How Detroit Went From A Booming Metropolis To A Shrinking City | NBC Nightly News

[Music] it is hard to fathom today the amount of economic activity that was happening in this city 110 120 years ago the first huge change in Detroit came in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal all this stuff wound up coming down the Great Lakes passing right through Detroit this rate became a major hub of trade and shipping with the advent of the automobile age which came roughly in the 1890s that heavy metal machinery background in Detroit morphed into the early stages of the automotive industry well coming up into the nineteen teens into the 20s the trip became fully industry alized as cars the Model T you know people can afford the Model T it just exploded and so people who are interested in making cars again coming to Detroit and that that was the first huge economic engine for Detroit in the twentieth century [Music] but that whole movement with the original mass production at the Henry Ford Highland Park plant was duplicated all across Metro Detroit in each of those was an economic ecosystem in and of itself so you had all the parts suppliers nearby and then from there just a whole community of workers and then all of the services that serve those workers mansions were built skyscrapers were built fortunes were made affords the Manoogian it is really the period under which Detroit becomes a major industrial hub it's a point at which Detroit becomes America's fourth largest city and it's a point at which the african-american community began to move to Detroit mainly from the south to Detroit in the period that we call the great migration beginning in the 19-teens folks african-americans in the south were in economic distress post-civil war sharecropping Society cultures as poorly paying as it was was kind of dissolved and there was a massive spike in lynchings so there was economic deprivation and fear of death and jobs waiting for them in the north whether it be African Americans in the South whether it be people from from the Eastern Bloc and in Europe they all came here because it was a Goldilocks era where you could make a lot of money relatively speaking with no education you have to imagine that a hundred and hundred ten years ago there were lots of car companies and over time there was a consolidation in the industry so they all basically formed into the General Motors and the Ford and and the Fiat Chrysler that we know today but those plants were built in by today's standards very unfavorable settings for an auto plant they literally assembled in one part of the body at one plant and then put them on trucks and finish the assembly a mile away and it is just tremendously inefficient on top of all that you had urban crushers that were beginning to build by 1920 the urban league estimated thousand african-americans were moving to Detroit each month and so Detroit's black population rises from fifty seven hundred and nineteen ten to one hundred and twenty thousand by 1930 the challenge was for African Americans is that there were very few places where they could live even though d'etre is a northern city it's a very segregated City it was then that is now it means that way the middle-class African Americans began trying to buy houses in neighborhoods around the city and they were met with great resistance probably the the most seminal moment in the 1920s at least as a relates to race relations was the icy and sweet incident dr. icy and sweet was a medical physician an african-american who moved into an all-white neighborhood the white mob tried to force a doctor named Austin sweet out of his house they sweet and some friends knew they were coming they've armed themselves around the house frictions got high bushes got high and a white man is fatally shot from a bullet that came from the sweet home two trials were carried out in 1925 and 1926 ultimately the sweet family was acquitted but it was it's an indication of how tense this this was the african-american population doubled from about 150,000 in 1940 to about 300,000 by 1950 on June 20th 1943 as a very warm day about 90 degrees in Detroit it happened to be a Sunday evening it was Father's Day evening but an altercation begins between whites and blacks in the black neighborhood the rumors were that you know a white mob and thrown a woman and a baby off the bridge or something like that and in the white neighborhoods the white bars in my clubs the story was that the blacks had committed some atrocity and so we were fighting on the bridge spread downtown people already related to this thing and the righteous spread from there over a three-day period 34 people were killed most of them blacks really in 1943 it was white people some whites obviously having open season on African Americans the 67 rebellion some people believe that that was a byproduct of years of oppression by the police [Music] so here shooting for those days to see soldiers and tanks on Mac Avenue was something like you never seen before and it was african-americans he sensitive rebelling against the oppressive conditions they were living in the economic disadvantages the racism the segregation and they targeted the police because the police was seen kind of as the the enforcement arm of the white establishment that was accident to me the destruction of our neighborhood because after that it was never built back up racial tensions spiked people had started moving to the suburbs obviously we know we know the term white flight that happened this was the epicenter of white flight and the problem with that was the automotive plants that were in the city started moving to the suburbs basically abandoning the community in Detroit the population peaked at about one point eight four one point eight five million in 1950 it began declining steadily after that and it declined even further after the 67 riot but the ride didn't cause it was just sort of an accelerant to what was already happening what it did do is it drained some of these neighborhoods and businesses and you know without businesses there's not much of an economy and things began to really sort of more self deteriorate at that point we tend to think about white flight in Detroit occurring after the 1967 rebellion but but mayor Edward Jeffries in 1944 lobbied Congress the federal government to to secure monies to build expressways leading out of Detroit into suburbs those failed policies by white men really set the seed for what you saw happen to Detroit in 2013 would we rather have a new plant in a crowded urban area where it's going to take you and a half an hour to get a truck from a urban location onto under a freeway are you gonna put it out in the suburbs where the freeway are already exist I believe in the 50s there were 10 or 15 new automotive plants built all in the suburbs none in the city of Detroit so that growth really happened in Detroit in the suburbs and that has been good the case for 60 some years the companies maintained presence in Detroit but they were no longer you know the thing for Detroit and does that happen you know a single industry economy you know when it begins to abandon where it is yeah Detroit just kind of stopped being the Motor City [Music] everything snowballed at that moment the effects of the Arab oil embargo the rise of the Japanese the in-your-face reminder that this trio of US companies was not necessarily going to be on threatened further for the rest of time you also had a rise in crime in Detroit in the 70s and that was probably in large part to you know the economic challenge is that a lot of people in the city face and so that really sets off a chain of events for city government to respond to right how do we bring in more revenue when people are leaving the city not just white flight but certainly by the 1970s black middle-class flight and so a city that at one time had 1.8 million people is now down to just over one and a half million people by 1973 and then by 1980 