MGM Grand Detroit Opening Casino Hotel

I just lifted this off the wire.

Oct. 2, 2007, 11:08AM MGM By JEFF KAROUB AP Business Writer © 2007 The Associated Press

DETROIT — Casino officials and celebrity chefs showed off $800 million worth of Las Vegas glitz amid Motown grit Tuesday _ hours before MGM Grand Detroit was to open to the public with a flashy, fireworks-studded gala.

Billed as the first Vegas-style resort built in a major metropolitan area, MGM Grand includes 400 rooms and suites, a full-service resort spa and a 17-story hotel with electronic concierges in each room. It sits a block from the temporary casino it opened it 1999.

Celebrity chefs Wolfgang Puck and Michael Mina will operate three restaurants in the new facility.

The MGM Grand Detroit was to open to the public before midnight with fireworks. Jim Murren, president and chief operating officer of MGM Mirage Inc., said the facility is not only a casino and hotel, but an "entertainment destination."

Detroit's other two casinos are working to complete their permanent sites.

Greektown Casino is spending $475 million to expand its existing facility and a 20-story hotel opens next year. MotorCity Casino is spending $275 million on a 17-story hotel to open later this fall.

The casinos are spending $1.5 billion to build sleek new hotels that are adding 1,200 luxury rooms and thousands of square feet of convention space. The three permanent sites will feature more than 220 tables and about 8,000 slots in 250,000 square feet of gaming space.

Things a Bit Brighter for City, Study Says

Ford Field, home of the 3-1 Detroit Lions

Things are looking up in Detroit. That's what a recent study released today by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says. Prepared by Social Compact, a Wash. D.C. -based urban consultancy, the study says that the city's population is actually higher than estimated by the U.S. Census bureau, crime is not as bad as perceived, and household incomes are higher than previously estimated.

While some of the findings appear to be vague or open to challenge, it is refreshing to read positive news about the city with the emphasis on economic developments rather than crime, school closings and population decline. It is also heartening to read that, according to the Social Compact, average downtown household income is $59,300 and 83 percent of its residents have at least a college education. (Ahem! -- I happen to live downtown.)

A Perspective on Jena 6

I saw this piece by Tennessean columnist Carol Swain this morning while cruising around the blogosphere, and thought it offered a calm, down-the-middle perspective on the Jena 6 affair.

When teens aren't taught value of life, it can have deadly consequences

by Carol Swain

Like most people who have followed the saga of the Jena 6, I am dismayed by the series of events preceding and following last Thursday's civil rights protest over the disparate treatment of six black teens originallycharged with attempted murder for attacking a white teen.

These details can be found online with a simple Google search. My purpose in writing is to offer another perspective based on firsthand experience. Much sport has been made of the deadly sneaker that the district attorney introduced as a weapon. What is missed is the fact that sneakers and fists can become lethal weapons under the right circumstances.

Almost a year ago, my 41-year-old brother, Kevin Henderson, died from injuries he sustained on his job after he was attacked by a group of teenage boys. According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack, five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.

It took many months for a measure of justice to occur. So far, two of the five boys have been charged with first-degree manslaughter. Like Mychal Bell, one of the boys has been held many months without bail. He awaits sentencing, and the family hopes he will go straight to prison. Most, if not all, come from single-parent households.

Perhaps the boys meant to kill him. Perhaps it was an accident. In any event, a life was lost because a gang of boys mortally wounded a man who left home for his job, not knowing that he would never return.

I offer this story of a senseless killing to provide another perspective on what might have been going on in the head of the Jena district attorney. Black crime is a serious problem that stereotypes all black youth. And it must be dealt with by a united black community that stands up and says enough is enough. Unfortunately, too many of our media-appointed leaders have failed to vigorously condemn the attack of the six against the one.

This is unfortunate. Who will teach our children to fight with pens and not fists? Who will teach them the value of life and the need for some to be peacemakers? It will certainly not be the community leaders who cut down the "white" tree, rather than share its shade. What was lost was a grand opportunity to teach our young people some badly needed lessons about bigotry, intolerance, self-respect and dignity.

I write the above as an African-American mother who has raised two black males to adulthood. I write as an American who believes that we can do better. We must heal the past, and we must all take responsibility for our actions.

Published Friday, 09/28/07 in the Tennessean.

Random Shots

While I haven't been blogging lately, I have been working on my photo collection of Detroit, sorting, deleting, organizing, and hopefully working toward my magnum opus of a photo presentation, or at least a series of slide shows about the city. Check out the two shows in the sidebar on the left: Detroit Jazz Fest and Random Shots: A Work in Progress.

