As I wrote about earlier, Time magazine has made an investment in covering the rise, fall, and potential rebirth of Detroit, purchasing a house in Indian Village and stationing a number of writers there for the foreseeable future. The goal is to study and document the city from within, to delve into what once made Detroit the Arsenal of Democracy but now has it resembling a graveyard of opportunity and American industry. Time has just published its first article about the city, and I definitely think it is worth the read for those wondering what happened to Detroit and, more generally, what has happened to an icon of American industry. Unfortunately for those who have lived in the area and understand the dynamics, the story’s arc is both depressing repetitive but also painfully truthful.
The article rather fairly articulates the myriad of issues that have plagued Detroit since the mid-50′s – both overt and passive racism, segregation and subsequent power drain between the city and suburbs, corrupt and/or indifferent politicians in the region, and the auto industry’s inability to evolve and address the growing competition from overseas competitors (though to this point, until recently Americans did not seem to mind SUVs and other large cars Detroit was producing. It could be said that Detroit was simply providing for a market that shifted their priorities far quicker than a company could have responded to). These factors should surprise absolutely no one who has lived in the Detroit area for any substantial period of time.
Case in point – the author notes the rather jarring divisions and boundaries that exist between the suburbs and the city proper. Driving along the Detroit River on Jefferson Ave. away from the city center, you pass a collection of check-cashing shops, highly-fortified strip malls, and apartments in various levels of disrepair – and to be fair, that stretch of Detroit has improved dramatically since I was a child only 15-20 years ago. Yet, once you pass Conner St., you are met by lush, tree-lined streets and beautiful homes in Grosse Pointe, one of the most exclusive and expensive areas in the entire state (and perhaps the entire Midwest). In a span of a 1/2 mile, the entire neighborhood undergoes a metamorphosis to such a degree that it is difficult for people not used to the region to understand.
Similarly, a drive along Woodward Ave. (the main artery north of the city) is just as shocking an experience. In the article, the author notes that Eight Mile Road acts as a de facto boundary between the city and the suburbs, but I think most people’s knowledge of Eight Mile Road is limited to Eminem’s movie. South of Eight Mile, you witness burned out and dilapidated factories, storefronts boarded up and vandalized, and every stereotype you have ever heard about the city. Yet, go 2-3 miles north of 8 mile, and you are in Royal Oak, one of the few hip, trendy towns in Detroit and a city with a thriving young professional base.
The social and economic gradients between the city and the suburbs are so steep, so abrupt that it is hard to grasp for outsiders; I could read it on the faces of my wife’s family when they visited the city while planning our wedding. Most suburban areas have a symbiotic relationship with the key city in the region; sure there are disagreements and petty infighting, but cooler heads prevail and integration is maintained because it benefits everyone involved.
Not Detroit. The region has missed out on a laundry list of potential projects and innovations that would have made the area infinitely more successful and harmonious – a light rail system, cooperation on Cobo Hall‘s expansion, school integration and improvements, etc. This inability to compromise, to see how cooperation would benefit everyone, will likely be a defining theme in Time’s works, and in a way that people will see eerie similarities with national politics.
What Detroit Says About America
The other key theme that I hope emerges, and one that I feel has often been overlooked, is how the decline in Detroit mirrors the broader decline in manufacturing and exporting that was once the bedrock of America. For a variety of reasons, America no longer seems willing (and perhaps not able) to produce goods within its borders for consumption both locally and beyond its borders. Of course, major factors of this erosion in domestic industry include inexpensive foreign labor, rising cost of US healthcare, insufficient tariffs and ill-defined foreign trade policy, and a shifting global economy. But I also think a major factor, one that has not been discussed nearly as much, is a shift in America’s view on manufacturing and the “working class.”
Not to sound reactionary or disingenuous, but I think this shift occurred with my parent’s generation, as the Baby Boomer’s flocked to college in droves and an emphasis was placed on education versus working for the first time in America’s history. Suddenly, people were graduating from high school and entering college (and/or grad school) at never-before-seen rates. At the same time, their parents had exited World War II into an era of historic growth and prosperity. The world was safe, people had nice homes and stable jobs, and kids could be kids for a bit longer; there was no push to enter the workforce because opportunity was always available. So millions of American children were given the opportunity to graduate from high school and college without pressure to join the working force immediately or be shipped off to fight in the war. That freedom of choice, to define your career on your own terms and timetable, was something new to most of America, and it clearly struck a chord.
