This is section ten




REVIN' UP MOTOWN



Ronald Gordon Ziegler

     Writing in the Detroit News on December 17, 1996, Nickie McWhirter entered
comments in her column drawing on data from a study of poverty recently issued from
Columbia School of Public Health National Center for Children in Poverty. Much of the
study offered little that was new. It challenged what McWhirter seems to think are
common stereotypes about poverty in the United States, but on this the funding provided
by the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation was
not well invested. But aside from the tired rehashing of the usual claims, issued to dispel
supposed myths, the study apparently also wants to insist that jobs and intact families are
not necessarily a cure for poverty, particularly among children. In order to make this
point, however, McWhirter sights statistics from the study to show that a "majority of
poor young children live in working families," but  those 'working families' turn out to
include something less than a nuclear family and extend to those with part-time jobs. That
slight of hand adds considerably to the analysis that "[o]nly one-third of the poor children
were from homes that relied exclusively on public assistance."

     If it is true, as she insists the study shows, that poverty and child poverty have been
growing rapidly, the question must be asked, as it no doubt will not be in the quarters
where it needs to be asked, how massive government efforts to combat the problem 
(to the tune of over $5 trillion since 1965) rationalized. They seem to be doing anything
but alleviating the problem. Their answer probably will come back that we need to spend
more (on programs that aren't working now) because spending more will solve the
dilemma. It does not seem to occur to these minds that if you subsidize anything --
including  poverty -- you are probably going to get more of it. 

     While many of the shortcomings of the data, at least as reported by McWhirter, are
explicable if such things as single parent families and teenage pregnancy are factored in,
something of special import is offered by the column and the study:


	"Detroit has the highest young poverty rate of America's 12 largest cities. 
	As of 1994, 60 percent of Detroit children in the studied age group live
	in poverty, more than half of them in extreme poverty." (p 9a)

     Even if that may seem to run against the grain of a major theme she wishes to get
across -- and an important one that is valid -- that "the stereotype of most  poor children
being black or members of some minority, living almost exclusively in ghetto areas of big
cities, is false, despite Detroit's high numbers," it is impossible to overlook the fact that the
city does have some serious problems, even if the data presented by the study is
problematic in some important ways. But Detroit's problems in this regard are not
particularly new. They have been around for some time. And there root causes are
generally not very well understood.

In 1954, it was very difficult to find an apartment, flat, or house to rent in the city of
Detroit. My parents searched for months before they successfully secured one. The
following year, the population of Motown is estimated to have hit the two million mark.
That same year, the population of Chicago also reached two million. Now, today, the
population of Detroit is in virtual free fall, cascading toward the million mark. By the next
census, it will undoubtedly dip below one million. The ballot measure recently approved to
permit casinos in some cities in Michigan set the population for such qualifying
municipalities at 800,000, indicating the anticipated drop in Detroit's numbers. The city
has fallen from the ranking of fifth in the nation while Chicago has grown to over 3.2
million.

     These changes have not been happenstance or coincidence. There are causal factors
involved, of course. They can be identified, and are not those often touted as besetting the
Motor City. Indeed, the  usual suspects are more symptoms than the root of the problem.
This analysis considers both.

     The usual suspects include white flight, suggested as having begun in response to
larger numbers of black residents, or associated with crime, the riots of 1967 and 1968,
urban decay, bussing, poor schools, or the like. Certainly, 1967 did not help the city, but
all those events and phenomena have proceeded after it, and the demise of Detroit began
before that. It may have contributed to them, more than having resulted from them.

     Detroit may in some sense be the Great Society, in that it was the policies of federal
intervention which have aggravated the problem. It may well be that Washington has
destroyed our cities -- it clearly has not helped them. Still, Chicago has not fared as badly
as Detroit, though both have suffered severely at the hands of federal authority. 

     In any event, by the time the Great Society and the riots hit, Detroit was already
staggered. Two particular items can be identified as typifying the causal factors in its
diminishment. The first occurred in 1957 and the second, within five years of that blow.
And, as much as they were lawfully proceeding from them, such things as urban unrest
were really nails in the coffin. The first blow came with the closing down of Packard
Motors and the second with the enactment of the city income tax.

     Coming near the crest of Detroit's population, Packard closed for a variety of reasons
which stem from the inability or unwillingness of that corporation to invest the capital
necessary to upgrade technologically to remain viable competitively. In this respect, the
closure somewhat presaged similar problems which each of the other auto giants would
also experience in the decades that followed. But when it closed, thousands of workers
whose families lived within a few miles of the plant on Detroit's near east side were
thrown out of work. In a very real sense, neither they, nor the city, ever has recovered
from this terrible blow.

     The city income tax measure was enacted in the early sixties by the mayoral
administration of Jerome Cavanaugh, who was very much a presager of the Great Society.
It instituted a two tier tax structure. Residents of the city had to pay a three percent tax on
their incomes, while non-residents who earned their income in the city had to pay a one
and a half percent tax. In retrospect, what that has amounted to is not only a penalty for
working in the city, but also an additional penalty for living there. People could enact for
themselves a considerable tax cut by moving out of Detroit. This became an important
factor even beyond that when young people moving into the work force had to choose
where they would live -- and work. It was a big incentive to look elsewhere at least for
homes, and it was also an incentive for businesses to leave, or not to locate in the city.
And, as in the wake of these factors, the other sorts of problems generally identified as
reasons behind Detroit's 'decline' grew, quite in consequence of them, the downward
economic spiral of the city was guaranteed. 

     The spiral became a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Poverty and dependency and crime
escalated, and it was these, as much as 'white flight' more narrowly defined, that brought
the city's economy ever downward. Confronted with the economic disincentives imposed
that encouraged moving out of the city, those who could opted for alternatives available
to them. Detroit's dependence for employment on the auto industry fed into the
developments as manufacturing required fewer workers to produce the same and even
greater product, and more than they had before, the auto manufacturer's and other
businesses directly related to them or connected in ancillary fashion to the incomes of
workers in these plants, began to locate elsewhere, as well. One can readily find dozens of
sites where factories once operated that employed thousands of workers within the city
limits. Even where positive moves have been made to build new factories in Detroit, they
employ far fewer workers in far fewer sites than were formerly employed. 

     The indications for future prospects for the Motor City are mixed. On the one hand,
there have been stirrings of sound economic measures to help. In late 1996, Governor
John Engler announced the creation of 'renaissance zones' in Detroit and neighboring cities
in an effort to begin to shift the direction things were moving. The areas selected in
Detroit for these zones includes, interestingly, 71 acres around the old Packard plant.

Continue