Hope you enjoy, and hope to get back to blogging soon.

Successful Jazz Festival Proves Detroit Worthy

Another hugely successful Detroit International Jazz Festival is in the can, thanks to Mack Avenue Records and other major sponsors and thanks to the hundreds of thousands of music lovers who streamed into dowtown Detroit to enjoy the four- day event.

Labor Day Reflections --Part II

See Part I in Sept. 2 post, immediately below

Coleman Young

and the

Push-Pull of the Suburbs

Detroit hit the iceberg in the fifties when the J.L. Hudson Co., the city's premiere downtown department store purchased rural land at the city's northwest border of Eight Mile Road to create Northland Mall, the world's first and largest major retail mall. Later Hudson's built Eastland Mall on Eight Mile Road on the city's northeast edge. The malls spurred the development of affordable suburban housing north of Eight Mile Road in Oakland and Macomb Counties. Instantly, these malls began sucking retail business from Detroit's downtown as well as from the city's strip malls on its main drags like Livernois, Grand River, Gratiot and Michigan avenues. By the eighties Hudson's downtown store was operating at a loss and eventually, in 1992, Hudson's closed the once world- famous and elegant downtown store on Woodward Avenue. The building was empty for six years until it was imploded in 1998.

Expressway Construction Guts City

Another force was at work during the fifties that would gut Detroit. Still fresh from his experience in World War II, President Eisenhower saw the military importance of roads and said let's build a border-to-border freeway system for national defense and commerce. This led to the Federal Highway Act of 1956, the largest public works act in history and the single-most destroyer of inner cities. It also marked the end of a robust railroad system and the beginning of a booming trucking industry.

Soon, the John Lodge Expressway replaced James Couzens Road, then the Ford Expressway was built to slice east-west across the city, paralleling northeast-bound Gratiot Avenue. Both the Lodge and the Ford destroyed thousands of beautiful homes and vibrant neighborhoods and displaced thousands of black and white residents, as well as creating a new housing market for whites in blue collar suburbs like Warren. Later, the Walter P. Chrysler northbound section of I-75 would take out what was left of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley -- the original, historic neighborhoods of black Detroit.

The 1967 Riot Rebellion

The sixties brought the civil rights movement and in 1967 the infamous 12th Street riot. A smaller, similar riot occurred in 1968 on the city's east side. Detroit was still a white majority city but that would change. After the riots, whites fled Detroit like they were being chased by Hurricane Katrina.

The late sixties and early seventies were also the year when the black militancy movement swept the nation, and Detroit was one of the stages where that played out. This scared many whites and accelerated their flight from the city to its burgeoning working class suburbs. I've always thought that Detroit's last best political hope after the riots was Richard H. Austin, a prominent black accountant who aspired to public life and took a run at the mayor's office. It was 1969 and the city could have either stabilized with a racial balance of roughly 50 percent black-white, or continued hemorrhaging white people, as it ultimately did. As we know, the city ultimately shrunk in population size to about 900,000 in 2006.

Austin ran for mayor, lost in the primary and in 1971 was elected Michigan's first black Secretary of State. I think he could have had a healing effect and possibly stemmed the tide of white flight because he was a well-liked moderate Democrat. Many blacks at the time thought he was an Uncle Tom. The voters instead elected white Wayne County Sheriff Roman S. Gribbs as Mayor of Detroit. Gribbs turned out to be a caretaker mayor who squandered his single term rather than make any attempts to stem the tide of outmigration.

In 1973, blacks and white liberals elected black state senator Coleman A. Young as Mayor of Detroit. I liked Coleman and voted for him three times. He brought pride and hope to the black community, stood up to suburban hostilities, and was a charismatic public speaker. Sadly, his often incendiary rhetoric increased white fear and expedited white flight.

Die is Cast

But by then, the die was cast. Metro Detroit was experiencing what regional planners call the "push-pull effect." Whites were being pushed out of Detroit by its deteriorating public services, failing public schools, rising taxes and escalating crime. And they were being pulled to the suburbs by their new housing and infrastructure, safety, newer and better schools, and quality of life. Most of the city's white flight was racially-based. But not all of it.

The city's economy was changing, too. In the sixties, some 70 percent of all American cars were manufactured within Southeast Michigan. Today, it's less than five percent. Between 1970 and 1990, Detroit lost half of its manufacturing jobs, some 200,000, and thousands more since then. The good, skilled jobs had moved to the suburbs, leaving Detroiters without cars with a large disadvantage in getting those jobs.

