High-fives heard across the country about Detroit's miraculous turnaround had me furrowing my brow in disbelief when I had the recent opportunity to see what the ruckus was about firsthand.
During a recent convening of community developers and policymakers at the Inner City Economic Summit, the "Motor City" was used as a backdrop to showcase its municipal fiscal reform, business development model and physical infrastructure advances in the wake of the city's 2013 bankruptcy filing. In the spirit of "revisiting the promise and problems of inner-city economic development," representatives from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) led a bus tour to various neighborhoods. Keynoter Michael Porter, a Harvard University business scholar and ICIC founder and other panelists weaved lessons from Detroit's beleaguered past, with promising strategies that fall in line with its future aspirations.
While Detroit's success in righting its fiscal ship, offering incentives to attract a stronger business climate and expanding its physical infrastructure is commendable, there was no mention about plans for human infrastructure improvement -- you know, the people. I wondered, "What has Detroit done with the people who used to live here? As an influx of affluent white residents settle in after a 40 year or so absence evidenced by well-documented white flight post 1960s riots, what happened to the impoverished and mostly black people, who formerly inhabited these now tony and avant garde communities? How does one accomplish the feat of revitalizing inner-city communities in a manner that includes and gives voice to existing residents and their needs?
Historically, race has played a critical role in how cities with African-American constituencies have been organized, managed and controlled. In collusion with the finance sector, federal and local governments used race as a measure to determine which neighborhoods (white) benefitted from federal housing insurance programs that rewarded racial residential segregation, incentivized homeownership and provided an on-ramp to wealth. Conversely, black neighborhoods were denied these benefits, leaving many residents trapped in a social and economic vise of concentrated poverty. Today, American cities are reaping what racist residential segregation policies of the past have sown.
In fact, cities have a cowardly legacy on race and poverty policy: Detroit's strategy for economic development continues to circumvent poverty and race. As cities go about revitalizing themselves, a consequence, intentional or not, is a racial "bleaching" that results in urban removal 2.0. Think: 1960s War on Poverty efforts that refurbished certain neighborhoods by sweeping poor black and brown people under the proverbial new area rug as the "urban house" got gussied up. This approach obscures an economically isolating approach to addressing poverty.
Poor people have a role in shaping poverty alleviation efforts as urban cities nationwide go about creating a new economy, but it's difficult to hear their voices of self-determination when looking closely at how big city officials address their constituencies. Chicago, for example, insults democracy when it's leadership unilaterally decides to close public schools, recklessly charging toward unproven charters that put children's lives and aspirations in peril as children cross into a gang territory just to go to school in some cases. Chicago has shown a prodigious insensitivity to the nuanced social ecosystems of poor people in its plan to transform public housing.
Cities can run from real progress in fighting poverty all they want -- at their own peril.
The notion of a national domestic agenda has fallen out of fashion in recent years, but the example of Detroit, Chicago and other cities struggling to put the poor back to work or provide a living wage proves that failing to incorporate their voice into the grand plan exacerbates poverty. As the poor and people of color get pushed out, and the affluent white residents move back in, we'll be soon talking about outer-city economic development strategies because we will have swept these people and these issues under the rug again like so much house dust.