Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis Paperback – November 5, 2013

Author Mark Binelli tells a well-written and engaging story of America's most maligned city. He explains his purpose in writing the book:=====For people of my generation and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder of the best having ended a long time ago. We held no other concept of Detroit but as a shell of its former self. ... Would my kids one day grow up thinking the same thoughts about America as a whole, about my ponderous tales of cold war victories and dot-com booms....A malaise spreading through the rest of the country....After I moved back to the city, people I met in dozens of different contexts described Detroit as "the Wild West." Meaning, it's basically lawless. Meaning, land is plentiful and cheap. Meaning, now, as the frontier quite literally returns to the city-- trees growing out of tops of abandoned buildings! wild pheasants circling the empty lots!-- so, too, has the metaphorical frontier, along with the notion of "frontier spirit."...just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for ... what, exactly? The end of the American way of life? Or the beginning of something else? Either way, that is why so many divergent interests are converging here right now. Who doesn't want to see the future?=====Detroit is late to the urban revitalization party. In the early 1980s other decrepit inner cities like Baltimore and Cleveland began replacing their boarded-up crumbling downtown areas with new commercial developments and "gentrified" neighborhoods of upscale real estate. These renewing inner cities attracted prosperous African-Americans, reverse-migrating White suburbanites, and foreign immigrants. I lived in Chicago during the twenty years when developers transformed its Near South Side from an urban wasteland of slums and crumbling warehouses into a brand spanking new neighborhood of glitzy high rises, fine restaurants, and multi-million dollar condos.Detroit remains massively slummy and scummy. In 2010 Mitt Romney's birth mansion was demolished, like many others in the city, because it had become a blighted crack house. The property in Detroit is so beyond repair that the city has abandoned much of its 139 square mile area, withdrawing police protection and city services. Even many of the suburbs are rancid. The abandoned Silverdome way out in Pontiac was auctioned off for next to nothing.Recently private developers have attempted to revitalize the city by buying up real estate for pennies on the dollar and rehabbing it. The big developers tend to be followed by individual investors who buy one property at a time and start improving it. The rising fortunes of the city then become a magnet for other property owners and businesses to start moving in. The cycle of urban decay is replaced by a virtuous circle of renewed growth.This book chronicles the beginning of that process in Detroit. It is funny in a self-depreciating way. It doesn't pull any punches about the mountain of problems that Detroit is buried under. But it also tells the happier times in the city's history --- those days from the 1920's through the 1960's when it was a boomtown that offered blue collar prosperity to the Italians, Poles, and Slavs who left the poverty of Eastern Europe, and also prosperity to the country boys from Appalachia and the destitute Southern Blacks who built the vibrant "Motown" music industry. Millions have prospered in Detroit.Binelli personalizes the history of the city through stories of his multi-generational Italian immigrant family. He tells about his life of growing up in the 1980s, leaving the city in the 1990s, and then returning as an "urban pioneer" in 2000s. He tells poignant stories about other Detroiters, heroes and villains. He tells the stories of labor unions vs. managements and of drug gangs against police. He tells the story of the city's politics, both of vision, and too often of corruption.You will take away from this book an experience of what it is like to live in Detroit and try to make sense of the economic and political issues affecting the town.After reading the book my feelings about Detroit's prospects for revival are:* Detroit is an "accidental city" rather than a "City of Destiny" like Chicago, St. Louis, or even Cleveland. These other cities were founded upon great natural transportation corridors, had trade areas extending hundreds of miles, were centers of distribution of natural resources, and attracted outstanding civic leadership. Detroit, on the other hand, is an "accidental city." It is a megalopolis only because Henry Ford happened to live there. Until he came to town it wasn't destined to be anything more than a middling city like Toledo or Grand Rapids. Now that the auto industry has dispersed the city must decline to a more "natural" size. Thus Detroit is NOT a metaphor for the rest of America. It is the exception, not the rule.* Detroit is one-dimensional. It rose and declined with the auto industry. The auto industry is reviving and there are many outstanding industrial and engineering firms remaining in the area. But it may not be able to develop a truly diversified economy as its more successful neighbors like Chicago, Indianapolis, and even Cleveland have done.* It's hard to imagine that small-time businesses like "urban farming" or artist colonies will gin up anywhere enough economic activity to replace the lost industrial powerhouses. Nevertheless it is better for people to be TRYING to add value to the city, even in humble ways, than to be sitting home collecting welfare or turning to crime. If Detroit is really going to recover significantly it will be through more traditional projects like the proposed new bridge linking the city to Canada and thereby making the city a giant truck stop on the NAFTA Superhighway.* The positive aspect is that the people of Detroit are nice. Contrary to all the stories about them shooting at you, the typical Detroiter is a friendly White, African-American, or immigrant who will be pleased to give an out-of-towner directions, recommend restaurants, or chat in a bar about the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, or Redwings. All those Appalachian Whites and Southern Blacks who came to town during the prosperous years give the city a folksy, down-home feel. I can imagine anybody who does go to live in Detroit will find it a welcoming place. These people seem capable of working together to restore a modest prosperity if properly led by the city governing officials and perhaps getting a boost from the investments of private developers.This book will definitely hold your interest if you're from "The D" or the State of Michigan or just want to know what's going down in the city. Detroit may not seem like the most entertaining subject to write about, but Mark Binelli is a great writer with many meaningful stories about the past, present, and possibly brighter future of the city.

