Missing Detroit: My Dad and the disease of blight | Hacker News Reader

Missing Detroit: My Dad and the disease of blight

beltmag.com

87 pointsrmason33 comments

The author of the article, Amanda Lewan, is a friend of mine. With a partner she runs two coworking centers in the city.

It's the millennials that are rebuilding Detroit. Granted it may be billionaires funding it but the people on the ground doing the work are young.

You may find it hard to believe but Zagat rated Detroit ahead of New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston and Chicago as one of the hottest food cities in America.

https://www.zagat.com/b/the-26-hottest-food-cities-of-2016

The author doesn't state her father's age or when he lived on Linnhurst.

My father, now 82, lived on that block from birth until his late 20s or early 30s. He went back 20 years ago for the first time in 30 years and was shocked and saddened by what he saw.

My father is 100 and the houses he lived in as a kid (the majority of that time on West Grand Boulevard) are all gone. All those houses and that of my great grandfather were all there in 2007. In fact the house my 5x great grandfather built in 1855 was there in the late nineties.

In Detroit the recession of 2008 was called Katrina without the water. My friends in New Orleans find that hard to believe but when you see the devastation that was wrought on entire neighborhoods you'd believe it.

This blog documents it as well as most:

http://www.goobingdetroit.com/

The Metropolitan area surrounding Detroit has done a remarkable job masking the city.

Take Oakland County, the largest surrounding county by population. It has the highest per-capita family income in the Midwest and one of the highest in the nation. To some extent, the rich metropolitan area had very little incentive to help out the city of Detroit.

Indeed, Oakland County is a great example. It has happened elsewhere in the state of Michigan but not on as large a scale. When you look at Genesee county and the hole that is Flint with the its wealthier suburbs around it.

It works the opposite way: cities operate on a zero-sum basis, especially when an MSA is declining in population the way many Rust belt cities are. Detroit may be the epicenter of the MSA but the other cities have all the incentive to see Detroit - and other cities - suffer so that they can maintain the engine of "flight to quality". Perhaps race is no longer the primary driver of this, as realtors cannot legally use race as reason to sell homes in the hinterlands, but the motion is decades in the making. Unless the Federal government gets involved (again), many US cities while barely function and their nearest and oldest suburbs will suffer a worse fate for not having the same level of infrastructure and sense of permanence to buttress them from sloppy decay (sorry that's a gin and tonic line).

New infrastructure is often vastly cheaper to build than existing infrastructure is to maintain and adapt. So, letting some city's die IMO has value.

DC is probably the classic example of a city best abandoned. We already moved capitals once, and frankly we would be well served by doing so again. DC was designed to be hard to move around in and guess what, it's hard to move around in.

Detroit, while not nearly as bad as some, really does not fit the needs of a modern population.

PS: It can literally be 10 times as expencive to build infrastructure in existing city's.

I went looking for the reason that Detroit became the home of the US auto manufacturing industry in the first place (short version, central location with access to labor, finance, transport, coal, suppliers) and found this interesting online book:

http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Overview/R_Overview...

It covers the history and talks about multiple transformations of Detroit over the decades. I thought the part about the car plants themselves moving to the city suburbs thanks to the workers (at least the white ones) having access to cars was particularly interesting.

What's so remarkable about this piece is that it says nothing at all about this "disease of blight." What is blight?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight

The article reads as if everyone was expected to know. But in fact, no one seems to know. Or talk about it.

It seems pretty clear that Detroit was not reduced to ruins by a plant chlorosis. So what happened? Did the same leaf fungus attack elsewhere, or was this a Detroit-specific disease? Is there a cure -- some kind of pesticide? A gene? Will a new GMO Detroit rise again?

In the medieval world, the Roman Forum became known as the Campo Vaccino -- "cattle field." Perhaps if you'd asked the medieval Romans how the center of the civilized world became a cattle field, they'd have given the same answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval

2 clicks from your wikipedia link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_decay

(It's a redirect from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight_(urban) which is linked on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight_(disambiguation) which is linked right at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight )

Please forgive me if But in fact, no one seems to know. Or talk about it. was more poetic than literal.

From your link:

Urban decay (also known as urban rot and urban blight) is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape.

And:

Urban decay has no single cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions—including the city's urban planning decisions, tight rent control, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeway roads and rail road lines that bypass the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and immigration restrictions.

Highly elucidating, I'm sure you'll agree! Imagine a page on potato blight that read:

Potato blight has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including...

Here's a page talking about two different things that are both called potato blight...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans

(It's again a link from the first link)

Is it so strange that a borrowed word ended up having a slightly different taxonomic breadth?

No -- what's strange is that a monumental historical event, which happened in the lives of those now living, and caused immense destruction and immense sorrow to many human beings, is not attributed to any clear cause, or human institution, or organization, or even ideology.

Unlike potato blight, which is caused by one or more well-described organisms whose DNA can even be sequenced.

This is very much the kind of intentional forgetting practiced by many post-genocidal societies. It's very similar to the way Indonesians remember the 1965 massacres, or even the way Chinese remember the Cultural Revolution. There's simply a broad social agreement that "we don't talk about these things."

