[Updated March 30th, 2011]
The decline of Detroit is often attributed to incompetence or menace: bad government, bad industry, bad schools, bad intentions, bad race relations.
I've got a hunch that excellence and unintended consequences had more to do with it.
When we think of the modern American landscape, what do we think? We probably do not imagine an urban neighborhood with corner stores, row houses and parks.
Instead, we think of shopping malls, subdivisions, cars and freeways. It turns out that the pioneers and leaders in all four areas were Detroiters.
Is there a correlation between suburban excellence and urban decline?
Adoption
Why is Detroit so different today from New York, Boston and Chicago?
Let's ask a seemingly unrelated question: why was San Francisco the first city to thoroughly adopt Yelp? Twitter? And Google?
All the innovative websites listed above were invented in the San Francisco area. Word of mouth helped the value of those technologies spread through personal networks. There was an excitement that rippled through the community because one either knew the creators directly or a friend of a friend who did. Knowing people and having a shared social context made it compelling to try and adopt new products. Plus, there was a lot of money to made by being involved with these projects.
For example, the first version of Twitter was launched in July 2006. If one were living in San Francisco and wasn't using Twitter and understanding it's world-changing nature by the spring of 2007 then one was simply out of the loop.
The social dynamics of San Francisco and Silicon Valley require one to be all-in on new technology and to view old technology largely with disdain.
As we explore the dynamics of Detroit as Detroiters created mass-market cars, freeways, malls and subdivisions it's interesting to imagine the excitement that must have rippled through the community with the launch of each new product. Imagine how the act of abandoning the old while heralding the new must have been socially rewarding and engaging. Plus, there was a lot of money to be made.
Furthermore, unlike websites, the products in Detroit were physical and present. One couldn't ignore a new freeway or a new shopping mall the same way one could ignore a new website.
My hunch is that the biggest reason Detroit (founded in 1701 by Louis XIV of France) today is so different from other American cities that were founded during the colonial era is that Detroiters thoroughly adopted the new 'suburban technologies' of the 1900s while other cities adopted them only in moderation.
Cars
Detroit has been leading America's automobile industry for over 100 years. Famous businessmen like
Henry Ford,
Billy Durant and
Alfred Sloan led the way to put the world on wheels.
Many media outlets mislead people into believing that the recent dips in market share of the Detroit region's Big 3 carmakers is the cause of the City of Detroit's physical decline.
The best counterexample is
Chrysler Headquarters and Technology Center. Completed in 1993, it is the second largest office complex in North America after the pentagon. Chrysler did not build it in Detroit, but the northern suburbs of Oakland County. So, while Time magazine publishes
photos of the abandoned Packard plant, the executives, bureaucrats, engineers and scientists of Chrysler are working in an excellent,
state-of-the-art facility miles away.
Should Chrysler have rehabilitated Detroit's old Packard plant instead? Yes. But the car business is not the internet business. Physical infrastructure is expensive and difficult to re-purpose. The market doesn't generally tolerate a carmaker spending the money needed to hit the reset button on an old, urban facility when empty farmland is available on the cheap out in the suburbs.
Long before Chrysler moved to Auburn Hills, GM hatched the plan in 1944 of moving designers, engineers and scientists out of Detroit to the suburb of Warren, where it created the
General Motors Technical Center. At the time it was heralded as the Versailles of Industry. The facility is still cranking out some of the most innovative car design and technology in the world.
And even before GM moved it's laboratories to the suburbs, Ford moved it's automobile assembly from the Detroit enclave of
Highland Park to the suburb of Dearborn.
Chrysler, GM and Ford weren't trying to create dilapidated space in the city, they were trying to create excellence in the suburbs. However, they did both.
Likewise the car industry in the 1920s wasn't trying to destroy our urban fabric. They were having fun building stuff, moving faster than human beings had ever moved before while ensuring there was a lot less
horse manure on the streets. However, they also helped destroy the urban fabric of Detroit by making it so easy to commute long distances. It wasn't the intention, but it happened anyway.
Freeways
Along with the automotive tycoons, lesser-known people had a major impact creating the suburban world we have today.
William Potts, a Detroit police officer, invented the red-yellow-green traffic light.
Frank Rogers, Michigan's preeminent road commissioner, paved thousands of miles of Michigan's roads and created many of the political and financial models for road commissions around the world. The snowplow was also invented by a Michiganian.
Detroiters were making it easy to move around within and leave the city before people in other cities had fully understood just how different a car-driven metropolis would be.
