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48212 - An Obliterated City: On The Ground In Detroit
By Richard McCormack
richard@manufacturingnews.com
A friend of mine said I should go to Google Maps and type in 48212. It is a zip code in Detroit.
"I happened to be Googling one day and I thought, 'Let's take a look at the old neighborhood. And it was, 'Oh my God,' " said Marko Slusarczuk, executive director of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association. "Go north a little and zoom in. You will see large areas of residential neighborhoods that are bulldozed."
So late one night I typed "48212" into Google Maps, hovered over what looked to be a nondescript area, zoomed in and then lifted and placed the yellow "Google Man icon" (located above the zoom tool) on the street for a ground-level view, double-clicking on the street in the distance, and driving around Detroit for hours on my computer. There are tens of thousands of abandoned homes, boarded up businesses and deserted streets.
I zoomed out, flew around at 800 feet altitude, and haphazardly landed on 1136 Puritan St. and then on 2932 Elmhurst Street. And I did 360-degree rotations.
Can I believe what I am looking at? Nothing of the sort exists in Washington, D.C.
My insides churned. I felt like a voyeur, safe inside my "car." Sidewalks and curbs are disappearing under weeds. There are empty playgrounds; dead trees and piles of debris.
Thanks to the miracle of Google (and the investment made in GPS, space launch, satellite, computer and networking technologies by the Department of Defense) I "drove" on my computer past hundreds of places like 1136 Puritan Street. Neighborhoods that are gone; blocks with nary a house left on them. Overgrown lots. Burned out homes. You can put the Google Man icon in the middle of an intersection, rotate 360 degrees, and there's not a car in sight.
I stood in front of 2144 East Ferry St. There is no good reason for me to direct you there. It is a random spot. But if you zoom out a click or two, looking down at the neighborhood from 400 feet up, you will see serpentine furrows on the vacant lots.
They are bulldozer tracks.
All of these neighborhoods were populated in the 1960s during the automobile boom. Socially conservative, middle-class families kept tidy homes and manicured lawns. But when people move out of a home that can't be sold and turn off the heat, the bitter winters with heavy snow and ice accumulating on roofs quickly turn a house into a heap.
Gutter problems cause basement problems. Water — the enemy of wood — penetrates the bones of the structure, and it sags, stress-fracturing windows. The homes become dens for drug dealers. Vandals complete the degradation. Neighbors call for a bulldozer. It doesn't take long for a city block to disappear, like East Ferry Ave. between St. Aubin and Dubois streets.
The automobile companies and their suppliers paid hundreds of thousands of workers a livable wage, giving Detroit the honor of having the highest concentration of single-family homes in any city in the country. Many thousands of them are vacant or gone.
"When people talk about the death of manufacturing, this is the most poignant example you can give them," said Marko. "This is a condemnation of the whole business philosophy that workers are disposable and are to be treated as an asset that is depreciable."
As I'm roaming the streets, I wonder about the Google employees who drove through these neighborhoods with cameras mounted on their cars, taking pictures to upload for the world to see, and what they thought of the carnage.
Travel around Detroit's 139-square miles to empty warehouses and bombed out industrial zones and you'll see telephone poles leaning sideways, boarded up storefronts, liquor stores, desperate churches standing sentry over barren wasteland, lone walkers, for-sale signs, dilapidated fencing, graffiti, weeds growing in parking lots — the urban prairie — discarded pallets, plywood and mattresses. And always there is a translucent sky beyond the lamp-posts and hodgepodge of wires.
There are some nice places in the city — middle-class neighborhoods and the outer suburbs with big estates. I typed "Detroit Real Estate" into Google and pulled up homes for sale. In the neighborhoods that look fairly nice from above, there are houses selling for $14,000. I find a house for sale on 8034 Georgia Street that is going for $11,900. It's huge. I take the virtual tour: eight bedrooms and four baths. Cheaper than a new car. Check it out. It's on a corner lot. It's got a nice tub. It's abandoned.
I go back to Google Maps and put the icon on the ground in front of the house and check out the neighborhood. Of the 17 lots on the block across the street, there are only two with houses standing. Take a look at one of them. Type in the address — 8082 Georgia Street and go to the street level view. You will see it. It is frightening. Many of the abandoned houses get torched at Halloween — on Devils' Night. The city is haunted.
If you zoom out a few clicks and scroll farther down Georgia Street (to the left when you're hovering above), past Crocket High School (to 6900 Georgia St.) you will see that there is NOTHING left. Cooper Elementary School is one of two buildings that remain standing within 25 square blocks of houses that have vanished. The city is gone! It is shocking.
Thousands and thousands of houses still need to be torn down, block after block after block after block. The bulldozers haven't gotten to them yet. There will soon be nothing left of Detroit.
A report from the city's Office of Foreclosure Prevention says that the number of abandoned and vacant properties has increased from 46,000 to 78,000 over the last three years. The city's population has declined from 2 million to 830,000 and the unemployment rate is almost 30 percent. That is a depression.
I start reading blogs and commentary left on news articles and studies about the condition of the city. They degrade into noxious screeds over race.
Venturing downtown on Google Maps, it looks like the Google driver was there on a Sunday morning. Hardly anyone is around. There are parking lots everywhere throughout city center. Not a crane on the horizon. Random spots: 2418 Cass Ave.; 1960 W. Grand River. Type them in, zoom in, go to street level and pan 360 degrees. Once proud, handsome buildings, they take your breath away. It makes your heart sink. It is desolate everywhere, for as far as the eye can see. No-man's land.
GM's headquarters, the inaptly named "Renaissance Center," stands above a bygone era of American global economic dominance. Motown is Notown. There will be no renaissance.
I want to get on the ground and ask the few who remain what happened. What do you do for a living? How much longer can you hold on? What is the city really like? What are your plans? Does anyone care? What happened to government? Where did all the wealth go? Is there any hope for Detroit? Does your fate await the rest of America?
Tens of thousands of people have lost all they invested in homes and businesses. The past is a memory that cannot be revisited, for it has been bulldozed and dumped in landfills.
After my virtual tour, I called Marko back. I said, "Gee, thanks for depressing me!" I tell him that I worry about places like Las Vegas and Orlando. If you don't have anyone making money in the Midwest, you don't have anyone spending it in Vegas.
He said that those cities are like Detroit in that they are single-industry towns, adding that the same situation exists in biology. "If you have a single-tree forest and a blight hits, you lose the entire forest," he said. "It's what is happening in Montana right now" with the Mountain Pine Beetle destroying millions of acres of trees.
His analogy made me think of my Irish ancestors who relied on one crop for their sustenance, and then, inevitably, to where I currently live: in Washington, D.C., a one-industry town.
Washington, D.C., does not look like Detroit, but if you don't have people in places like Detroit paying federal taxes, why would it not someday?
Our politicians do not live in Detroit, but they should act as if they do. While they pour hundreds of billions of dollars the country does not have into wars in far corners of the globe, Detroit and New Orleans — once mighty American cities now utterly destroyed — are there on the Internet for the world to see. What an embarrassment. What a condemnation of America's political and corporate leadership and the economic policies of the past 40 years that remain in place to this very day.
Detroit is a city that was painstakingly and lovingly built by hard working Americans. Like the cities of the ancient Mayans, it is reduced to rubble; nature reclaiming man's domain.
It is right here, right now.
It is real.
This is America.
It cannot be ignored.
What has become of our country?
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