Binelli is a good writer and has produced an interesting if breezy overview of efforts to make something of Detroit.The author, a Detroit native, moves back to the city to chronicle the people who hope to reinvigorate what is arguably America's most desperate urban area. This is not "ruin porn", as apparently people call profiles of Detroit that focus on the mayhem, arson, desolation and abandonment that have bled a once booming metropolis of over 2,000,000 people down to today's count of 700,000 inhabitants. The desolation, failures, and rotten characters are a part of the story, but they form the backdrop for a book that recounts Detroit's rise, fall and present state of hope a midst the hopelessness many feel for the city.The reader gets early chapters on the carving out of the wilderness of the French trading post that became Detroit, its rise as an industrial center and peak as the home and production site of automobiles. The movement of autos first to the suburbs, then to the South and overseas, social unrest in a bi-racial metropolis, the 1967 riots and corrupt urban politics each acted as accelerants upon each other, fueling an unhealthy urban environment that led to the flight of whites and middle class blacks away from the metropolis. These people took with them from the city much of the entrepreneurship that can sustain jobs, the tax base and the density that every city needs to pay for basic services and infrastructure in urban areas.For some reason Detroit's fall has been uniquely physical among American cities. Detroit residents have an inexplicable romance with fire; the number of arsons that claim buildings exceeds that of other cities by a large amount. Lately mayors have taken to demolition of large numbers of abandoned buildings. What official Detroit doesn't get, scrappers do - entrepreneurial citizens who take homes and buildings apart for copper tubing, fixtures and any other building materials that can be reclaimed and sold.This has produced a city that is largely abandoned in many areas. What exists, doesn't work well. A history of corrupt politics along with a shrunken tax base means that citizens are largely without basic services - Binelli chronicles one 911 "center" that is a fireman on the porch of a run-down station with a telephone. That public official attempts to direct the one ambulance in his area to multiple situations nightly. That means that stroke and heart attack victims wait sometimes hours for a response.With buildings being taken down, there is enough open land within the city limits that agricultural industries and farming are serious proposals to reinvigorate the economy. This would be on top of the many small farm-plots that dot the city presently, inhabitants using a cheap available resource (open land) to produce income by the planting of crops.Binelli's book is largely about the people who look for solutions - like the small urban farmers above and Mayor Bing, who is trying to physically move the spread-out population back to a tight urban core in order to deliver services more efficiently (this plan calls for abandonment of largely sparsely inhabited outlying areas). Hope does spring eternally and one will find himself rooting for these schemes even if they seem like long-shots.The other characters the author highlights include firemen, who he accompanies on runs and around the station house; neighbors - each of whom seems much more colorful than an average group one would find living on your block, and politicians. The politicians are of course, both a symptom and cause of some of Detroit's woes. Recent Mayor Kilpatrick proved incredibly corrupt as well as incredibly bad at hiding his personal aggrandizement. He and some other powers-that-be remind one of the corrupt third world countries that steal most international aid for their own profit and are quite brazen about it.On the whole Binelli's survey is interesting and well painted. The reader gets enough glimpses at the severe decay and abandonment within which the city exists to satisfy the urge to know what Detroit is really like in detail. The glimpses of hope offer that; the personalities is some cases are testaments to the will to survive; in others examples of the depths people can sink to when parasiticly trying to steal, cheat and scheme their way through life.A minor annoyance is Binelli's seemingly reflexive tilt to the left. A couple of gratuitous George Bush and conservative swipes were uncomfortably placed in his text. The major fault I found was that he blamed the de-industrialization of Detroit wholly on the managers of GM, Ford and Chrysler. No mention of the effect that strong labor unions had on pushing costs up to the point where they were anti-competitive with the rest of the world and other areas of the United States.On the whole, an interesting read.

Entertaining and informative book. Gives a broad understanding of D's history, as well as of the underlying and recent problems. As it was covers the subject up to 2011/2012 only, the reader interested in the current situation needs other sources or first hand experience.

me and my students loved the book, it's a great read and highly informative. Binelli is a great writer, and Detroit still a place to be.

good book but the LeDuff one was more interesting

It was for my partner for Christmas. She's from Detroit and is interested in self sufficiency. She's really enjoying the book.

good read