only 1.1 million people by the year 2000 they're far fewer than a million people that live in a city and that again was a had a tremendous drain on the city's city's resources and the ability to provide basic public services [Music] we begin in Detroit Michigan at one time the fourth most populated city in the country and one of the wealthiest well it's now becoming the largest city in American history to file for bankruptcy this has been absolutely devastating this is the city that personifies urban blight they're gonna have to put together a plan I think there is still a question about what's gonna happen with those pensions so the bankruptcy happened in 2013 a run up of decades of mismanagement obviously the financial crisis harmed pensions so they had a 350 plus million dollar budget deficit as well as 18 billion dollars in long-term debt you know I mean the the city for years had been taking in a billion in revenue and spending a billion too and kept borrowing to make the difference until they ran into the legal borrowing limit and the city ended up in bankruptcy one of the untold stories I think of the bankruptcy is the extent to which the period immediately leading up to it three or four or five years leading up to it essentially set the framework for the bankruptcy to be effective because you don't want to go into a bankruptcy clean out all your debts and then find that you don't have enough to work with so that you just slide right back into bankruptcy the problem with a city get into bankruptcy was the problems with revenue it was a declining city places that have a single dominant industry especially when it's based on consumers tend to feel the pain a lot more deeply than other than diversified places and when financing dried up and people weren't able to get the loans they needed to buy cars the the auto industry tanked right along with it so the city filed the chapter 9 bankruptcy protection largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States when judge Rosen said he needed eight hundred million dollars to solve a bankruptcy I just thought there is no way we can assemble that kind of money that quickly but you had two major foundations located here or who had high interest here the Ford Foundation and Kresge and the two foundations agreed that we wouldn't put the first money on the table and if we put enough money on the table we felt that we would sort of start in motion the willingness of others to do the same so although eight hundred eight hundred fifty million dollars is a huge number when you get eight ten twelve different folks contributing to that it's doable and so I think what you saw in the first year or two after the bankruptcy was mayor Duggan really going to work on the basics when I got elected we need to put on 500 lights a week to get neighborhoods lit we had to buy new ambulances we had to buy new buses we had to train bus drivers but ultimately you need a quality of life that makes people have a reason to stay in Detroit or to come to Detroit how do we improve the city and and not revisit the same failed policies 2008 to 2013 began a rail system we did land-use planning for the first time we created a small business fund that began the engine a small business development we began school reform efforts that was the demolition of the abandoned houses we've been taking down 100 vacant houses a week and when you take out the burned-out houses we had a lot of vacant houses that are beautiful brick houses people walked away from when they were underwater their mortgage we started auctioning them on our own website and how we auction for houses every day and we've now moved four thousand families into houses that were vacant for years ago the city receives something called hardest hit funds which are which are federal dollars and it's using those to tear down some of the tens of thousands of blighted properties that were tallied in 2014 so we own just over 95,000 structures and lots and all of those were abandoned in some way shape or form before we got them that's nearly a quarter of all persons in the city of Detroit's problem is it's so huge and there's just not that many people anymore so what do you do with all these swaths of land where there's just you know polka dots of houses you know and just fields and forests it's a real challenge so in 2014 under this new administration and post bankruptcy the land bank became the place where all residential publicly owned whether it was tax foreclosed or had been abandoned for years years and years was transferred to the land bank to actually come up with a strategy to push that property back into productive use the past eight years or so jennife occation has gone to the downtown area and that marks a radical change for the truth so welcome change it's a limited change given the scope of the problem it's 140 square miles of a city and this is a handful of square miles in the downtown area a couple years ago always pretty much in the Cask corridor between Wayne State and downtown and there's a real bustling area along Cass and it looked like a Woody Allen movie there were all white people there were no black people commit for the first time in my life growing up as a Detroiter and being an african-american and I was like that's not my city is it there's a huge divide between the neighbourhoods and downtown Detroit there's a narrative called to Detroit's which the mayor of Detroit Mike Duggan hates the ear but a lot of people believe it's true you go into the Midtown area it's heavily white in a heavily black City what happens in the areas outside of the seven-point-two square miles the the broader general Greater downtown area the job's not done until you get those neighborhoods restored and that is incredibly complicated because you're talking about an entire generation of people who don't have the skills as far as we can tell to to survive in a modern economy I believe 38 percent of the jobs in the city require a degree of some kind which is relatively high even for most major cities it's a pretty high number and the problem is is that we have an education system that is failing Detroit schools are a failure it's hard to understate how important that isn't how critical that is for the livelihood of the city and the future of the city as these people get out into the world you know and the real big issue is that so for instance 71 percent of the jobs in the city are held by people that live in the suburbs that look like me largely a white population the automotive industry is still the driver of the Metro Detroit economy we don't have the assembly plants that we used to have before it's more of a white collar office research and develop engineer and kind of kind of kind of thing now than it was a labor thing before the automotive story has spikes so well back up I like said 15 and 16 or US automotive sale records they haven't seen profits like these in the history of the automotive sector but the issue is we're still 250,000 jobs short of what we were in 2000 [Music] it's not gonna be one strategy that brings the economy of Detroit back it's gonna be a mix of strategies we're trying to pursue all I mean you got to have the cooperation of everybody who lives and works in this area you got to have investment from outsiders it's a real balancing act I mean it's a real dance you got to do if it was easy they would have solved it already me it's so hard to figure out and it's heartbreaking now to drive down the streets that I grew up on it toss the football you know communities where I went to school to grade school tragedy in terms of vacant houses people who were victims of the foreclosure crisis it is not a comeback City into those communities experience of Renaissance [Music] hey NBC News fans thanks for checking out our YouTube channel subscribe by clicking on that button down here and click on any of the videos over here to watch the latest interviews show highlights and digital exclusives thanks for watching