What was once the bastion of a select few wealthy American children college became affordable to far more families. Instead of working on a farm or in a factory, kids were encouraged to study various subjects at college, and while that led to some amazing innovations in a variety of fields, it also created a gulf between the “educated” and the rest of America that has been growing since. Income disparity is the most emblematic, but culturally it became an issue that “smart” people went to college and ran the world, and those who worked in city services or in manufacturing were “doomed” to some second-rate life. With respect to income disparity, it began to take shape between those who attended college and those who did not, to the point that today’s college graduate makes nearly twice as much money per year as a high school graduate. And to make matters worse, a stigma became attached to manufacturing that didn’t exist even 20-30 years ago, that it was for “dumb” people who lacked the intelligence and character to “do something better” with their lives.
(Full disclosure – the author is a computer engineer graduate with a law degree. I’m a prime example of the “stay in school, you’re better because of it” mindset. So if I come across as completely wrong on this topic, please comment and forgive my ignorance.)
Working in a factory is difficult – my Dad did it for a couple of years during and after college, and it certainly did not sound appealing. It is hot, dirty, and dangerous; the stories you hear about individuals being injured rather spectacularly while working on an assembly line, while perhaps embellished, are still quite real. But more than the difficulty, it has the look and feel of a monotonous and “brainless” job that people do not identify with office work (even though I would certainly debate this point). And perhaps most damning for manufacturing, it seemed like the “fallback” for kids who didn’t do well in school, where all you needed was a high school diploma and working hands to nab a decent job with good benefits. It didn’t seem like a “good” job, but one that was a last resort for those who couldn’t do anything else.
Most parents want what is best for their children, and that certainly includes launching them toward a career that will both make them happy and provide economic stability. When college and high school graduates made approximately the same amount of money, there was little impetus to push your child to college unless he or she displayed some particular acumen or propensity to a subject that would be best served in a college atmosphere. But starting with the Baby Boomer generation, you had parents who had gone to college, who emerged with high-paying jobs that did not subject them to the factory floor and all of its real and perceived dangers. In addition, parents who did not go to college but who witnessed the growing income disparity steered their children toward more schooling as a way to succeed in the new marketplace. This further marginalized manufacturing and, more generally, the working class. You didn’t want your kids working in a factory because it was “menial” labor, a job without much of a future beyond a steady paycheck. While I think the recent economic downturn has reset people’s opinions on this consistent employment, for years this was seen as the easy way out, and you should aspire to something greater via attending college.
Now, it would be foolish to equate the fall in America’s manufacturing base to an emphasis on education. A major factor was increased costs for manufacturing compared to foreign labor and resources. Instead of producing steel, televisions,textiles, and automobiles in America, it was far cheaper to outsource them to other countries. Maximum profits, global integration, and whatnot accelerated the income gap and the fall of manufacturing in America. And I also admit that this is a vast simplification of the reasons behind the shift in America’s economy – even though more people are heading to college, the number of graduates remains around 25%. So clearly the vast majority of Americans are not becoming over-educated Ivory tower acolytes.
But along the way, America changed its opinion on manufacturing and related jobs; what was once an envious position for growth and middle-class prosperity became the dirty, abject tasks you shipped off to third-world countries or the fringes of the Rust Belt. Today, we are a society that favors services over manufacturing, in which America imports more than it exports. And I can think of no other industry that has been more affected by this shift than the auto industry, and no city moreso than Detroit.
Of course, one of the few exports that America continues to enjoy a solid advantage is in entertainment media, specifically movies. Thus, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Michigan has recently adopted tax breaks and other incentives to entice movie studios to produce films in the state, with many settling in an around Detroit. The goal is to make Michigan, and specifically Detroit, a “Midwest LA,” creating jobs in production companies, set designing, and other related services. And in a way, this kind of makes sense – Detroit and the surrounding area has long been designed to provide services on a massive scale; movies are one of the few remaining industries that can make viable use of massive factories and a production-based economy. So far, returns have been solid – see Gran Torino and Transformers, as well as the upcoming movie Whip It.
So a study of Detroit’s economic realignment and rebirth, if any, will likely mirror that of America. While I have my doubts that Time or anyone else will be able to capture such a dramatic shift in real time, I am excited to see how Time plans on tackling this issue in its future essays. For all its warts, Detroit still has a chance to recover and reclaim its place in America as a driver of the economy; I think these articles will be a great opportunity to put the average American in the passenger seat.
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