Twin Cities: New Orleans and Detroit

What is it about this north-south line of demarcation that records such a common and desperate statistic? After Hurricane Katrina, the population in the greater New Orleans area declined an understandable 29%. Aside from folks who were just plain scared, there were a whole lot more whose homes and places of work underwent a “liquidity” crisis of unbridled proportions. There is still unrepaired damage in the Crescent City, more than half a decade since the rising waters from broken levees decimated the area.

What’s Detroit’s excuse? It ranks second among cities of 100,000 or more, according to the U.S. Census, to have contracted by 25% or more… the actual number of Detroit’s population shrinkage over the past decade. But Detroit’s plight was its unfortunate status as capital of the rust belt where two of its largest employers – General Motors and Chrysler, massive companies before their collapse – filed for protection under U.S. bankruptcy laws and reorganized into smaller entities with fewer product lines and a whole lot fewer employees… with those who did remain making less in pay and benefits. The remaining big competition, Ford, didn’t need bankruptcy to leverage its unions into lower pay and benefits; they just saw the writing on the wall. Suppliers were proportionately slammed.

By sheer numbers, the 237,500 people who deserted Detroit dwarfed the New Orleans departees by almost 100,000 (140,000 left that Delta city). 185,393 of these Detroit deserters were African-American; the whites left mostly in the 1960s. When I go to hockey games in Los Angeles – yes, I admit it; I am a Kings fan with season seats – and the Detroit Red Wings are in town, the stands are filled with Wings fans, all across the arena. You’d almost think we were in the Motor City with all those red and white Jerseys littering the stands. I would remark jokingly, “I guess no one really wants to live in Detroit anymore.” Except it’s not a joke; it’s reality. In nearby Pontiac, Michigan, the massive Silverdome football stadium, built 37 years ago for $55.7 million dollars, was sold in 2009 for chump change – $583,000 – because the annual maintenance costs were decimating the city treasury.

When my Web-master, Drew Gross, saw a listing for a four bedroom, three bath single family home in the Detroit area for $15,000, he got excited at the prospect of home ownership, a distant dream even in home-price-damaged Los Angeles. The online photographs looked pretty inviting, but a check on Google Earth revealed that it was the only structure standing in an otherwise rubble-infested block. The March 22^nd New York Times tells us more: “Detroit’s population fell to 713,777 in 2010, the lowest since 1910, when it was 466,000. In a shift that was unthinkable 20 years ago, Detroit is now smaller than Austin, Tex., Charlotte, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla.

“‘It’s a major city in free-fall,’ said L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive of neighboring Oakland County, which was also hit by the implosion of the automobile industry but whose population rose by almost 1 percent, thanks to an influx of black residents. ‘Detroit’s tax base is eroding, its citizens are fleeing and its school system is in the hands of a financial manager.’”

Back in 1970, Detroit had a population of 1.5 million, but today, it is a city of ugly, rubble-cracked over-grown weeds among abandoned buildings, from homes to larger commercial structures. The NY Times continues: “With more than 20 percent of the lots in the 139-square-mile city vacant, the mayor is in the midst of a program to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings. But for many, the city already seems hollowed out… ‘You can just see the emptiness driving in,’ said Joel Dellario, a student at the College for Creative Studies. ‘I’ve been in and out of this city my whole life, and it’s just really apparent.’” Kind of makes you wonder… which city is next? Not the America you remember as a kid growing up? Yeah…

I’m Peter Dekom, and it saddens me deeply to see this part of America in such a state of desperation and disrepair.