Metro Population Stays Same While Housing Doubles

In 1970 some 4.8 million people lived in the seven counties of Southeast Michigan. Today, the same number -- 4.8 million -- live in Southeast Michigan. Yet the number of housing units has doubled during the same 37-year period! This means that the same number of people are living in twice the number of households. We've had zero population growth and 100 percent housing growth. All we did was develop virgin farmland, build more roads, freeways, sewers and strip malls, and suburbanize. While the region was busy with all this housing and infrastructure expansion, the city of Detroit's housing stock eroded to the point that today one-third of its 120-square mile land mass is vacant land and property. We have lost so much time, and so much of the city's housing stock and infrastructure are beyond reclaim.

Signs of Hope

Recently I see signs of hope. Redevelopment projects in the city are being done in a more thoughtful manner. I am truly impressed with downtown's revitalization and GM's work on the riverfront and th city's beautiful new RiverWalk. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's New Neighborhoods strategy holds promise. It may be too little too late, but Kwame's giving it a hell of a shot. Detroit Renaissance has just launched a plan to revitalize the region in the wake of all this recent devastation in the auto industry. The new group One D can make a difference.

Labor Day Reflections - Part I

How Did Detroit Get

To Where It's At?

The J.L Hudson Co.'s downtown store, circa 1955, courtesy of Wayne State University.

As the downward spiral of Detroit continues -- in spite of a successful revival of downtown and promising new plans for its neighborhoods -- the question often asked still is: How did we get here? Let's take a brief spin down history's lane, with me behind the wheel, of course.

The course to Detroit's current plight can be traced to the twenties when Henry Ford sent recruiters to the South to bring back busloads of black and white men to work in his factories. This was part of the Great Migration of blacks moving North seeking jobs and freedom from the Jim Crow South. In Detroit it planted the seed for what later resulted in -- compared to other Northern cities which also experienced the Great Migration -- a disproportionately high black population as a percentage of the city's entire population. All the large northern cities were recipients of the Great Migration but none ultimately were impacted by it more than Detroit.

You can see the migration's impact in the fact that Detroit's population has been a black majority since the eighties and today's remaining population of 900,000 is 90 percent black. A growing black population and a declining white population accelerated this transformation like no other major American city, except perhaps Washington D.C. Detroit was once the nation's fifth largest city with a population of 1.8 million; today it is 12th.

The recruitment of workers from the South by the auto industry and others is a watershed in Detroit's history. It is one of the main reasons that Detroit became a crucible for racial tension and a northern center of the civil rights movement. Without such a large black population, relatively speaking, the history of Detroit would have been profoundly different. I hasten to add that I am not saying that Metro Detroit's black population has been or was the cause of the city's problems in the last 45 years. The causes are many, complex and interrelated.

What Could Have Been?

I am saying that the economic and social development of Detroit and its environs would have occurred in a dramatically different way had the city received a proportionately smaller influx of blacks from the Great Migration. Although no one can every say with certainty, with a smaller beginning black population, the city's white population would have stabilized somewhere near 50 percent in the seventies. By example, the population of the city of Philadelphia in the fifties was 2.1 million. Today, Philadelphia's population is 1.2 million with a 65 percent white population. Philly lost nearly 900,000 residents, but maintained its white majority.

Detroit's total population would have settled in somewhere a tad above one million. Fewer corporations and manufacturing plants with their jobs and tax revenue would have fled. The suburban sprawl of the 70's and 80's would have not been so rapacious of both the city and its rural land use. During the last half of the 20th century, the suburbs were awash in economic growth while the city continued its decline. Imagine if only half of the growth that occurred in Oakland County over the past 40 years had taken place in the city.

Detroit's efforts to prevent a declining population and to keep whites from fleeing was hampered in the first half of the 20th century by the city's inability to annex municipalities and their tax bases and "keep" whites in the city through geographic expansion. Other large cities like Chicago, and later in the century Phoenix and Columbus OH simply kept expanding the city limits so that as white flight moved outward, the city kept those citizens as taxpayers to support schools and municipal services for the entire city. This also had the affect of maintaining a "racially balanced" city even though it would have racially segregated neighborhoods. Today other Midwest cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and others still have white majority populations.

Detroit was unable to expand physically because it has been bordered by Oakland county on the north, Macomb County on the northeast, the small city-suburb of Dearborn on the west, and the Detroit River on the south, thus making it jurisdictionally landlocked and unable to expand the city limits and hang on to its middle class tax base. Also, during the first 40 years of the 20th century, Detroit was growing and nobody was thinking about out-migration from the city, or if they did, they saw it as another sign of prosperity. Besides, there were wars to be fought and won.

Labor Day Reflections Part II appears tomorrow on Talk About Detroit.

City of Trees