Channel: NBC News

Views: 1,106,368

Rating: 4.4625802 out of 5

Keywords: NN FilmsNoAds, detriot detriot city, booming metropolois, detriot, detriot city, detriot shrinking city, nbc news, nbc nightly news, reviving detriot, reviving detriot city, detriot richest city, detriot richest city US, United states cities, detriots population, detriot city nbc news, detriot crime, detriot crime 2018, detriot city crime, detriot city crime 2018, detriot news 2018, detriot metropolis 2018, detriot shrinking city 2018

Id: 1CBwI3heojM

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/cortezdo]

It seems people get upset whenever someone talks about racial tensions in Detroit. Whenever the topic of gentrification comes up. You literally had white people in the video who are very knowledgeable about the history of Detroit talk about the good and the bad. They talked about the racial tensions. They talked about segregation and they talked about how a large portion of the jobs in downtown Detroit are held by white people that live in the suburbs. People on this sub are attacking OP for bringing up issues that need to be discussed.

[u/IdunnoLXG]

Unlike every other Rust Belt City, we get a serious F for not diversifying our industries outside of the Automotive sector.

I still love living here. I feel welcomed given my background (Middle Eastern) and no one looks at me awkwardly and treats me like a human. You don't get that in a lot of other places, but you do get that in Detroit. I think it's the "we're all in this shit together" that makes us so united.

[u/Stratiform]

This is unquestionably one of those situations where they set out to tell a specific story with a specific agenda before they even began interviewing or filming. It's very one-sided, misses a whole lot of what's going on in Detroit, and even goes as far as taking the good and twisting it to be bad.

I give it 0/10 and want back the time I wasted watching this drivel.

[u/dbrown5987]

So we have another post where the pumpers "the D is coming back" and the non-pumpers square off. I have been here for a long time and work throughout the US, do not expect to be here forever, and have no dog in the fight. Here is my try-to-be-objective view:

• first, this area has perhaps stabilized but still way too dependent on one industry that has a shrinking need for people in the US and is highly cyclical. Same population as 49 years ago but much older average age.

• 12,000 new business and professional jobs? OK, nothing wrong with good news but look at the Forbes list of where white collar jobs are being created and Detroit ranks dead last with Cleveland. Yes, someone from McKinsey works here along with Accenture, but not as much as comparably-sized cities

• unlike Indianapolis and Columbus, which are Rust Belt bright spots, this area will NEVER take the city and suburbs and mesh them into one governed area, which is what is needed to grow.

• even if you are in medical or software, if most of your customer base has something to do with automotive, you are in automotive.

• too many people I meet here are still living in the early 1970's when the Big Three had 90% of the market and people moved to this area to find work.

• I know there is a large Middle-East population and automotive attracts foreign executives, but it is still insular and somewhat cliquish if you did not grow up here. As one of my friends who grew up here and left the area for work reasons put it, "everyone on LinkedIn that I know from Michigan only knows people in Michigan and everyone from somewhere else knows people from all over the world"

So what does my crystal ball say about this area? It is not going to become a giant Youngstown, OH because of all the automotive research done, but will maintain relatively the same population, have a few spots of diversification, some "I left Brooklyn/Seattle/Denver and love it here stories", and be pretty much the same year-after-year without any growth like an Atlanta or Dallas or NYC. The wild card of course is if one of the large automotive companies moved or re-configured because the whole mobility bet does't pay off and is pie-in-the-sky.

[u/GracefulExalter]

A national media outlet telling a story of nothing but poverty and ruin porn in Detroit? Shooooocked.