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Detroit Today 1 Real-estate developers in the upscale suburbs north of Detroit sometimes tell a joke when the conversation turns to rebuilding the Motor City. “We did rebuild the city of Detroit,” they say. “We did it in Oakland County.” That quip contains the key to understanding Detroit today—arguably America’s most distressed big city. As early as the 1940s, auto companies were scouting for undeveloped land outside the crowded city to build new factories; the postwar exodus to the new communities north of 8 Mile Road had begun long before a divisive figure like Coleman Young became mayor in the mid-1970s. As we saw in the introduction, sprawl is the natural condition of cities today, particularly in America. And today that process of creating a new urban form—lower density, powered by the private automobile—is all but complete in metropolitan Detroit. Tens of millions of square feet of new suburban office space sprouted like toadstools near highway exits in the ’80s and ’90s; suburban shopping malls grew larger, more upscale, and more distant from the old city center. Each year from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, suburban homebuilders added another ten thousand to fifteen thousand new houses, condos, and apartments to Detroit’s suburban outer ring. Back in the older central city, all but stripped clean by decades of deindustrialization and white flight, a handful of new projects went up, heavily subsidized by a roster of redevelopment boards and agencies. But the real action continued to be in the suburbs. By 2012, as I write this, the Detroit suburbs have become the city, in any real sense. As we saw in the introduction, only six percent of the taxable value of real estate in the tri-county Detroit area can be found in the city itself, while ninety-four percent is out in the suburbs. Let that statistic sink in. If we total up the dollar value of all the real estate on which the owners pay property taxes— all the homes and malls and office buildings and factories—today ninety-four Chapter 1 | 16 cents of every dollar of that value is found in the suburbs; only six cents of every dollar of tax base is found in the city. Drive along major suburban arteries like Telegraph Road or Big Beaver or Rochester Road, and you pass seemingly endless shopping districts and housing developments and office and industrial parks. Die-hard Detroiters might disparage it all as inauthentic; one civic leader, in a private conversation with me, once called suburban sprawl “mile after mile of crapola.” The aesthetics of suburbia aside, there’s no denying that the city has largely been rebuilt out there beyond 8 Mile Road, the city’s northern border. Yet the outsiders who sniff that nobody lives in Detroit anymore face a comeuppance. Detroit remains among the top twenty cities in terms of population even today (although perhaps not for much longer); the city’s population density, as we’ve seen earlier, is twice that of places like Phoenix and Dallas. My youngest brother, living in suburban Chicago, tells me that when he mentions to friends that I live in Detroit, they invariably ask, “In what suburb?” That someone with a job and means to move would voluntarily live in what many outsiders think of as an urban hell mystifies and astounds them. So what do we make of Detroit after all these years? As a starting point, let’s consider the 1960s-era documentary City on the Move, produced as part of Detroit’s bid (unsuccessful) to host the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. The film highlighted the city’s many assets—its humming auto factories, its bustling expressways—and it included a clip of President John F. Kennedy endorsing the bid. As an example of hubris before a fall, it’s hard to beat: the city was seeping jobs and population even then, and the film (still available on the Web) boasted of Detroit’s model race relations not long before race riots ripped the city asunder and sent thousands of families fleeing to the suburbs. Yet viewing the film with hindsight today, the most remarkable thing about City on the Move is not its outdated optimism but rather how much of what it portrayed remains valid. Case in point: the filmmakers touted the city’s great center of learning, Wayne State University, along with Detroit’s magnificent cultural institutions and its world-class hospitals; and of course...

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