Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  “I always think about leaving, bro. There ain’t shit here. I can’t because of finances. If I could, I would move to a farm, something like that. Upper Michigan. This city just fucked up all the way around. If I had a choice, I would turn this into a farmland. It’s vacant for a reason. I believe that. The city know what they doing. They waiting for it to deteriorate. And it’s almost there now. So whoever come up with the best price, they can build whatever they want, bring in the richer white folks, the richer black folks. You know, the bank got henchmen, too. I know a guy who was paid to burn down houses. Crooks is crooks. They come in baggy jeans and shirts and they come in suits and ties.”

  Overman said he was still scrapping, but he also planned to build a three-wheeled bicycle cart—he’s a skilled welder—large enough to carry five hundred bottles of water, which he could sell for a dollar a bottle at some of the free outdoor concerts downtown. As we approached his apartment, Overman pointed to a sign advertising new condominiums “starting in the 150’s.” He shook his head. “Everyone waiting on a list as long as a scroll to get into low-income housing, and they building these condominiums? It seems to me like they moving the upper class here and the lower class across 8 Mile.”

  His voice shifting to a skeptical murmur, he read the sign’s tagline: “Be Part of Detroit’s Revitalization.” Then he chuckled. “You know they not talking to us.” By “us,” he wasn’t including me, of course.

  “Unless that’s a hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “You feel me?”

  Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, handcuffed in court after violating the terms of his probation. [Daniel Mears/ Detroit News]

  11

  POLITICS

  THE QUESTION PERSISTED, AS yet unresolved: was Dave Bing really the man we wanted behind the wheel of the car metaphor representing Detroit’s future? As the nationwide sense of economic doom was hitting Michigan harder than any other state of the union, Detroit not only faced bankruptcy but the threat of a state takeover, made possible by Governor Snyder’s emergency management law, dangling like an invisible sword. Was it real, or just that, a threat, meant to stiffen the spines of Detroit’s historically feckless political class in their forced marched toward austerity?

  Detroit’s tawdry and dispiriting political erosion had started at the top, with the undoing of Kwame Kilpatrick, the young, virtuosic, wildly charismatic mayor who’d come into office in 2002 on a wave of promise and left in handcuffs, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. While Kilpatrick and his administration also stood accused of bribery, kickbacks, embezzlement, blatant cronyism, and running the city like mafia capos, his ultimate downfall proved to be a humiliating sex scandal involving his chief of staff—and most damningly, his agreement to settle a police whistle-blower lawsuit with nearly nine million dollars of taxpayer money in order to prevent a series of suggestive text messages from seeing the light of day. That ploy obviously failed, and so the public was eventually treated to ripe exchanges such as the following:

  CB (Christine Beatty, the mayor’s chief of staff): I really wanted to give you some good head this morning and i didn’t know how to ask you to let me do it. I have wanted to since friday

  KK: Next time, just tell me to sit down, shut up and do your thing!

  Meanwhile, several members of Detroit’s city council managed the improbable concurrent feat of almost equally disgraceful public misbehavior, including mockery of a fellow councilperson’s hearing aid (Council President Monica Conyers), involvement in a bar fight with another woman (ditto), threatening to “get a gun if she had to” in order to shoot a mayoral staffer (ditto), skipping important votes to tour in England while casually referring to the council in the UK press as “a second job I have” (ex–Motown star Martha Reeves), and paying an annual sixty-eight dollars in property taxes for years without once questioning the preposterously low, clearly erroneous bill (JoAnn Watson, who insisted the charge had simply led her to “the natural conclusion my house isn’t worth much anymore”).

  In a plot twist too delicious for fiction, Conyers, the wife of long-serving and belovedly liberal Representative John Conyers, eventually pled guilty to a bribery case involving a billion-dollar sewage sludge disposal contract. As of this writing, she is serving a thirty-seven-month prison term. When news of the FBI’s investigation into the sewage deal broke, Reeves, asked for comment, claimed to identify a net positive. What she said, exactly, was: “What I think it will do is get a bit more publicity for the council. This is one of the most highly publicized councils in the history of Detroit. They say if you’re not doing anything, they’re not saying anything about you.”

