween, founder Berry Gordy moved most operations to a secure office building close to downtown, away from the riots he had called 'a hurricane of rage.'"

None of us will every really know. That's all I have to say about the riots.

DDOT Seeking Public Input on 3 Rapid Transit Lines

The Detroit Department of Transportation will host four public meetings this week to ascertain public support for three possible rapid transit routes. The options, all of which include a three-mile stretch of Woodward between downtown and New Center, are:

Woodward to Eight Mile; Michigan Avenue to Dearborn, near Fairlane Mall and University of Michigan-Dearborn; and Gratiot to Eight Mile.

These three alignments were deemed worthy of further study for several reasons, including public support at an earlier round of public hearings, population, housing and employment density, major destinations, traffic volume, bus ridership, and concentration of car-less households. Modes being evaluated include bus rapid transit, light rail and upgraded traditional bus service.

The public meetings are being conducted under the auspices of the Detroit Transit Options for Growth Study (DTOGS) and are a step in the Federal Transit Authority-mandated process that must be followed in order to apply for federal funding.

DTOGS is expected to be complete by the end of the year, at which time the FTA will receive a recommended alignment and mode.

Each meeting will begin with an hour-long open house that will be followed by a presentation and public comments. The meeting schedule is:

Wednesday, July 25 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Guardian Building

Wednesday, July 25 from 5 to 8 p.m. at Wayne State University's Welcome Center

Thursday, July 26 from 5 to 8 p.m. at Wayne County Community College's Cooper Community Center

Saturday, July 28 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn

Urban Agricultural Growing in Detroit

What do we do with the open spaces of Detroit? Of its 120 square miles of land, nearly 40 square miles are now open spaces -- the byproduct of abandonment of the city. One use of this land is urban agricultural. There's a group that's been working at this since 1998 and today is known as Earth Works Garden . Today, some 300 agricultural projects exist within the city of Detroit. This is a national movement that is part environmental and part urban reclamation. Regardless of your thoughts on oil, its rising cost is a certainty and perhaps urban farming will be one part of Detroit's future.

Boblo Boat Comes Home

One of Detroit's storied Bob-Lo Boats, the S.S. Ste. Claire was towed from Cleveland to Detroit recently to be part of the festivities at the opening of the city's new Riverwalk. Owners are attempting to restore the boat to near originality. You can tour the boat for a donation of $5 at the foot of Rivard St., near Chene Park.

Beating Crime Requires Strong Families and Neighborhoods

Adolph Mungo, Michigan political consultant and general observer of the Detroit scene, recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Detroit News that really nails the crime situation in Detroit. Mungo says that the real problem there are so many killings and other major crimes in our city is that: "Criminals are not afraid of the police and, worst of all, many of them have more firepower than the police." (I suppose it's also safe to say that criminals are not afraid of their victims.)

I agree with this observation and others in Mungo's article. However, Mungo fails to address the core problem. We are now on our second generation of inner city youth who have grown up without any parental control or a decent family life where two parents instilled family and community values. They drop out of school, mimic the thug life, join gangs, get illegal guns. As a result we have criminals running wild, attacking at will. Police can only respond after the fact.

The community does nothing about it. Oh, there are marches, and neighborhood meetings and sermons on Sunday. But the community continues to look to the police, the mayor's office, and other government agencies and institutions to solve the problem, when the solution lies within each and everyone of us as individuals to take responsibility for our children, our neighborhoods and our city. Too many Detroiters are accustomed to a culture wherein people wait around for "them" to fix the problem --"When are they going to do something about this crime?"

The police get blamed for their inability to stop criminal behavior that has become normalized in our city. According to FBI statistics, Detroit has the highest crime rate and murder rate per capita than any other major city. The police spend most of their time running from one crime scene to the next, rather than working to prevent crime. They can crack down in a certain area and cut crime for a minute in that area. But soon they will have to leave that area to crack down in another, and crime goes back up in the first area.

