Detroit Ruin Porn and White Guilt

It suddenly hit me why I was walking swiftly and directly back to my car after snapping a few photos:  shame.  Like so many others, I was making the most of my visit to Detroit by roaming the inner city neighborhoods and documenting the ruins.  "Documenting” might be an inaccurate term.  It’s not as if Detroit’s continuing fall hasn’t already been photographed and recorded thousands of times over by proper journalists.  No, these snapshots were for my personal collection.  Why you ask?  To make myself feel like an actual photo-journalist?  To prove I was there?  Sure, why not…  But really, let’s admit it was at least partly morbid curiosity.  “Ruin porn.”  Hence the occasional shame, and why I found myself avoiding eye contact with local residents and walking directly back to my car after being spotted depressing the shutter button. 

Imagining yourself taking these pictures and actually doing it are two different things.  Why?  Because before you arrive you don’t picture people actually walking around.  You think that the devastation is confined to certain slightly off the beaten path regions where no one lives, like individual neighborhoods had been hit by aerial bomb raids.  But to drive around Detroit for only a short time imparts the startling revelation that the devastation isn’t limited to certain neighborhoods or individual blocks, it is everywhere – including the places people sleep at night.  Driving down once regal thoroughfares such as Grand and Jefferson Avenues, or any of the smaller streets that compose the Midwestern, strictly grided residential blocks of Urban Detroit is unlike driving through any other city in America.  Every block has multiple houses abandoned and in complete disrepair or burned down, leaving a partial brick exterior as a corpse.  In many neighborhoods there are far more abandoned than inhabited homes.  It’s like a giant open grave.  Except people still live here. One moment drove this point home for me:  I was looking at a particularly dilapidated home and wondering how long it had been abandoned.  Then I saw the plastic city trash tote in front of the house and realized that it was still inhabited. 

That’s the thing:  you imagine yourself taking these pictures with all the time in the world to frame your shots, with no one looking over your shoulder.  “I'll switch to manual and adjust my f/stop, blah blah blah…”  But Detroiters are still walking around their neighborhoods and they don’t particularly like outsiders gawking at their burned down homes.  And who can blame them?  Is it really that much different in principal than staring at the victim of a horrible car crash?  We all want to be proud of where we live and where we come from.  When wanna-be photo-journalists treat their city like Greek ruins, it makes it hard for them to be proud of Detroit. 

But I can’t stop myself.  Who can?  I justify my tourism with bullshit rationalizations.  “I’m pumping a bit of money into the local economy by visiting.”  Sure.  But I can’t face the locals when I'm wandering with my camera, so I turn back to the car.  It’s not fear for my safety.  Yeah, Detroit looks like a war zone and it’s still dangerous by American standards¹, but it’s not Iraq.  Working-class Americans live here.  People who were born here or couldn’t leave.  Now they’re simply trying to make the best of a bad situation like any of us would.  And I can feel their eyes on me, even when they’re not.  Even if I can successfully hide my camera, I’m sure it isn’t hard for them to figure out what a white boy wandering aimlessly through the neighborhood is up to in black Detroit. 

Some things become obvious very quickly when visiting the Motor City.  Case in point:  nobody stops at stop signs and traffic lights.  OK, that’s an exaggeration.  But people run lights all the time.  It’s way worse than Hollywood, but for different reasons.  When you think about it, why should people bother to stop?  There’s very little traffic outside of downtown and a few trendy spots.  And who is there to stop them?  Emergency services are spread ridiculously thin.  In two days I can only recall one cop car. 

Detroit is in some ways a study of contrasts:  a proud city that’s decaying.  The Joe Louis “Fist” Sculpture commemorates arguably the greatest boxer of all time.  But it’s also a symbol of both black pride and Detroit pride, even in the face of continuous decline.  People still ally with The Big Three – you hardly see any foreign cars on the roads here - despite their dramatically decreased manufacturing presence.  Downtown is a mostly beautifully preserved collection of post modern and art deco architecture.  The Detroit Institute of Arts in midtown is an exquisite structure itself, and inside are held some of the most dramatic and valuable art collections in the western world (purchased in better times when Motown was flush with cash).  But drive up Gratiot Avenue and you’ll see the flip side in all the closed up business facades:  graffiti is everywhere.  I’ve never seen so much.  There’s as much graffiti as there is broken glass on the sidewalks, and there is a shit load of that.