  The writer Zev Chafets, in Devil’s Night, his 1991 book about Detroit, compared the city to a postcolonial African state, despoiled by attendant historical baggage and endemic corruption. It’s sort of a great analogy, but also a flawed one. Black Detroiters were not a conquered people; they moved to Detroit to improve their lives—and did, building the city alongside the white majority, albeit in drastically disadvantaged and prejudicial circumstances. To me, the power shift in Detroit, and the ensuing hostilities with the suburbs, feels much closer to a cold war satellite-state scenario, in which dueling ideologies play themselves out through largely immaterial pawns. And so in the seventies and eighties, Coleman Young was spoken of by suburbanites in terms reserved, at a national level, for the likes of Fidel Castro or Ayatollah Khomeini. At the invocation of Young’s name, many suburbanites easily lapsed into the fanaticism of the anti-Castro Cubans raging from the shores of Miami Beach at the not-so-distant island paradise snatched from them, the rightful owners, by a corrupt demagoguing madman.1

  Likewise, for all his outsized flaws, Kilpatrick clearly did himself no favors by being African American and built like a linebacker. Putting his blackness aside, Kilpatrick would have still been a flamboyant, almost Shakespearean character in many ways, but certainly his penchant for wearing diamond-studded earrings and flashy suits and listening to hip-hop abetted his transformation into a cartoonish bogeyman. There was a slightly creepy, Willie Horton aspect to the way the camera lingered on his mug shot on local newscasts and the ease with which it became de rigueur for (generally white) commentators to describe him as a “thug.” While still mayor, at the height of the scandals assailing his administration, Kilpatrick made an infamous state of the city address in which he claimed, “In the past thirty days, I’ve been called a nigger more than any time in my life.” Using such inflammatory language so opportunistically, and in so public a forum, drove his critics and even many of his few remaining supporters apoplectic—and yet the pointed, incessant deployment of “thug” as descriptor suggested that perhaps he wasn’t exaggerating all that much.

  After Kilpatrick’s resignation, the president of the city council, Ken Cockrel Jr.—whose late, aggressively Afroed father, a radical civil rights attorney, had served on the council in the seventies as an openly Marxist candidate—automatically became mayor. Prior to his ascension, the bald and somewhat hulking (but quite genial) Cockrel had become an unintentional YouTube sensation thanks to clips of a city council meeting in which Monica Conyers seemed to violate parliamentary procedure by shouting “You not my daddy!” at Cockrel before angrily referring to him as “Shrek.”

  Cockrel’s reign was short. Within a few months, a special election was held, giving the business community the opportunity to install one of their own, Dave Bing, who had parlayed his NBA stardom into the creation of a successful steel- and auto-parts-supply company. Coming after Kilpatrick, the anointment of the former Detroit Pistons point guard made perfect sense. Bing was the anti-Kwame, a lanky, graying man in his late sixties, bespectacled and mild-mannered. Critics pointed out that Bing had not lived in the city proper for decades, having long ago decamped to the tony suburb of Franklin. But voters didn’t care. Bing cut a perfect visual contrast to the gross appetites of the Kilpatrick administration, which had remained on public display for so long. There was an appealing, a
scetic quality to the new mayor—something monkish about his gauntness, his quiet dignity, his unself-conscious baldness and drooping silver mustache. He looked like an avuncular praying mantis. Even his eye-glazing ineptitude at public speaking became a plus when compared with the glibness of his quick-tongued predecessor. This guy was not going to cause trouble; this guy wouldn’t be capable of tricking us. Detroit no longer wanted a visionary—just a ruthlessly competent technocrat in the mold of Michael Bloomberg, someone whose very lack of charisma would be its own mark of authenticity.