Community activists will tell us that the community's lack of any substantive response to crime is the result of poverty which creates single-parent households and other related issues, and certainly that's a part of it. But until citizens unite and as Mungo says, "rise up against crime," the killings and robberies will continue.

End of Blackness

Several years ago I read The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson and was impressed by her facile and intellectual writing style and the force of her message. In her book Dickerson concludes that we’ve gotten all that we are going to get from whites in terms of apology or concession, that through begrudging white acquiescence and black determination, blacks have made tremendous strides in the past 45 years since the Civil Rights Movement, that racism is not dead but has morphed into a new, less virulent strain that while still harmful no longer prevents blacks from achievement, and most importantly, that blacks should stop looking to whites to solve their problems but rather find solutions within themselves as individuals and from within their own community.

I pulled Blackness off the shelf recently and began to read it again, as I do with most books that I really enjoy. I expected to savor again some of the lucid, clear points that Dickerson makes in this very insightful and pragmatic writing. But something is happening this time around. I’m picking up a vibe that I’m not sure whether I missed the first time, or that my views have since shifted – probably to the right but still left of center – since I last read the book and I’m reading it now through a different prism. From this reading of Blackness I’m feeling from her an edge, an anger, even a meanness that I didn’t feel before.

I know that a black person writing meanly about white people should come as no surprise, and is with justification. I’m used to taking a beating, as a white, reading black literature of the fifties, sixties and later, about black oppression and victimization, about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and overt racism, about how a white can take no comfort in racial ignorance, that all whites are guilty, actively or passively, in America’s great Original Sin. I fully understand, though no longer fully accept, that today's white cannot wash his hands of the racism of centuries ago by simply saying I wasn’t there. Such readings for me have always had a purging effect, as if reading the work of an angry black author was a cleansing, washing away at least some of the white guilt, and possibly – though rarely – showing me the way to salvation from the racial swamp that we all have to muck around in.

Writings like Dickerson’s always leave me perplexed. As a white reader you take a real pounding from constant reminders of how your being white ties you permanently to our nation’s treatment of blacks first as as slaves, then victims of the Jim Crow era, followed by being the recipients of the various forms of overt and invidious racism of the 20th century up to today.

The black writers remind a white person how barren is his soul of love, how hopelessly egocentric and Eurocentric he is. What’s perplexing is that nothing concrete is offered as to how whites can help. I believe that the vast majority of whites want to do the right thing when it comes to helping other Americans in need, regardless of race. But whites today don't know what to do when it comes to being part of the race solution, if there even is one, and blacks have nothing substantive to offer them as to how to help. (Dickerson at least offers a strategy for blacks to follow.)

Most of us have come to recognize that blacks historically have been treated egregiously and, we are willing to take part in something to make things right. America has been trying to do that for the past 45 years. First, the black-led Civil Rights Movement blew the doors off old-school racism, prejudice and discrimination. Then President Johnson ushered in the $7 trillion Great Society that harmed more than helped black America, destroying the black family and black manhood with open-ended welfare. Maybe whites have not embraced the change, but we have accepted it as inevitable, and we either stepped aside and let it happen, or jumped in and helped to bring about the change. After all, the vast majority of the social workers and social engineers of the Great Society where white liberals, motivated by a blend of white guilt and a sincere, if naive, desire to do good.

Dickerson thinks that because American culture is out there, highly visible for all to see on television, film, art, and the Internet that blacks know what whites thinking and feeling. Black race writers always see whites as transparent, an easy read. They still rely on the dated model of the old days, when blacks worked in the midst of white folks but were invisible as slaves, domestics, and menial laborers. And whites carried on with their lives in the presence of these blacks as if they were invisible. Or some blacks became close friends or confidantes and were brought in on the nuances of white life. But those days are past. Today, all our shit is hanging out there – black, white, Latino, whoever. And all of us from all cultures and groups in America know, or have access to, what the others are thinking, or how they feel on a certain topic. There are no more racial secrets in America. We’re the Mulatto Nation now.