A few years ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table in Oakland, Calif., reading an article about a New York artist who had moved (part-time, as many do) to Detroit, my then-former hometown.
Midway through, I read a quote that made me scream: “At that point, Detroit was really a ghost town,” the artist said, referring to the moment she arrived in the city. I quickly hatched an idea for a guerilla poster project: “Detroit — not a ghost town since circa 1600.”
To date, my project remains unrealized, but the influx of awe-struck newcomers who seem to honestly believe Detroit has been a city without people since at least the 1950s, if not the last four centuries, has only grown.
I moved back to Detroit soon after that article was written. I work in economic development, so discussion about who is coming here, who has been here and who the city is being redeveloped for comes up in my circles several times a day. The topic is such a routine part of my existence, and the fly-over opinion pieces on the topic so plentiful, that I at first barely noticed this week’s apoplexy-inducing example: a New York Times photo essay on Detroit’s emergence from 36 years of budgetary oversight.
“Last week, we visited the city to find further signs of recovery,” the article begins. It proceeds with 15 paragraphs of patronization and back-handed praise, peppered with nods to the troubling dynamics of disparity plaguing this and every gentrifying urban area. Accompanying each artily-spaced paragraph is a photo-image after de-populated image of homes and businesses and vacant lots in various states of disrepair or early rejuvenation, each against the hopeless gray sky that is the hallmark of Michigan spring.
It was all so predictable. I scrolled quickly, rolled my eyes and headed to work (in a rehabbed former auto dealership that sees upwards of 150,000 people per year come through our doors, but whatever). But then a friend, a historian and fellow Detroiter now living in New York, posted a photo of the print version on Facebook. Neglect compounded by decay compounded by desolation, the width of two pages. “Pioneer fantasies. Buildings. No people,” she wrote.
On closer look, I became angry, once again, at how hard these journalists — like the countless other purveyors of “ruin porn” before them — had to work to get those shots. Many of these homes, in an oft-photographed neighborhood on the edge of downtown, aren’t abandoned. They are merely being fixed up on a realistic timelines — which is to say years or even decades — by owners who have not been extended such luxuries as mortgages or home repair loans.
And a curious development has recently materialized just outside the frame. The City Modern Presentation Center is a squat, hastily erected showroom for the nascent $100 million infill development spearheaded by resident billionaire Dan Gilbert. The neon “City Modern” in its name glows deep into the night. Efforts like this — not to mention the strip of trendy restaurants literally one block west — make it impossible to traverse Brush Park any longer without seeing people until long after dark. When I finally ventured into the trendiest of the new eateries last month, I had to park two blocks away.
All this investment comes, as it always seems to, just a little too late to directly benefit the residents who have been holding things down for generations. Longtime Detroiters aren’t only invisible in the national media, it seems, but in their own backyards.
I imagine New Yorkers picking up Tuesday’s Times, though, and believing those bleak images are the sum of our city. In my experience, the next step is you’ll either feel superior to us or you’ll start buying up our real estate. Or both.
Maybe you’ll close your gargantuan gallery in Brooklyn and purchase a building for $500,000 then try to flip it for $6 million a year later.
Or you’ll scoop up a Mies van der Rohe townhouse up the street from me and become yet another dude in Carhartt who doesn’t say hello in the park. Or you’ll open a business or start a “social enterprise” without recognizing that others have been doing exactly what it is you are telling us we need — without funding or media attention — for the last 20 years.
Lots of folks perpetuate this dangerous myth of Detroit as “clean slate.” Search “Detroit” and “ghost town” and you’ll find no shortage of hits, including Time and even The Guardian. (It’s no coincidence that 80 percent of Detroiters are black.)
This is not to say that the level of disinvestment here isn’t alarming. Returning has made me confront, more than ever, just how alarming it is. But it’s important to view Detroit in perspective. I mean, that’s what photography is all about, right?
That perspective must include those who created these conditions, those who benefit from them and, most critically, those who navigate them daily. That perspective must include Detroit’s people.
Palm is a Detroit-based writer.
