Detroit's bankruptcy has won global attention.REBECCA COOK/Reuters
It was possible to see the signs of Detroit's decay, even back when cars were the engine of the American economy, when Detroit was the world's greatest factory town, when auto executives – meeting in urgent planning sessions but living in easy elegance – were known as whiz kids and one of them was Robert McNamara, the stylish, cerebral secretary of defence.
It wasn't, as so many commentators have argued, the high labour costs, nor was it the racial upheaval, nor even the Japanese imports that portended doom for Detroit. It was the very mobility that Detroit created – the very mobility that Detroit personified – that sealed its demise.
Because even a half century ago – long before Detroit's calamitous collapse and the state's innovative rescue plan that Republican Governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign Friday – the auto industry and the people who built it were starting to move beyond Detroit's boundaries. Detroit may have sold more cars than ever in the 1960s, when presidents had the telephone numbers of the car chieftains at the ready (and that of Walter Reuther, the powerful chief of the United Automobile Workers union, too), but the demographic disaster, unrecognized but unrestrained, was already in train.
"This was a time when autos were king and Detroit was living big, something hard to fathom in this day and age," says Jerry Sloan, who in a long career served as vice-president of both American Motors and Ford before teaching at Ohio University. "It was a flashy time, flamboyant and confident. There's very little of that left."
And so the city's bankruptcy – and the recent move to preserve the priceless collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts from being tapped to pay creditors – that have won global attention have been a long time coming, the culmination of decades of decline visible now in acres of vacant lots, in scores of demolition crews tearing down additional buildings every day, and in the city's treasury, impoverished in part because about half the city's properties are in arrears for their taxes. Why pay taxes when there are no services – and no apparent penalty?
This is often portrayed as a Detroit story, but it is an American story, an American tragedy. It is, in part, the story of big dreams and a big boom – and it is also the tale of a big bust. There is a racial element, a labour element and a (mis)management element. There was an element of public corruption, plenty of it. And there is a global marketplace element: Other nations, especially in Asia, began to beat Detroit at its game. Detroit may have been about mobility, but it was not about flexibility.
"In some ways, the story of Detroit is the story of the rise and fall of the automobile industry," says James Bright, retired executive director for North American public affairs for Ford and a former professor at Indiana University. "It's a tale that is sad and hard to watch."
Today, Detroit has tens of thousands of blighted properties, many of them stripped of any last shred of value. The city is run by an emergency manager, appointed by the Governor of Michigan, and by an elected mayor who has partial – which is to say limited – authority. The urban homesteading (and the urban garden movement) that are beginning to win attention in the city and beyond are the green shoots of optimism that have grown amid the city's symbols of failure.
But those green shoots are welcome, especially so after such a long decline. Young people and families without children have added life to Detroit's midtown area and its riverside downtown, and the city establishment, including the auto companies, has mobilized against the threat the art museum might have to divest some of its treasures to help pay for retiree pensions and other city expenses.
One recipe for recovery has come to be called the Grand Bargain. At the heart of it is a scaled back pension plan that already is getting wide attention, in Detroit and in other American cities where government legacy costs are a burden on current budgets.
"The Detroit plan is the integration of foundation funds, state rescue dollars and retiree concessions put together with other pieces of the puzzle," says Jonathan P. Wolman, publisher and editor of The Detroit News. "People across the state, some of them far from Detroit, have rallied to the cause."
The grand bargain to battle the city's $18-billion (U.S.) of debt – which just won the endorsement of state Attorney-General Bill Schuette but still requires further approval – may make Detroit more livable but it cannot bring back its glory days, when the automobile industry had the glittery brains-and-bravado aura possessed today in Silicon Valley.
"If you were a young person and got a chance to work at a car company, it was a great opportunity to develop highly appealing and highly desired consumer products, much the way the iPhone and other high tech products are now," says Walter S. Mossberg, who reported from Detroit for The Wall Street Journal from 1970 to 1973 and now is the co-executive editor of Re/code, a prominent website chronicling the high tech industry.
So while Detroit – now also reeling from revelations about fatal flaws, known but not revealed, about General Motors cars – sketches a new future for itself, the canvas has some qualities of a pentimento, where traces of the past are evident in the landscape.
"There was an incredible creative vibrance in Detroit in the old days," says David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author working on a portrait of Detroit in the early 1960s. "Sometimes when things are dying there's a beautiful glow coming out of it. It's like when the sun is going down. That is what was happening."
Detroit may not be ready to say that the sun is rising again. But the horizon may not be as dark as it once was.
David Shribman