The downtown area, now virtually vacant, is scheduled to be a party center for wealthy suburbanites, with a new football stadium, baseball stadium, three large casinoes, and a theatre district. The local ruling class, which has moved decisively to integrate itself, while keeping the mass of people strictly color coded, has seized the city school system outright, which will mean, I think, that the schools will become even more stratified with children being tracked early on for specific careers.
This only underlines some of what already exists (white people come downtown and riot after Red Wings victories in the Stanley cup), but in many ways it is a significant change. Given the largese now available, booty from the one-nation-over-all international scene, it is possible to bribe, with relatively small amounts, sections of the working class to oversee the others--teachers for example. However, at the bottom of the system, at least in Detroit, is a growing number of people for whom there is no place at all. I asked a U, Mich urban planner working on this process just what will happen to the thousands of poor people who have no place in the picture. His response, in a fairly large public meeting, was, "well, we hope they move somewhere else. " Then, a room full of laughs.
It is still possible to walk in the vacant bulldozed fields, one mile from the city center, and kick up a pheasant. The surface-street arteries into the city look like a passage through Beirut, after the bombing. Most schools are pre-jail institutions, and the youth, at least a significant section of them, are completely without hope.
So, in order to "prove" the comeback of downtown, which surely has not yet begun to happen, and to fund the necessary social maneuvers necessary to fend off the potential of a repeat of the uprising of 1967 (which would ruin the casinoes) the folks in charge are building the pyramid of investments. Youth in the city, I believe, already live under fascist rule, and it is extending, with velvet gloves over the iron fist. That's my guess---others?
At 02:22 PM 5/6/99 -0400, you wrote:
>from Grant's Municipal Finance Observer's email update:
>
>>-> DETROIT?
>>"That cities are coming back is not news. Week chases week, and
everywhere we
>>read about this or that downtown' flourishing, and sometimes in the most
>>unlikely of spots. St. Louis? In the 1980s, St. Louis was dubbed The
Carthage
>>of America.' At the end of the 1990s, St. Louis is written up in Saveur, a
>>glossy magazine that carries under it title the slogan Savor a world of
>>authentic cuisine.' We were shocked, then, but not surprised, when Fitch
IBCA
>>upgraded Detroit to A- from BBB+. After recent years of stagnation, the
City
>>of Detroit is experiencing renewed growth because of increased private and
>>public investment and continued conservative financial management of city
>>operations,' the Detroit upgrade report read."
>
>Charles, anyone, what in god's name is this all about?
>
>Doug
>
Rich Gibson
Program Coordinator of Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.