But they were all transfigured into new souls called suburbanites, though many maintained an undying love-hate relationship with the neighborhoods they were forced by fear to leave behind, often viewing the city and its current residents with a mixture of contempt, dismay, and nostalgia. They pined for the old glory days of the city, following the stories of its streets and politics as if they lived within its boundaries; following the news of its decline like a lover both grieving and gloating over the travails of a lost love. In the late sixties, many of my black friends began to leave, too, as the city declined, for segregation had finally lifted its weight from the close-lying suburbs. So they, too, moved across 8 Mile.
Over the years, I’ve known many whites who work in downtown Detroit and savor the scary, sexy power of being comfortable in the city—at least during work hours. They’re proud of their ability to move around the urban landscape and to have at least daytime friends of other colors. Most whites in the Detroit area stay away, however, especially from anywhere outside of downtown, fearful of the community beyond it. But some former Detroiters are pulled back to their old neighborhoods—some intact, some bedraggled, some where the old home is completely gone: the decay and destruction an affirmation of their parents’ obviously right decision to leave, so long ago.
I wonder if, sometimes, they suspect that decision itself, multiplied across Detroit, was at least part of the cause of all the mess here now. That maybe the mass flight, the leaving of property all over town, the years of being egged on by whispers and realtors to cross 8 Mile, was all part of a nasty, self-destructive Monopoly game involving real properties and real lives. I wonder what might have happened in Detroit if there had never been this flight—if whites had held on and resisted the racial manipulation; if blacks had been able to push back the plague of unemployment, drugs, and crime; if we had been able to live in Detroit, all at one time.
It is hard for many black Detroiters to comprehend the sense of belonging, or even entitlement, that many whites feel toward Detroit, even decades and states removed from living within the city boundaries. There are those—black and white—who have never lived in Detroit proper, or even in Michigan, who gaze (through Google Maps) at old family homesteads, and vicariously traverse old family blocks from afar. They regard Detroit as their city. And I believe that the sense of being part of Detroit proper—despite living well outside of its borders for generations—is rooted in that mass evacuation. Like the movement of blacks across the city after the destruction of Black Bottom—a predominantly black neighborhood razed in the early sixties in the name of urban renewal—this was an unprecedented transfer of community; and suburban parents did their best, as they understood it, to build better lives. But fear of a black city made my friends Detroiters in exile.
Folks ask the question, Will Detroit come back? Well, Detroit never left—but three generations did. Today, regardless of the city’s efforts at redevelopment, most know that they will never again live in the city of their affection. Most of the old neighborhoods are much too far from livability for them, and the city’s core and urban lifestyle holds no appeal for those accustomed to suburban sprawl. But more and more of the children and grandchildren of the Kidnapped Children are finding their way home. Yet despite ghost-town metaphors, “blank slate” pronouncements, and prairie-land descriptions of Detroit, they find the city already occupied, and these strangers in a strange yet familiar land must learn to share it with those who held on.
As the quality of life in the outer ring of the city declined, forcing more blacks to look outward to escape crime and to seek neighborhood stability, property values fell in the near suburbs—because of the age of those communities and their housing stock, because of the mortgage crisis, because of block-busting that is still alive and well (though sometimes with more subtle practices than before). As many of the suburbs become less “exclusive” and downtown living grows, owners who held on to core city properties during the crash of their values watch their fortunes rise, after contributing to the city’s vistas of decay and destruction. For decades, they held on to ravaged, abandoned structures as they waited for a time of profitability, contributing to much of the urban devastation for which black city dwellers have been reviled.
Younger generations of whites from the suburbs, who don’t have their forebears’ fear of the city, are moving in the opposite direction, proudly proclaiming their Detroit provenance and reveling in their new urban life. Some of them re-create suburban segregation in the heart of the city; they want life in Detroit—without Detroiters. But many more look to the city as the most exciting place in the world to live in diversity. They are led by the artists’ community, the creative seraphim of redevelopment; they are the coal-mine canaries of our scorched and burned land. This community of artists has been waiting and creating for such a time as this, for Detroit has always been a city of artists. Our extreme creative impulse in Detroit is now unfettered, no longer consumed by the past that propelled, yet devoured, so much of the city’s creative energy.
