Election Direction
Last week Detroit re-elected Mike Duggan as Mayor. It was a lackluster election. Coleman Young II offered a weak alternative. His immaturity and lack of finances combined to provide little challenge. Duggan had a $2.2 million campaign fund and Young $39,000. Young, however, did give voice to much of the dis-ease in the city and forced Duggan to address tensions between downtown and neighborhood development.
But with the election, Duggan’s attention goes back to downtown. The Mayor is drawing the wrong lessons from his win. On election night at the Renaissance Center Duggan likened his victory to a “report card” saying, "Seventy-five percent of Detroiters think the city is going in the right direction."
Duggan did not get the endorsement of the majority of the city. In reality, the majority of the city chose not to vote at all. Neither choice sparked hope. Duggan would be wrong to count the 80% who stayed away as disinterested or apathetic. In fact, with all his money, all his neighborhood meetings, commercials, and endorsements, Duggan got fewer votes in 2017 (73450) than he did in 2013 (74303). Roughly 15% of voters endorsed him.
This means Duggan has not convinced much of anyone that he is anything other than a politician put in place by a power structure out of touch with most of the city. In spite of all of his talk about revitalization, the daily experiences of most people show that Duggan is more concerned about a whiter, wealthier downtown than he is about neighborhoods.
In the month before the election, the US Census Bureau reported that Detroit is the poorest large city in the country. Our overall poverty rate is 35.7 percent. More than half of our children live in families below the poverty level. Many of these families lost pensions and healthcare in bankruptcy or jobs in the downsizing of public schools and public services.
Duggan refuses to seriously address the issues facing most people. When he does, it is surrounded by an us vs. them rhetoric that belies his call to “put us vs. them politics behind us forever because we believe in one Detroit for all of us.”
Duggan has pursued a water shut-off policy that has brought international condemnation for its callousness. He continues to pretend some people don't want to pay their bills. In the course of his first term, nearly 90,000 people were shut off. Duggan’s payment plan, initiated in response to criticism, has done little more than shift shut-offs down the road. Under the new Great Lakes Water Authority, one in four residential customers is in a payment plan, an unsustainable and devastating approach.
All of this continued pain and misjudgment flows from the refusal of the Mayor or his staff to seriously consider an income-based water affordability plan, such as that which was recently successfully implemented in Philadelphia. Water activists in Detroit have been pushing for water affordability for more than a decade, yet Duggan seems incapable of hearing ideas that emerge from the community.
Likewise, under Duggan, we have moved from a city of home-owners to a city of renters. For the first time since WWII, we are a majority renter city, facing double-digit rent increases. One in five of us face eviction every year.
There is much about our city that is heading in the right direction. New forms of work, caring for one another in times of trouble, art, music, and dance to celebrate our lives and hopes. These initiatives are finding ways of living based on support and care. They are shaping a future the new Mayor does not even see emerging.