  * * *

  With Bing firmly in place, political observers turned their attention to the city council, a governing body that historically had a contentious relationship with the mayor of Detroit. Considering Bing’s age and his vow to serve for a single term, the council might also be the place where the next mayor emerged, a man or woman with the boldness to steer Detroit through this uncharted, transformational moment—once noble, self-sacrificing Bing had taken the hits for implementing tough new policies in the name of rightsizing and budgetary rectitude. The 2009 elections looked to be an exciting race. By summer, 167 candidates had thrown their hats into the primary, all jockeying for only nine seats, and the scandal-weary Detroit electorate seemed prepared to usher in a new slate of leaders: the postprimary field, whittled down to eighteen, had shed both Monica Conyers and Martha Reeves.

  One evening that October, I attended the closing candidate debate, which was being held at the grand, domed Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Because of their potentially unruly number, the candidates had agreed to multiple, subdivided debates featuring randomly selected participants, so this final meeting would involve only six of the contenders. Still, it was being closely watched because it featured the two front-runners, Charles Pugh, a former TV news personality who also happened to be openly gay, and Gary Brown, an ousted police officer whose whistle-blowing lawsuit had set off the chain of revelations ending with the toppling of Kilpatrick. Pugh’s popularity, in particular, was considered surprising, as conventional wisdom had pegged Detroit’s predominantly black electorate as socially conservative when it came to issues like homosexuality.

  Both men, though, came bearing, “uniquely Detroit” (Pugh’s words) backstories. In 1974, when Pugh was three years old, his mother was murdered by her heroin-dealing boyfriend; four years later, his father, depressed after being laid off from Ford, killed himself. Pugh, aged seven and the only other person in the house at the time, discovered the body. Somehow, he not only survived but flourished. Raised by his grandmother, Pugh decided to go to journalism school, with the intention—he mapped out this plan in high school—of starting in local news, moving onto a national broadcast like The Today Show, and eventually running for the U.S. Senate. The years of television experience had given Pugh a distinct messaging advantage over most of his opponents. A young-looking thirty-eight-year-old with a highly personable, perpetually empathetic demeanor, Pugh addressed potential constituents with a warm and expertly calibrated sincerity. He had the broadcaster’s habit of smiling as he spoke and took an almost childish delight in the pronunciation of every word, as if, rather than speaking, he were nibbling a treat or unwrapping a series of little presents with his mouth.

  Meanwhile, Brown, a methodical-minded overachiever, had known he wanted to be a cop by the time he was twelve. By sixteen, he’d finished high school, though before graduating he’d already enrolled in after-school community college courses in criminal justice. On the advice of one of his professors, a judge, he joined the Marine Corps rather than head straight for the police academy, where he was too young to become a cop, anyway. After being stationed at Pearl Harbor, he returned home to Detroit to find his twin brother had become addicted to heroin. Brown, in turn, became an undercover narcotics officer. “I thought this was a way of helping him,” Brown told me. “I’ve raided every drug house in the city. I guess it was me being idealistic.” Brown, who helped build complex conspiracy cases against drug gangs like Young Boys Inc. and the Chambers Brothers, would call his brother before certain raids to make sure he wasn’t in the targeted dope house. As for his eventual clash with Kilpatrick, there was an almost literary perfection to the asymmetry between the two men, it seeming especially poetic for the ostentatious Goliath of a former mayor to be brought low by someone as unassuming, at least at first glance, as Brown. A trim, preppy guy with glasses, a neat little mustache, and the high, purring voice of a chain-smoking grandmother, Brown was basically Eliot Ness, exuding both military discipline and an upright fixation on investigatory precision.