Malls
Few things are as American as the two-level, fully-enclosed, artificially lit, circuitous mall that ensures shoppers see every storefront. The shopping mall concept was invented by
A. Alfred Taubman, who is considered a pioneer and legend in retailing.
Taubman was born in Pontiac, MI. He is a huge philanthropist in the Detroit and Ann Arbor area. In terms of business innovation, Taubman's shopping mall is hugely valuable, creative and profitable. His company, Taubman Centers based in Bloomfield Hills, MI, owns shopping malls across Michigan and across the country and is considered an American
empire.
Taubman Centers is also a reason Detroit doesn't have a walkable, urban retail zone. The malls were just way too good at what they did. It sucked all those shoppers out of the often cold, rainy, snowy Detroit sidewalks and into comfortable suburban malls.
Subdivisions
Many metro-Detroiters of my generation or younger have no idea what a neighborhood is. If pressed to answer: "what's your neighborhood?" they might respond with the name of their subdivision or their suburb. But, they don't know what an urban neighborhood is. They haven't experienced Corktown or Hubbard Farms or Indian Village where one has a bar, stores and a park all within walking distance. For them the houses are on the 'inside' and the shopping is something to which one drives on the 'outside' of the subdivision.
This brings us to
Pulte Homes. In 1950,
Bill Pulte built his first home. In 1960 he built his first subdivision with 49 lots. Today Pulte Homes is the nation's largest homebuilder. Bill Pulte is from Detroit. He has created tons of jobs, he has 14 children and dozens of grandchildren. Like Taubman, his company is based in Bloomfield Hills and he seems to be a very likable Michigan entrepreneur.
However, he is also largely responsible for the death of the urban neighborhood in Detroit. He wasn't trying to kill cities. But he did it anyway. The subdivisions he built were more appealing.
Exodus or Migration
Many observers characterize the abandonment of Detroit as flight: an exodus from the city. When viewed in the context of contrasting the new and shiny with the old and understood, the movement to the suburbs was done, at least in part, with a spirit of migration to something better as opposed to just an exodus from something terrible.
Once the infrastructure was in place in the suburbs it's easy to imagine the social pressure on CEOs of city-based companies to move their operations to the suburbs. Our business leaders, were likely caught up in the excitement at their country clubs about the promise of the new suburban mode of doing business.
Imagine being the CEO of a media company based in Detroit, talking to the CEO of a car company who just invested in a suburban facility. It's easy to imagine the peer pressure that must have been exerted to move out. Once a CEO decided to move his company to the suburbs it was only a matter of time before all his employees would move out too, accelerating the decline of Detroit.
We recently experienced this type of 'leadership', when the CEO of Comerica (a bank that had been based in Detroit since 1849) moved the company's headquarter to Dallas, TX in 2007. His rationale: pacify the critics on Wall Street who think of Comerica as a Detroit company.
This type of self-fulfilling spiral of short-term decisions litters the history of Detroit.
Media Coverage
When national and even local news outlets cover Detroit, they don't interview Lee Iacocca asking him why he vacated Detroit and created blight. They don't make even the simplest systematic connections:
- vacancy is Detroit's biggest problem
- vacancy is caused by those who vacate
- vacancy is NOT caused by those who stay
- therefore let's interview the people who vacated
Instead, they interview people who are still living in the neighborhoods and reeling from the unintended consequences. To the casual viewer, it appears that the people being interviewed are the cause of the blight that surrounds them.
This gets especially tricky when spanning generations. A typical twenty-something living in Macomb county looks with disdain on the people of the east side of Detroit. Not realizing that the blight is directly related to their Italian, Polish and German parents and grandparents abandoning those neighborhoods.
The media ought to interview the evacuees, the CEOs who decided in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to leave their highly-regarded skyscrapers downtown and trade them in for office parks in the suburbs. Do they feel they acted rationally? Were they thinking systematically? Are they satisfied with the results? Do they believe there were unintended consequences?
And they ought to interview the grand-children of the ordinary folks who left Detroit. Do they understand that their families contributed to the problems? Do they feel a sense of accountability for the state of Detroit? Do they realize the fate of the suburbs and the fate of the city are highly connected?
Excellence and Unintended Consequences
The leading visionaries and companies in malls, subdivisions and cars are all Detroiters. Instead of being called Motor City, we could be called America City. Our people lead the way and most the new growth in the USA has followed our lead. Cities today are exceptions. People pay to visit downtown Disney, but live in a subdivision, shop at malls and drive their cars on freeways.
