Daniel Howes

Detroit supplies ammo for its bad image

Next time someone laments the tiresome fact that Detroit is getting whacked again in public, remember this: We give them so much material.

That's not negative. It's the truth. There is a mayor who copped to a felony and bolted, a deep well of public corruption, the antics of the City Council and a public school system teetering on bankruptcy. The Legislature is unable to deliver a budget or embrace reality; the governor struggles to lead; and the bureaucracy treats jobs-providing businesses like the enemy -- proving that what ails Detroit isn't made only in Detroit.

The state economy slipped into recession after the September 11 terrorist attacks and never came out. The capital is controlled by organized labor and its retrograde, anti-business agenda. Corporations are gone, going or wish they could be. No less than the president of the United States forced two of Detroit's three automakers into bankruptcy and stuck American taxpayers with the bill. And myriad auto suppliers went Chapter 11, too.

Then, this week, thousands swarmed Cobo Center in search of federal dollars to help pay rent and utility bills, a spectacle that elicited more national ridicule, mild nausea and a searing observation from Walt Williams, 51: "This morning, I seen the curtain pulled back on the misery," he told The Detroit News. "People fighting over a line; people threatening to shoot each other -- is this what we've come to?"

Let's hope not. But if the past year, if not the past couple of weeks, proves anything, it's this: Time Inc. called it right when it bought a house here for its "Assignment Detroit" project because this city and its state are cautionary tales for a nation whose politics call for expanding government and constraining business even as unemployment rises. Done that here; see how well it works?

Second, the caricatured version of Detroit carried on magazine covers, in national newspapers and foreign TV broadcasts is less the creation of mean-spirited outsiders (or hometown reporters) and more a passingly accurate reflection of our world here in all its ugliness, brokenness, even desperation.

The unemployment rate in Detroit really is pushing 30 percent, almost twice the state average. Job fairs and hiring offers routinely are swamped, underscoring how many are looking with the prospect of more to come when jobless benefits and buyout checks stop coming. Even if a fair chunk of the Cobo crowd actually didn't belong there, that so many showed up in American's poorest major city underscores how poor it really is.

So why keep doing the same things and expecting a different result? In Detroit, the need to feed local government with dwindling tax dollars finally delivered the worst of all unintended consequences: business, pressured by recession, has less incentive to invest in a high-cost, contentious city, and government cannot sustain itself because its mismanagement and political rot hastened the exodus of businesses and residents.

Talk about a vicious cycle.

In Michigan as a whole -- save, particularly, the progressive financial management of Oakland County -- the story's not much different. Same philosophical squabbles, same results, same blame game, and the same ol' cynicism. The only difference is that the damage being done to the fabric of the state, compared to Detroit, may be more easily repaired than in the city.

It's easy to dismiss the madding crowds this week at Cobo as yet another urban manifestation of the failed postwar industrial welfare state, the take apparently preferred by talk radio. Partly, but oversimplified. It's also equal parts culture and recession, exacerbated by an assumption that lifetime work with a few companies and local governments would always be there.

Today's Detroit is what happens to a city whose government turns into itself and away from those businesses that create jobs even as business -- and its unions -- cling to an operating model long after it's grown obsolete. Just about everybody loses.

dchowes@detnews.com (313) 222-2106 Daniel Howes' column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Catch him Fridays with Paul W. Smith on WJR-760.