  The auditorium for the debate was packed. I sat beside an unusually tall man wearing an expensive gray suit and a gold Fendi watch. He told me he tried to attend most of the debates in order to stay involved, though he was more of an Eisenhower Republican. Introducing himself as a lawyer “by trade,” he said he hoped to one day produce his own low-budget, self-financed movies for a black audience. He also thought one of the keys to Detroit’s revival might lie in its rich cultural history, in somehow pivoting on the world’s consistent adoration of the Motown sound, and of Detroit artists like Aretha and Eminem, by cultivating a vibrant club district. “New Orleans has a six-block entertainment strip and it attracts two million people a year,” my neighbor said. He understood the job would not be easy. His brother, he said, liked to tell a story about leading a blind man into the light. What’s the first thing he does? his brother asked. Close his eyes.

  I didn’t entirely understand the fable. Detroit was, presumably, meant to be the blind man, recoiling from too much change, even change of a positive nature. But had the blind man actually regained his sight? Or was the point that even his blind eyes were sensitive to bright new surroundings? The lawyer, after delivering the punch line, gave me a gnomic grin. I smiled back and nodded foolishly, as if we’d shared a moment of wisdom. After that, I didn’t feel like I could ask what he’d actually meant.

  Soon the six candidates filed onstage. Part of the drama of the debate, aside from its finality, surrounded Charles Pugh, who had been forced, just the day before, to make a humiliating disclosure: his $385,000 downtown condominium was about to be foreclosed on, after his default on a second mortgage. Apparently, Pugh was also being sued by his condo association for unpaid dues. As a broadcast personality, Pugh made well over $200,000, a year, but he claimed that leaving his job in order to run for city council full-time had put him in financial jeopardy—a claim undermined when the Detroit News reported on the eleven different eviction notices Pugh had received while renting an earlier apartment during a four-year period beginning in 2001. In an effort at damage control, Pugh posted a video on his website. It appeared to have been hastily produced with a cheap webcam. Pugh’s large and uncannily egg-shaped head—which, completely shaved, made him look like a colossal baby—had been shot at an unflattering angle and nearly filled the screen as he exhorted viewers to pray for him and vowed to remain “on the grind, asking for your vote.” He also insisted that going into foreclosure actually opened a number of “options” for the foreclosee—true, in a sense, if those options were limited to (a) leaving your house or (b) paying back the money you owed.

  In his introductory remarks, Pugh assumed an upbeat tone, as if he were anchoring live from a Super Bowl victory party for the Detroit Lions. Explaining his decision to move from journalism to electoral politics, Pugh said, “I’m tired of just reporting what’s wrong.” As for his more immediate problems, he transformed them into an asset—an issue not of irresponsibility but of relatability, pointing out, “Just like many families, I’ve experienced personal tragedy. And just like many families, I’m facing financial challenges right now.”

  Aside from his polished delivery, Pugh’s performance struck me as terrible. At one point, he told the moderator, straight-faced, “Well, the good thing is, personal finances have nothing to do with how the city is run.” He also had the annoying habit of referring to his finances as “my challenges,”
as if he’d been nobly struggling to overcome some severe disability, like being been born with flipper arms and then deciding, through sheer force of will, to become a professional juggler.

  Several of Pugh’s opponents provided even greater entertainment value. Kwame Kenyatta, a gaunt fifty-three-year-old sporting a pinstripe jacket, mustard yellow turtleneck, and brown kofia, had the best fashion sense of anyone on the stage, a sort of Casual Friday Afrocentric look. That April, Kenyatta and his wife had not only defaulted on the mortgage of their four-bedroom colonial home on Detroit’s northwest side but physically abandoned the property, simply walking away from the loan. When confronted with this fact by the moderator, Kenyatta was unapologetic. Flashing a tricky half smile and peering over his podium through permanently hooded eyes that gave him a serpentine quality, Kenyatta insisted he’d made a financial decision, “just like GM made a financial decision to go bankrupt.” This line received hardy applause, as did his bit of one-upsmanship of candidate James Bennett, an ex-cop who had declared himself “a blue-collar guy,” to which Kenyatta responded, “I’m street collar, not necessarily blue collar. I come from the streets.”