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BLOGS
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Detroit:
One Chance for Re-birth?
By Robert Wicke Even before the recession, Detroit's economic health was close to disastrous, largely as a reflection of being the largest city in what is still primarily a one-industry state. The city itself has had few auto plants left for the last several decades. The population has shrunk by more than one half since 1950. Open land started appearing some thirty years ago, and pheasants, among other wildlife, within city boundaries have regularly been seen since then. Now, Detroit is at the epicenter of the current recession. It has the highest unemployment rate in the U.S., close to three times the national rate. According to the mayor's office, unemployment could be as high as 50%, (including underemployment and people no longer considered to be in the labor force). The number of employers anticipating doing any hiring over the next year is less than half the number anticipating lay-offs. And, while unemployment is nowhere close to what it is in cities in the third world, it is certainly significant. Of course, of 150 million unemployed world-wide, 75% receive no unemployment insurance.(1) Some of Detroit's unemployed are not eligible, and eventually, extensions of the benefits may not be forthcoming. The unemployment compensation funds of most of the states (26/50), including Michigan's (2), are already operating in the red. Many of the industrial jobs are probably gone for good. The benefits are often blamed for the out-sourcing of the auto industry. Despite spending more of GDP on health care than any other country, and two and a half times the OECD average (3), there is still nothing approaching universal health care in the United States. Depending on how the question is phrased, a majority of respondents will give single payer health care approval, but the Obama administration has kept the option off the table, largely, at the behest of health industry lobbyists. This is despite evidence from organizations, such as the Physicians for a National Health Program and the California Nurses Association, that single payer would save a considerable amount of money. It is also in the face of further evidence that health insurance premiums will rise sharply upwards in the near future. Economic diversification for Michigan has been a topic of discussion among elected officials and the media for several decades. The Granholm administration has claimed significant starts towards diversification for its last year in office, but it's an open question as to how much of it will take place within Detroit. (And how much of it will be something other than further development of the auto industry.) The Chevy Volt will be manufactured in a facility that is two thirds within Detroit and one third in Hamtramck, but most of everything else is planned for outside Detroit. The bulk of the diversification so far has involved demand for a relatively small number of machinists and engineers. The question that hovers over all of it is where will mass production in any of these new industries will take place. In the auto industry, production has been moving to "right to work" states and to other countries, such as Mexico, for several decades. That is not just in the old-line industrial industries. In one of the newest industries, the production of wind turbines, Federal stimulus dollars have paid for manufacture in China. Given that most of the industrial jobs are extremely unlikely to ever come back, the question becomes how can Detroit begin a move towards a green post-industrialism. Lacking a realistic option to move to mass production in any of the newer industries, the above is its best chance. This would not make it a "transition town," (4) but a little like one, in sharing a first step: food security, perhaps tied in with development of renewable energy. (And it would be doing so in a blue-collar city, which has been widely given up for dead, for several decades.) Detroit does have resources: open land and water. The area of the city is sufficient to contain two of the largest cities in the country, San Francisco and Boston, plus Manhattan, with room to spare. It currently contains about 40 square miles of vacant land (5), vastly more than in any of the intervening years, going back to at least 1980. Put that vacant land together with food security issues, experience living in the country among some of the population, and some hard work, and what you get is urban agriculture. Cornelius Williams is from a long line of black farmers from Southwest Michigan. He saw the potential for urban agriculture in Detroit early on and was able to meet up with some environmentalists who wanted to encourage home gardening. The group met and wrote a grant application, which when funded, became the basis for creating what has been dubbed the "G.R.O.W. collaborative" on the east side of Detroit. The group operates a farmer's market in the neighborhood where it originally formed. Then,
there is Malik Yakini, the bass guitarist in a band, a school principal,
and By this past fall, community gardens in Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park were producing more than 120 tons of produce (7), and that counts only the gardens in one (large) education project. That does not mean, however, that all the possible fault lines are in the past. Both the labor to produce this bounty and its distribution remain racially segregated to a large extent, and there is the looming possibility of a corporate take-over of the efforts. That corporate take-over could come in the form of Hantz Farms, envisioned by John Hanz, a financier. Part of the plan is to produce fresh, "natural" fruits and vegetables, another suggests various types of renewable energy, and a third talks about advanced methods of tying it all together and making it work in a relatively small area. Tree Hugger suggests that it all may be undercut when remarks Hantz made to Fortune magazine about "creating scarcity" are taken into account (8). Since the early days of the present decade, though, there has been a plan for creating urban farming in Detroit, coming largely out of the Boggs Center (9), called the Adamah project. It involves "windmills producing electricity, tree farms and a lumber mill, aquaculture projects producing fish and shrimp, greenhouses for growing flowers and vegetables, grazing land and a dairy, and community gardens, and called for co-housing with shared dining and common areas to create a strong sense of community."(10) Although it never received over-all funding, it has nevertheless served as a set of guidelines for moving at least the East Side of Detroit into a better future. By itself, this vision will not be sufficient, clearly. To make Detroit resilient to any degree, something would have to be done about transportation, and certainly about medicine, to make that affordable and stave off the coming increases in private insurance rates. And, obviously, some degree of economic recovery will be necessary no matter how much more resilient people become. As mentioned above, the Michigan unemployment insurance fund is underfunded and supported by borrowing, and Federal extension of benefits seemed unlikely to be in the offing at the last juncture. One of two things seems necessary for recovery in Detroit, and elsewhere. Both of them are unlikely. One is public sector employment, such as the Roosevelt administration instituted after Harry Hopkins joined the administration, the CCC and the WPA. These programs provided jobs for eight million people; the Obama administration has so far created by its own accounting two million jobs. Those jobs hardly even kept up with the necessities of adding jobs for new entrants into the labor force. The figure required to stay even is 100,000/mo. So, the most that could have gone into recovery over the past year is 1.2 million. That leaves 800,000 and since both of the unemployment figures (the official one and the one that measures underemployment and being considered outside the labor force) have been more or less stable, none of the 800,000 qualifies as jobs for recovery. Then, the cost of each job runs at around $250,000 (11). Then, there is the green collar economy. The news from those quarters is not really better. Two events underline that. One would have to be the forcing out of Van Jones, as the green jobs Czar. He was apparently tossed to the Right Wing, in return for another few months of pretense. The other is the announcement this week by the administration to back loans, to the Nuclear Industry amounting to $8.3. (Considered necessary, because private finance was unavailable, due to being of high risk.) For roughly the same reasons, the Government is also insuring them. The justifications that have crossed the podium on this decision more or less just pegged nuclear power as a source for green jobs, under the entirely misleading contention that nuclear power emits no carbon. True, as a standing power plant it does not, but not at all true about the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle. That is, uranium mining, crushing and milling the ore, creating the steel and cement for the reactor, constructing the reactor. (12) There will be no green jobs program of sufficient scale, unless the public begins to understand the really enormous potential for renewable energy better, and hence, gets behind organizations such as Re-power America, Green for All, and Powershift. There are huge questions as to how this city will survive in the face of the extreme narrowing of options under the neo-liberal business model. These questions are precisely why the United States Social Forum will be one of the most interesting and relevant social forums to take place yet. The mainstream media in the United States have generally covered Detroit, if at all, in distinctly negative terms. It seems very likely that the participants in the USSF will want to surpass those limits and take some fresh, creative approaches. End Notes 1.
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