So many of the blights of pervasive poverty are painfully apparent in Detroit.  In the morning I decided to go to a grocery store to grab something for breakfast.  I asked my phone where the nearest grocery store was relative to my hotel.  I kid you not that Google Maps suggested the nearest relevant match was across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.  Surely there was something closer - perhaps the maps app just gave me a bad suggestion - but it seemed to jive somewhat with my observations.  Just as I rarely saw emergency services, I can’t really recall seeing grocery stores.  How many Detroiters rely heavily on fast food for their meals?  How many rely on low paying fast food jobs to survive?  Probably too many.  And while I may not have been able to find many grocers by driving around, I could see three or four casinos with no trouble at all.  What does this say about the way we treat our blighted and poor communities?  Do we give up on rehabilitation?  Is the courting of luxury casinos a wise move by the state of Michigan to foster revenue, or a sign of abject desperation that only leads to exploitation of an exhausted populace?  One thing’s for sure:  Detroit’s shattered economy has shifted dramatically from its manufacturing heavy hey-day. 

So what can be learned?  I don’t know.  As Anthony Bourdain honestly opined in his recent CNN Detroit biopic, “Detroit is screwed.”²  Is he right?  Many have tactlessly made comparisons between Detroit and Hiroshima, usually in the form of mass emails meant to make some completely unrelated political point about welfare (with completely inaccurate facts and reasoning, of course).  Such comparisons are ridiculous.  At the risk of sounding cold and heartless, Hiroshima was completely leveled, all at once, with almost no survivors, making rebuilding relatively easy.  Detroit has been dying slowly, with survivors of the downturn spread thin throughout the rotting husk.  Japan was rebuilt by a United States flush with post-war wealth and confidence.  Detroit has been abandoned to financial insolvency by a Superpower in decline, and a white bourgeois, long ago relocated to the suburbs or Texas.  There is no previous case study for the Detroit syndrome (at least not at this scale) and therefore, no clear path forward.

Detroit has obviously been mismanaged by a litany of politicians and business leaders.  Scan the internet for blog posts and you can find people blaming Detroit’s downfall on the mostly black population and the city officials they’ve voted for.  But in this writer’s opinion, that's a painfully narrow and misguided analysis.  Sure, Detroit’s minority population must take responsibility for electing people like corrupt mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  But let’s not kid ourselves:  white people elect corrupt politicians in cities all across the world.  Furthermore, Detroit’s current population wasn’t primarily responsible for the near collapse of the American auto industry.  They just couldn’t afford to get out once the writing was on the wall.  With worthless homes and low-paying jobs they still can’t get out. 

Others blame the UAW.  Like many labor unions, it’s hard to argue that they didn’t get greedy and demand too much for too little work (while laborers at non-union parts suppliers in other states often make a fraction of their wages).  Perhaps the UAW and the state of Michigan were too naïve, paying little heed to low wage labor competition from overseas and across state lines.  Then again, maybe the joke’s on the rest of us, living in states where “right to work” really just means “right to get fired for no reason at all.”  There’s no easy answer, because there is no one answer.  Those who would seek to blame Detroit’s ills on one problem or group of people are oversimplifying for the sake of political scapegoating, or giving in to lazy thinking.

To see Detroit up close is to regretfully agree with Bourdain’s assessment.  Detroit really is screwed, and there’s no foreseeable way to restore it.  The more you drive its streets, the more difficult it becomes to picture in your mind the vibrant city of the 50s and 60s, when Motown ruled the airwaves. 

I don’t know what to do with Detroit any more than the next person.  But one thing I do feel strongly about is that the worst possible action is continued inaction.  To be fair, it’s not like we completely ignored Detroit or its economy.  There have been the multiple taxpayer funded bailouts of American automakers.  But the city itself has largely been left to rot.  Surely if we can spend billions rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, it stands to reason that we could do something about Detroit.  Even if it’s not rebuilding, but strategically retracting.  People in Detroit are finally embracing the idea that they need to abandon dead structures and neighborhoods to be razed³, and some significant federal funds have been allocated to help with the bulldozing⁴. 

As the city compresses to relieve the strain on essential services, it is possible there may be serious conflicts between individual rights and those of the community if people are forced to move from their homes.  Drastic and possibly unprecedented action may be necessary to bring back jobs, or alternatively, to move hopelessly unemployed citizens out of state.  We, as a nation, should be ready to lend a helping hand.  A common political refrain for several years has been that we need to start spending money and resources rebuilding America, instead of spending it all overseas in foreign wars and nation building.  There’s no better test case than the Motor City.  Detroit used to be the crown jewel of the Midwest.  We shouldn't let it fade into oblivion.

1. Fisher, Daniel.  “Detroit Again Tops List of Most Dangerous Cities, As Crime Rate Dips.”  Forbes.  22 October, 2013  http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/10/22/detroit-again-tops-list-of-most-dangerous-cities-but-crime-rate-dips/
2. Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown; Detroit – transcript  http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1311/10/abpu.02.html  
3. Saulny, Susan.  “Razing the City to Save the City.”  The New York Times.  20 June, 2010  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21detroit.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
4. Spangler, Todd.  “Michigan gets OK to use $100M to demolish vacant homes, fight blight.”  Detroit Free Press.  6 June 2013  http://www.freep.com/article/20130606/NEWS06/306060065/demolition-money-vacant-land-detroit