Always at the expense of Detroit

Though I've lived in the Detroit area for 33 years I didn't grow up here. And I certainly wasn't part of the white flight that began leaving the city in the 1950s. I don't have the fear and animosity of Detroit that some of my neighbors do, the ones who are proud of how many decades since they've set foot in within the city limits.

From my perch here in the suburbs some of the stories of Detroit city management seem rather strange. Why can't they seem to get it together? Why do they continually accuse suburbanites of stealing city assets? The latest examples are Cobo Hall and Belle Isle. Why are city leaders (who are black) so willing and successful in playing the race card decade after decade? Why is the city gov't so continually incompetent, tied in knots over trivial matters?

John Mogk, a professor at Wayne State Law School, explains a great deal of this in an editorial that appeared in Sunday's Free Press. The specific issue he talks about is the Hantz farm project. John Hantz has proposed buying up 1500 vacant lots around the city, cleaning them up, paying the property taxes, and turning the lots into urban forests with wood to harvest.

Sounds great, doesn't it? The city is in a financial mess and every dollar in taxes would be welcome. There is also a desperate need to do something with all those vacant lots. And the income from the harvest and jobs for the lumberjacks is sorely needed. So why didn't this sail through the City Council. Why isn't it a no-brainer?

Mogk lists several reasons. The first is mistrust. The population of Detroit is about 80% black now. And throughout American history blacks have gotten the short end of the stick. Even after slavery and Jim Crow the blacks feel they exist to be exploited by the whites. In Detroit when a highway and a big urban renewal project went through in the 1950s it destroyed the center of the black culture in the city. Even the recent mortgage mess has hit Detroit harder than the 'burbs. There are a lot of reasons why blacks don't trust whites.

The second reason was misunderstanding. The Hantz project has a 100 acre chunk of land as its core. There aren't many tracts of 100 contiguous acres in the city. So if the city is going to sell a chunk that size to Hantz the perception is that somebody is going to be displaced, even though a 2006 amendment to the Mich. constitution prevents that kind of deal. And if people will be displaced for a tree farm, what's going to stop that land grab like the one in the 1950s?

The third reason is misrepresentation. There has been lots of talk lately about, "The future of Michigan depends on the future of Detroit." That implies the state doesn't prosper unless its biggest city does. But the residents of Detroit see right through that. If the prosperity of Michigan truly depended on the prosperity of the city, the fortunes of the city would have been quite different over the last 60 years.

It seems every time the black leadership of the city has faced off with the white leadership of the state it has been at the expense of the city. And local leadership and residents don't see that changing any time soon.