My time spent in Detroit was limited to about 90 hours when the rented U-Haul pulled off I-94 into the heart of Midtown . I was fresh off a summer in New York City, where I lived in a (somewhat) far-flung immigrant neighborhood and worked in Manhattan, the hyper-everything caricature of human life that manages to remain the center of the universe. Detroit, as I don’t need to tell you, doesn’t play that game.
I wanted to move here for the same reasons that every other out-of-towner does: there’s opportunity here; it’s cheap and emerging; you can do anything you want, right? Of course! New York has already done everything and been everything, while Motown is just getting started, right? You can love it and it will love you back!
Yes, no, and maybe so. My apartment is cheap(ish) and sexy, the beer is good, Wayne State will keep me young, Whole Foods is down the street. But where have racism and white privilege more thoroughly destroyed an American city? Where else do city governments clutch nickels and dimes so tightly that protests to keep water running continue for weeks? How many four-, six-, and eight-lane thoroughfares sit near-vacant before and after rush hour? Detroit hustles harder, indeed.
“F— the money that’s moving into Detroit,” offered a graffiti artist I met at a car show. “Shinola is an amazing company that’s doing amazing things for the city,” claimed one local who sported a black-dial timepiece from the brand. A friend: “Motor City Brewing is hipster trash;” my dad, on the same place: “this reminds me of San Francisco back in its golden age.” My favorite, from an advice-offering classmate who grew up in Michigan, was the suggestion that I avoid anywhere south of 8 Mile.
There are right ways and wrong ways to move somewhere. In Detroit, all ways are right and wrong. Yes, no, and maybe so. Intolerance, ignorance, unchecked gentrification, bigotry, selfishness, racism, and nearsightedness are, as I hope we can all agree, bad. Open-mindedness, modesty, empathy, entrepreneurialism, and a desire to engage are, as I hope we can all agree, good. New construction in Midtown? Events to attract ex-pats? Public funding for stadiums? Yuppies? The suburbs? These are tougher to sort. I have yet to meet any Detroiter that is here for all right or all wrong reasons, but I also have yet to meet any Detroiter who is openly exploitative, malicious, or otherwise interested in seeing the city fail. I’ve met the genius and the misguided. I’ve been told I’m part of the problem. But I haven’t seen the thing that will cripple or upend the very real progress being made in this strangely beautiful place, and I hope I never will.
