Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises by Jodie Adams Kirshner (review)

198 The Michigan Historical Review the dark side,” readers can come to a greater appreciation of the team’s glories. (8) Hunter’s book represents a worthy contribution to Detroit’s baseball history, and likewise belongs on the shelf of any true crime fan. Scott Ferkovich Detroit, Michigan Jodie Adams Kirshner. Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. Pp. 368. Notes. Index. Hardcover: $28.99. The City of Detroit’s trip through municipal bankruptcy in 2013-14 is generally hailed as a great success. The process wiped $7 billion in debt from the city’s books. It gave Mayor Mike Duggan fiscal running room to expand programs like city planning. And it allowed the city to modernize its woefully inadequate city services. But as author Jodie Adams Kirshner points out in Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises, bankruptcy left important players in Detroit untouched—the ordinary residents mired in poverty and joblessness. Broke thus provides a needed corrective to the current image of Detroit as a “comeback city.” While great advances have been celebrated, particularly in the newly fashionable downtown, Midtown, Corktown, and other districts, vast areas of the sprawling city remain virtually untouched by any improvements. Kirshner’s pointillist approach follows several Detroiters identified by their first names—Joe, Miles, Cindy, Lola, among others—as they scrape out an economic existence in a city beset with high unemployment and little opportunity. Among other woes, the city’s housing market virtually collapsed during the Great Recession, and much of Broke follows Kirshner’s actors as they try to buy or hold on to a house facing tax foreclosure, vandalism, and heartless speculation by real estate vultures. The accumulation of detail creates a portrait of despair. At an ice cream parlor, workers dish up scoops from behind bullet-proof glass. A long-ago brush with the law that never leaves his record endlessly dogs the character Miles. Joe, a handyman, hires an ex-convict to help with some work and “the man agreed but told him robbing houses and selling drugs paid better.” (101) “Bankruptcy could not provide new remedies against financial problems,” Kirshner writes. “It could not directly reverse the population loss, employment loss, or property value loss that contributed to the Book Reviews 199 shrinking tax base, nor could bankruptcy bring back lost federal and state support to offset pressures on public welfare.” (xix) That last point about the loss of federal and state aid is a key to the puzzle. As Kirshner writes, assistance to cities peaked in 1978. Since then, Detroit and other cities have lost out on untold billions in dollars that were once promised but never delivered. “We have overestimated the ability of cities and their residents to combat powerful forces like automation, suburbanization, the recent financial crisis and deindustrialization,” she writes. (xxii) A reader might quibble that all cities suffer many of the same problems as Detroit. But, as Kirshner asserts, the Motor City may represent the extreme end of the scale of urban distress. And she is certainly on target that the highly touted bankruptcy—one of the transformative events in Detroit’s recent history—did little or nothing for many of the city’s struggling residents. “The lives that Broke chronicles show us what bankruptcy cannot accomplish,” she concludes in a downbeat cod. “They show us the hard work of combating individual poverty must take precedence over facile, short-term urban fixes.” (283) That’s a lesson of special relevance for Detroit. As Miles, one of the people Kirshner profiles, tells her in the book, “Detroit’s a good thing when it’s going good.” (xv) But no city can prosper if it’s at its best only when the going is good. John Gallagher Author and journalist William D. Lopez. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 232. Works cited. Hardcover: $27.95. William D. Lopez’s Separated details how mixed-status families navigate everyday life and institutions by focusing on a Midwestern county in Michigan. Mixed-status families are those that have a...