But here, let me help you out with that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Ground_(book)

https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Clean...

It's very reassuring, however, to note that Detroit is now "one of the hottest food cities." I'll be sure to check out one of those New American bistros next time I'm on Linnhurst.

There are a ton of papers analyzing what happened to Detroit and comparing it to various other times those factors happened to similar cities.

But like most big things, there isn't a single cause, exact duplicates are hard to find (ie, most other cities had only one of the factors), etc.

Detroit is just that patient who managed to have a weak immune system, a genetic predisposition to respond to a byproduct of the bacteria, and managed to catch a rare bacteria. They're an outlier, and we can't pin it on a single factor what happened to them.

But we can still list off the half-dozen social issues that manged to converge at once and how their various interplays accelerated the issue.

Ed:

Consider what happened to bananas -- it wasn't just the infectuous agent, it was the large monoculture farms and trade practices which enabled it, and any analysis dependant on just the most proximate cause won't capture the whole picture.

Also, bats and cave explorers + tourists.

You illustrate the point exactly. Maybe it would be clearer with a little more detail on the "potato blight" analogy.

Here are two kinds of statement:

"Potato blight" has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including rainy summers, witchcraft, overworked soils, and God's wrath at our tolerance for rampant homosexuality.

"Potato blight" is the common name for a plant disease, usually caused by the organism Phytophthora infestans.

The first statement, just in its form, is essentially pre-scientific, pre-rational thinking, which has been the norm for most of human history. Parts of it may be true in some sense. Pretty much none of it is in any way testable.

The second is a scientific statement at least in form -- it may or may not be accurate, but that's easy to check.

Occam's basic point was that when you propose a complex, multi-causal explanation of a discrete syndrome, against an alternative hypothesis which is parsimonious, precise and uni-causal, the Bayesian prior of the complex hypothesis should be very low.

In this case, we have a multi-causal explanation of a historical mass migration. To my mind, the causal null hypothesis for any urban decline or mass migration, past or present, is: the city fell into ruins because the people who lived there left. The people left because, due to political or military forces, they became afraid for their physical safety. In short, ethnic cleansing.

This simple uni-causal explanation is amply confirmed by anecdotal evidence from the period. Or you could accept Wikipedia's multi-causal explanation, which to my eye is basically zoning changes, the phase of the moon and maybe even God's wrath.

But, sure, there are a ton of papers. Bear in mind: in 1405, there were a ton of papers as well.

White flight was an exercise of economic power by the people that left.

Wow. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about Marxism. But at least it's an ethos.

I don't know this, but let's suppose that by your use of this term "exercise of economic power", you imply some moral sense in which the action is unrighteous or unjust. Right? (Bear in mind that, of course, from the opposite perspective, it sounds a lot like "blaming the victim.")

Consider a not hugely dissimilar migration that happened around the same time: the migration of French Algerians to metropolitan France. Here's a short Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oran_massacre_of_1962

Totally serious, non-rhetorical question: would you categorize this historical event as "exercise of economic power" or as "ethnic cleansing?"

Also, is there any generalization that can be drawn across the political systems in which these two events happened (decline of Detroit, independence of Algeria)? Or is it just a coincidence that they both go down in the '60s?

People weren't forced out, many of those that had resources chose to leave. That's not a cleansing.

I'm not sure what to make of you comparing several hundred thousand people moving to a new location to a mass murder.

Do you somehow think that deaths from murder were a major contributor to the changing demographics of Detroit?

Uh, no, if several hundred thousand people were murdered, that would be a massacre.

If they left because they were afraid of being murdered (or otherwise violated in their physical safety), that would be ethnic cleansing.

Do you not believe this applies to those who left Detroit, or Algeria? Really? Is it not the case that every country and major city outside East Asia contains areas where residing would endanger you? Including... most of Detroit? Could you seriously be this good and innocent a person?

Note also that it takes a lot less physical menace to drive out Ward and June Cleaver, than Dylan "YOLO" Hipster. Of course, Ward and June were privileged...

That isn't the definition of ethnic cleansing.

(usually involves force and systematic exercise of that force)

Crime isn't force? Withholding protection from crime isn't systematic?

When Milosevic went to cleanse Kosovo, he didn't send the Yugoslav Army to put people in cattle cars. He just let Arkan's Tigers do whatever. Arkan got the message and so did the Albanians:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkan

Version 1: Detroit declined because the US auto industry declined, due to foreign competition. US auto production peaked in 1973, at 10 million cars. Today, 4 million.

Version 2: Detroit declined because it became a black-majority city. 83% black today, blackest big city in the US.

Version 1 (unless broadened) does not explain why exactly the same symptoms (if not always as extreme) appeared in many other American cities, not specializing in auto production, at the same time.

"Due to foreign competition" is also contentious -- an equal and opposite contentious statement would be "due to free trade," ie, attributing these events to an human political decision, rather than an abstract force of history.

Version 2 still contains the passive voice. Notice that both these versions trail off into "no one is responsible." This is consistent with a political memory hole.

