State of the City
I have chronicled every State of the City address since 1993, beginning with Coleman Young. Of the long list of mayors that followed, some speeches have been memorable. Dennis Archer got a standing ovation when he promised to pick up the garbage. Most have been fairly predictable efforts emphasizing “redeveloping” the city, providing better services, and creating jobs. One mayor after another has framed a vision of the city providing jobs, housing, services, and safety.
Duggan is no exception. But, increasingly, I find Mike Duggan’s efforts to be unsettling. His most recent address was especially troubling.
Duggan has completely blurred the distinction between the private, profit driven sector of our city and its people. Over the course of his administration, Duggan has touted public, private partnerships. While making it sound like these partnerships are ways of leveraging private businesses to provide public benefits, the opposite is true. Public money is used to support private businesses and enhance their profits, for dubious public gain. Virtually all of his development projects are based on these kinds of deals.
Studies of these partnerships (P3), while emphasizing their complexity and differing objectives, concluded that:
"Contrary to the repeated advertising claims and popular mythology, we know very little about the performance of... P3s -- event at the most elementary levels."
There is "no evidence" that these projects deliver "more quickly than projects funded in more conventional ways."
"P3s were 24% more expensive than ... traditional procurement" projects.
P3s should be "headlined 'fabulous deals -- for all but taxpayers.'"
In some ways these partnerships are an extension of the tired thinking of the 1950’s slogan “What’s good for GM is what’s good for the country.” It was following that line of thinking that we watched corporate capital leave Detroit and create all those abandoned buildings that so troubled Duggan.
But Duggan has taken this idea to new heights. Nearly the first 20 minutes of his State of the City could have been a commercial for General Motors. Staged with gleaming Hummers and pickup trucks in the background, Duggan invoked product names and corporate slogans. He celebrated the shift to an electric factory, producing electric cars, and 2,200 jobs for “metro Detroiters.”
He offered images of new developments, factories transformed into housing, and showed a smattering of African American faces to screen the white power structure that provided the venue for this speech and is doing most of the “renovation of our city.”
The willingness to sacrifice people for the promise of jobs and the use of public money to support private industry is symbolized by the very place from which Duggan delivered his speech. GM Factory Zero, of course, was in earlier days what most people called the Poletown Plant. Showing a slide that illustrated his shockingly shallow view of the problems raised by development, Duggan characterized the site where he was standing as the result of extraordinary efforts “clearing out the land in the 1980’s.” The city “cleared 400 acres” and now we have this new plant.
That clearing included 4,200 people and all their possessions and memories tied to place. 1,300 homes were demolished. 144 businesses were knocked down, along with 6 churches, a school and a hospital. This was all in the name of a never to be materialized promise from GM for 6,000 jobs.
Everyone knows that behind the slick slides is the refusal by Duggan to ask critical questions of how to develop a city that protects people and provides for enriched, joyful lives. Chasing big developments and empty jobs has only meant that the city becomes smaller, while white power brokers become richer and richer.
Yet in the shadows of so many of these old structures, people are moving to study, to rethink and to reimagine completely different ways of living. New ideas of collective life are emerging, far from the bankruptcy of the Mayor and his ideas.