Mourning Detroit

I’ve never been to Detroit. I don’t know much about the city or anyone who lives there to be honest. All that I have learned about the city of Detroit has been from TV series or newspaper stories about corruption, degeneration, and overall the death of a once great American city. I can’t help but mourn the slow death that Detroit has experienced. I’m a big fan of the urban jungle and I always want every city to thrive. That Detroit has been allowed to die off says a lot about how the state of Michigan feels about the city of Detroit and its people, but it also says a lot about the citizens of Detroit. This city’s demise brings up questions about autonomy. Can cities really thrive on their own without the involvement of the state government? Are there enough good people around to make sure that funds that are made available to a city are used properly? Are there enough trustworthy and hopeful people to make business people want to invest in the city and its population?

If you’re lucky enough to live in a place like New York City, you’d agree that cities can and should be autonomous. NYC after all is a great hub for business and attracts some of the best minds in the world to its blocks and skyscrapers. But there are other cities that don’t fare well. The problems of Detroit can be placed squarely on the shoulders of a decayed auto industry, but that would be an incredible sleight of hand that does little to unearth the true problems of a city like Detroit. Take a city like Pittsburgh for instance. It was once a great steel town, and then all the businesses moved away. Yet Pittsburgh has survived and rebranded itself, so much that it is viewed across the United States as one of the best cities to live in. One thing that Pittsburgh has that Detroit lacks is an educated population. There are few residents of Detroit who have a college education. In this fast paced world we live in, a college education is vital. Businesses need an educated workforce to be successful. And perhaps that is one way to explain the decline of Detroit. But there certainly has to be other reasons. Detroit has been in decline for such a long time. And because of this property value has plummeted. So why haven’t businesses in need of space moved some of their operations to the city of Detroit? Why haven’t the likes of Apple, Google and countless other tech companies in need of massive campuses sought to buy space in Detroit? Here we come back to the case of education. Surely these companies worry about having a work force. But Ann Arbor is not too far from Detroit, and it has a massive college educated network.

The truth of the matter is that to get to the root of Detroit’s problems would require an inquiry of considerable depth. At the moment the city appears to be nothing more than a poisonous pill. Yet it is also a sign of hope. Detroit can rise once more, as phoenix does. This is the perfect moment in this city’s history for innovation. This is the perfect opportunity for businesses, schools, and non-profit organizations to come in and rebuild the city of Detroit. This is the perfect time to make this city into what it had always threatened to be. The question that remains, is who amongst the American elite has the courage and the vision to affect change and bring about prosperity to a city long yearning for a savior?