It also seems deeply problematic (in a number of respects) to argue that Detroit declined because African-Americans moved there. Surely the proximate cause of the decline is not that a new population arrived, but that the old population departed?

Here's a clarifying thought-experiment. Imagine that Detroit was a city-state, and you were its absolute monarch, crowned originally in 1965. Then deliver the explanation as if you were talking to your bondholders. Extra points if you can use the phrase "our incredible journey."

If you think foreign competition was a major factor, the responsible parties are the executives and engineers of the Detroit automakers, for being worse at their jobs than their Japanese and German counterparts.

You jump straight from the condition "America makes worse cars" to "America should stop making cars and buy Japanese and German cars."

A mercantilist or protectionist would jump straight to "Americans drive worse cars."

So there is a policy choice: under free trade, Americans get to drive cute Beetles and sporty little Civics, instead of giant Pontiac boats. Under protectionism (assuming version 1), Detroit remains a city, not a bandit-infested wilderness.

Human beings (the Guardian would call them "neoliberals") made this choice. So, they're responsible. This does not constitute an apology for the '72 El Camino.

As I understand it, you propose a right to "conservation of prosperity": if something is prosperous now, we should use force to ensure that it remains so in perpetuity, and are morally responsible for the harm that comes from not doing so.

How do you decide what to freeze, and how do you decide which year to freeze it in?

I could argue we had a similar moral imperative to prevent the destruction of the livelihoods of horse-drawn carriage drivers. What if you had made this argument successfully in 1890 and the auto industry was never allowed to exist in the first place? Would you acknowledge the same responsibility for the nonexistence of Detroit that you assign to free trade now?

I believe we have a right to a government that does everything possible to support, cherish, protect and uplift its citizens -- whether by defending them from crime, or preserving their livelihoods.

Yes, I'm aware that this makes me a nutball -- some kind of communist or fascist or something. I used to be a libertarian, if that makes you feel better.

If horses were citizens, I'd definitely preserve the carriages. They're not, and the carriage drivers could become chauffeurs. Not that there was a plan, but that would have been a fine plan.

Sometimes things are going so well, you don't need a plan. Other times...

>and the carriage drivers could become chauffeurs

And the people in Detroit could move somewhere with productive economic activity. Why are they different from carriage drivers?

FWIW I used to be a protectionist. I became disillusioned with it when the choices around which things to protect, what to protect them from (foreign competition vs. automation), which status quo to lock in, and where we draw the boundaries of units that ought to be protected from each other, started to seem arbitrary.

I remember a particularly compelling line of argument from an economics textbook: okay, the US should make its own cars, but why stop at the national border? Why not have every state make its own cars? Think of all the jobs that would create! An auto industry in every state! But why stop at state? Why not make people sell their cars and trade to locally manufactured ones at every county line? Because it'd be a huge waste.

And, of course, many of the things we propose to protect "disrupted" something else not so long ago, sometimes in living memory. If we protect truckers from autonomous vehicles, for example, we will have to explain to the laid off railroad guys why we did not protect them from the truckers. Why we did not protect the longshoremen from the shipping container and crane.

It's the government's responsibility to take care of its citizens, absolutely.

Making people do work that they know is inferior to what could be done by machines (or foreigners) just seems like an extremely degrading way to go about that. I'd much rather see a good chunk of the output of "license to print money" operations taxed and redistributed.

Or, the quality of all cars sold in the US increased, including American cars. I suspect that the number of cars sold per capita, regardless of origin, has remained very roughly the same since Detroit's better days.

Those executives may have done a great job, improving the quality of their cars to the point that they can sell as many as they do today, in a wider competitive environment.

I suspect that the number of cars sold per capita, regardless of origin, has remained very roughly the same since Detroit's better days.

In the US, down about 25% since 1976, actually. This reflects cars lasting longer.

[1] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/12/0...

Which is a good thing. I still have my 25 year old, first owner honda civic.

So, all things being equal ...

Discussing "Version 2" will get you fired from your job. It is crime-think of the highest order. Your mind will simply slide away the words on the screen until they form an incomprehensible jumble.

I used to belong to a cult. Like many fundamentalist Christians the members took the events in Genesis as literal truth.

I once explained to a cult member that the order of events was incorrect. There is not one, but a series of conflicts with our scientific understanding of how the solar system formed. Notably the sun does not come into existence after the earth. I watched him read and re-read the chapter. He literally could not see it, even with it right in front of him.

If I was right, then I merely believed the scientific explanation for cosmic aggregation made sense.

If he believed what I believed, then he lost everything, friends, family, business connections.

For most people (not counting yourself, since you were sincere enough to bring up the hypothetical), having an honest conservation on this topic is impossible.

This is why I don't trust the narrative Western society presently has on race. It is of course possible that I am entirely wrong about my ideas on the subject, but attaching such sigma to the topic is a tell, like in poker, that the other side is bluffing. Anytime there is a sign saying 'Don't dig here', it is the job of a real scientist to grab his spade and thrust it firmly into loam to uncover what may be lying there. And if you don't like what you find, then too bad, the list of people who discovered scientific evidence contradicting their position is voluminous.

tldr; Darwin's ideas continue to detonate.

I'll fix it.

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