With the recent auto bailout, we were treated to quite a few stories about the “future of Detroit.” In a sad story from The Weekly Standard, writer Matt Labash visits the city that was once a thriving metropolis but is now dying with no salvation in sight:
Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days. It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.
Men’s Fitness magazine christened Detroit America’s fattest city, while Men’s Health called it America’s sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the “most dangerous” title for five of the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.
What I like about this piece is that the writer doesn’t devote his space to slamming the city, even though that would be easy. Instead he talks to people who live in the city, from firefighters who battle blazes in the abandoned, dilapidated buildings that plaque Detroit, to a homeless man from the South who thought the job prospects in Detroit might be better than his former home in Alabama (he was wrong). They’re all fighting the same fight, hoping and fighting for a city that’s probably hopeless.
UPDATE: For a little more perspective on this story, Flickr user smooveb has a goal of photographing 100 abandoned homes in Detroit. At the time of this posting, he’s got 72 hauntingly beautiful photos in the set.
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