The Motor City desperately needs a new identity

Springtime in Detroit: The snow has melted, revealing festering mounds of decaying litter blown up along freeway embankments and against chain-link fences. The road surfaces are crumbling, thanks to winters that increasingly ping-pong between freeze and thaw.

At the grueling end of a long, gloomy winter, it feels like everyone out on the roads is in a foul mood. People honk more, ride your rear bumper, pass you on narrow, low-speed streets where there’s not really room for passing. As Bill McGraw noted in the Freep, there is an “increasing number of yahoos who treat expressway driving like a real-life video game, tailgating, speeding, weaving in and out and periodically firing guns.” The ever-present sound of snarling muscle-car engines begins to sound simply like an expression of white male rage.

As in many other locations, road rage here is tactile and has been noticeable worse since the pandemic briefly shut down road traffic and offered us a taste of an alternate world we have largely failed, outside of remote work, to embrace. It feels hostile out there. Mean.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, thanks to being the father of two boys with soccer and ninja classes and an ailing father and family issues that need doing, and it’s not bringing me joy. Being so dependent on my car is slowly bleeding any remaining optimism I had about this place and its future. Case in point: Today I took note of a rehabilitation project under way on Lake Frances in Palmer Park, which aims to dredge and clean the pond and stabilize its banks with new native plantings. Neat! Then I took notice of how the parking lot next to it was festooned with litter following a weekend of nice weather, because there’s nothing like going to the park for some badly needed fresh air and greenery and leaving your shit everywhere.

Maybe, I think, what I’m seeing when I’m behind the wheel is the real Detroit, the product of our cultural identity as the Motor City. We staked our identity on the automobile and we’ll go down with the automobile.

The craziest part of it to me? We chose this lifestyle, and we continue to choose it.

A four-wheeled culture war

Cars — sorry, trucks and SUVs — are getting bigger and heavier. I see so many Yukons, Navigators, Expeditions, Grand Wagoneers, Escalades and behemoth pickup trucks rumbling along on our oversaturated roads and crowding our parking lots.

Your know it’s Spring in your Detroit neighborhood when this donuts shit starts up again. 🙄 Last year one road near me was a drag track most the summer. pic.twitter.com/tRA0wCEeXN

— Daily Detroit (@TheDailyDetroit) April 7, 2023

There’s a tug of war happening between the status quo and any hint of new. Any tangible signs of progress in Detroit come marred with an asterisk: swaths of land devoted to automobiles. Downtown and the District Detroit lower Cass Corridor are defined as much (or more) by parking lots as by actual businesses, housing, offices or entertainment establishments. I recently went out to dinner at a newish eatery that had opened in a formerly derelict neighborhood, and I felt excited — until I realized that directly across the street, nearly the entire block was taken up by pockmarked unpaved parking lots surrounded by chain link fences, turning half the neighborhood into a dreary dead zone.

People bitch endlessly — a noisy minority, perhaps — about the proliferation of protected bike lanes as an affront to their God-given right not to have to share the road with other modes of transportation. You don’t have to look hard to find examples of motorists threatening cyclists. I’m actually starting to get nervous about how these yahoos will react to the Woodward Avenue road diet in Ferndale and the bike lanes it will bring. They’ll complain bitterly if they don’t see the bike lanes filled from the get-go with cyclists. Driving through the construction zone, which is restricting the number of open travel lanes, already feels like a scene from “Mad Max.”

And in a case of people voting with their feet (or more accurately, their Tahoes), the places in metro Detroit with the highest population growth continue to be godawful car-dependent exurbs like Macomb and Lyon Townships.

You could accuse me of becoming obsessed with the negative side of auto dependency, and you’d have a fair point. But once your eyes are opened to the huge bill we pay for car dependency, you cannot unsee it. And the debt we are amassing — financial but also in poor health and the ugly mindset I’ve described above — is only growing larger.

There’s a gym I go to on the days of the week when I drive my son 25 minutes away for indoor soccer practices. (The location hardly matters; the fact is so much of Detroit is just like it.) Driving down the main drag, I marvel at the proportion of businesses — new and used car dealerships, gas stations, repair shops, rental agencies, parts stores — that relate directly to the automobile. How do we unravel this absolute economic dependency, as will inevitably happen one way or another? Then, I arrive at a massive parking lot and look around at the nearest thing that catches my eye: a big strip mall set behind its own sea of parking that must be nearly a quarter of a mile away.

So much wasted land, and so little there there. It’s simply lifelessness. No signs of actual people outside anywhere. This isn’t a place designed for people, but cars.

This is what we’ve built, and continue building.

Inflection point

If any place cries for some fresh ideas, for trying some different ways of doing things, it’s here. We have an aging housing stock, limited job prospects, a moonscape network of roads, a scarcity of walkable neighborhoods and downtowns, and woefully insufficient transit. Is it really any wonder people continue to leave for greener, more vibrant pastures?

I’m aware that the Detroit-based auto industry created vast wealth and played a leading role in creating the American middle class. But frankly, that was a long time ago. The record since the oil shock of the 1970s, at least, is a lot more checkered. Most auto plants have long since left Detroit proper, and many more today are built in low-wage, non-union Southern states than in Michigan or the industrial Midwest. The industry has left a lot of physical, toxic and psychic scars as it ebbed and fled Detroit for greener pastures, lower costs and tax incentives.

The shift from combustion power to electric vehicles will inflict further pain and consolidation — and even then, EVs are still cars, just quieter. None of these other problems I’ve described really go away.

And so, I’m left to wonder what to make of this place, and what path it will choose, at a time when so much is at an inflection point. At the end of one of the strangest winters I can recall, I’m feeling especially despondent about this place I call home.

Like a lot of Detroiters, I could use some hope.

Creative Commons photo by Heather Kaiser