Last American City

A New York sports writer recently dubbed Detroit, “The last American City.” As in, the last real city, the last gritty city, the last un-gentrified city, the last not-over-developed city left in America. He says he knows this because he travels everywhere there’s an NBA team – that’s most big cities --- and Detroit is the only one not Starbucksified, if that can be a term.

Indeed Detroit might be the only American city left without chains and big box stores on every corner. This is both good and bad. When you want a cappuccino and a Sunday New York Times you’re going to have to work for it.

But Detroit is also the only major city where you can purchase a Victorian house less than 10 minutes from downtown for $130,000; houses built in the 1890s with sculpted-wood interiors, tile fireplaces, original stained glass and plenty of room to create art or music or whatever. Where you can afford to buy an old manufacturing plant and turn it into an artists’ enclave or an office building.

Detroit is America’s final frontier, an urban and sometimes rural landscape with potential so ripe you can taste it. On the trail of American opportunism first there was the American South and West, then bustling cities from coast to coast, then a nationwide move to the suburbs and now a trend back to cities.

As we know Detroit has so far missed out on the last leg of that trend. But Detroit is not alone, historically or currently, in its cycle of boom and bust. The tale of any city is a tale of boom and bust.

Detroit ranks 40th globally among cities in its rate of declining population over the last 50 years, according to Shrinking Cities, a recent art and research project out of Berlin. More than 350 cities across the globe have hemorrhaged businesses and residents over the last 50 years; a quarter of them on the American East Coast, as factories moved out and people followed.

Those waiting for the resurgence of Detroit might look to Rome for solace. Rome had 1.5 million residents in the 1st century A.D. and nearly shut down 300 years later when the population fell to 30,000. By 1970, the population surged to 3 million. Valencia, Spain’s third largest city, boasts a large and bustling hip/bohemian district with buildings dating to 136 B.C. For decades the area was abandoned and said to be dangerous and drug-addled. In the 1990s the city “re-discovered” the barrio and now its real estate has gone through the roof.

In America Detroit is the last major urban area to revitalize—Philly did it, Cleveland, St. Louis, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, the list goes on. Even Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, a place with palpable race problems as evidenced by the recent battle over the Confederate flag flying over the statehouse dome, created a bustling little and diverse downtown for itself and with it, higher inner-city property values. In the 1970s NYC famously went bankrupt and today you can’t escape exuberant shows of wealth on Manhattan.

Detroit might be the only city left with room to grow. Motown is its own Wild West, the new urban prairie, a wide open space with acres and acres of green-covered lots where outsiders can come and build whatever they want for relatively cheap. Classic and empty bars line Michigan and Vernor avenues begging for a shot of life. Detroit intellectuals such as Grace Lee Boggs have pleaded for ages with people to think of Detroit’s vacancies not as blight, but as opportunity. Build a funky housing project for artists; make public art; build a state-of-the-art apartment building that runs on natural power; build a massive community gardening system. Detroit’s a canvas; just build.

All the world’s comeback cities have their problems. Wealth, higher taxes and spikes in cost-of-living force out longtime and lower-income residents. There’s little room to grow. Buying a house or a building in appealing areas will cost an arm and a leg.

Not in Detroit. The city is 300 years old---young in the global scheme of things. What will Detroit be in 20, 50, 100 years?

Sure, the city’s got problems. But it’s also got much to offer to the person with a thing for urban settings, a person who wants to create, to build, to re-invent something new from something old and doesn’t have a couple million dollars to do it with. It’s the same draw of New York and San Francisco before they were discovered by everyone on the planet.

And that’s the fun part about the story of Detroit. The city’s future on the global map of cities is entirely unknown.

Detroit’s story is not ending. It’s just beginning.