Week 4 Blog

To say I have a lot of thoughts about Detroit’s recent development, based on our readings, would be an understatement. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take this time to provide some of those thoughts for public judgement and hope you find my word vomit endearing.

I can’t say anything particularly surprised me about how Detroit has developed, but what stood out to me is the way that Detroit’s revival has entirely focused on the downtown 7.2 area. Driving from my site to downtown, it is very obvious that the city’s resources have failed to reach anywhere outside of this small section of the city, and the reason for this is a shifting of the focus of cities from areas for people to live to vanity projects and sources of modern capital. With few exceptions, such as Portland, Seattle, and other cities which have attempted to implement progressive policy measures in response to development, modern cities are attempting to solve their crisis of deindustrialization by copying Richard Florida’s model which, I suspect, is inspired by New York’s gradual migration from industrialization to global finance. This model? The attraction of an amorphous “creative class” which in reality simply means the modern upper-middle class, such as lawyers, college educated tech workers, doctors, and even millionaires and billionaires. The problem, obviously, is that not every city can be New York or San Francisco, with their sources of global finance and technology. While these cities do face issues with gentrification, there is still something to be said for the existence of a city culture. New York City is extremely expensive, but the city is still intended for living in. The same could be said for San Francisco. While the tech industry has gentrified the Bay Area and driven out locals, there is still some degree of culture. The same can not be said for the new Detroit, the 7.2 which has been “revitalized” since 2013. Like Moskowitz writes, the area has turned into a center for a few billionaires and non-profits to buy property and host tech and finance companies. Their workers are housed there, in both downtown and midtown, ferried back and forth by a largely privately funded tram system. I don’t mean to parrot the thesis of the book, but the 7.2 has become more a center for business production than a vibrant city.

The 7.2 ultimately fails at being a livable city due to this fact. In the city’s quest to throw a band-aid on their decades of economic failure, they opened their doors to a trojan horse of capital in the hopes this would be the one scenario without the waiting Greeks. Rather than develop the downtown to encourage Detroiters to reestablish local businesses, affordable housing, and a vibrant community, the city brought in billionaires to inject funds, who in turn brought their workers, who in turn brought opportunistic small business owners capitalizing on the availability of disposable income. There foreigners, for lack of better words, and I can not say I am immune to this trend, pushed out the residents of rent controlled apartments and local houses to establish themselves, only temporarily. Because while they establish their coffee shops, their revitalized parks, and profess, as one says in the book, that “everyone wants to be friends,” they will not be here for long. When you orient a city around capital production, the result is an uncontrollable growth in costs for residents. While the yuppies come in and pay their too-high rents with their tech and finance salaries, their contribution to revitalizing the downtown will make their own apartments and condos hot commodities. Maybe their work will fund a proper metro and new park next to their residence, which will drive the value up even higher. They’ll be priced out, and in will come those from the next income level. This will continue until all that’s left are temporary residences for those one step below the upper class.

Or, the yuppies will simply leave when they want to have kids and families, because the creation of a city to attract young, unmarried professionals and only them doesn’t lay the groundwork for good family living in the downtown. While a 25 year old tech bro can find enjoyment in working from home, biking to a park, and going to drinks with new young friends in the city’s downtown, the grounds for a sustainable community of the elderly, the lower-middle class, the single mothers, and the children, are gone. From my own experience in downtown, I struggle to think of it as a place where community can establish itself in the model of Jane Jacobs. Once the yuppies wish to settle down, they’ll leave for suburbs, and continue their work from home. In their place will be more of them, an endless cycle of immigration and exodus where the original inhabitants become forgotten memories of a plutocracy of 7.2 miles.