Mark Binelli’s brilliant, but disturbing, portrait of Detroit explores the city’s history and its future. Binelli grew up in Detroit and his familiarity with the city shows on every page. Here’s a sample of Binelli’s acute analysis:
More often, anti-crime measures in Detroit did not resemble para-military raids so much as containment policies. A certain degree of crime could be ignored as long as the fulcrum of change in Detroit (downtown, the university district, and the handful of other neighborhoods where the city’s elite actually live) remained safe and relatively unaffected. Short of fundamentally changing the underlying conditions producing such high levels of violence and illegal activity in the first place, policing could do ony so much, so the best-case scenario amounted to hoping the criminals stuck to killing one another and kept the collateral damage to a minimum. (p. 223)
Throughout his narrative, Binelli sprinkles in a sample of horrific Detroit crimes: the dismemberment of a barber, the car jacking of white students, the Chief of Police mugged while mowing his lawn. A crack-addict and his girl friend argue about which channel to watch on Valentine’s Day. The crack-head kills his girl-friend, takes her to an abandoned building (90,000 of them in Detroit), and burns the body. The crime is discovered when a 911 call reported a dog running around with the burnt arm in its mouth.
GRADE: A
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In the 70s and 80s the Mumbai Police depended on criminals killing one another and they did so with no collateral damage and it led to an overall decline in the mafia. Seems like a general trend.
That seems to be a prevailing mode of thought, Prashant.
To quote Moe from The Simpsons: “Hey, leave Detroit alone. Them people are living in Mad Max times.”
Deb, Mad Max times is right! After reading DETROIT CITY IS THE PLACE TO BE, I was stunned by the living conditions…which is pretty much chaos.
Megan reviewed it for THE NEW STATESMAN. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/01/detroit-still-breathing
And another new book by a guy who lives here was reviewed in the NYT on Sunday.
Detroit City is the place to write about–especially after Sugarman’s win.
Megan wrote a great review, Patti! The picture Mark Binelli presents is very dystopian. I did appreciate the history of Detroit sections in this book. Buffalo is on a parallel path.
Thanks, George. Hope Buffalo fares better being smaller.
Too many people think the new Senaca #100 million casino will save Buffalo, Patti. But I’m skeptical.
I wrote a paper on Detroit for my Intro to Urban Environments class, so I am really interested in this topic. The video on your blog listed the unemployment rate at an astounding 18%, but even this figure does not fully represent the dismal opportunities for employment in Detroit. Unemployment figures usually include those outside of the labour force (ex: housewives, those imprisoned, the disabled…) as employed; however, if you only look at the unemployment rate among those in the labour force (in other words, the employment rate for those who can and would like to be employed), it was actually 32% in 2010. Add in the fact that the city of Detroit is over 80% black, and we clearly have a serious issue of racial inequality.
There are so many reasons why Detroit (and Buffalo) has declined. Reasons range from deindustrialization (neoliberal trade policies), to changes in shipping methods, to racist policies leading to segregation (redlining, steering, restrictive covenants…), to suburbanization, to competition for industry among cities (ex: tax abatements and other incentives which lead to a race to the bottom)… There are a lot of factors that stack the odds against these Rustbelt cities.
The reporter commented on the fact that the city of Detroit was built for 2 million people, but currently contains only 1 million residents. This has to change. I would argue that addressing sprawl would be the place to start. Prosperous and growing cities, such as Portland, have instituted what is known as urban growth boundaries. These boundaries create a clear line between urban and rural, and do not allow for new development outside of the urban boundaries. If growing cities can still be prosperous while reining in sprawl (and thereby forcing investment in the inner city), certainly declining cities, such as Detroit and Buffalo, should be able to put these boundaries in place. While the Buffalo population has decreased by about 50% over the last half century, we continue to sprawl out into a larger and larger area. This simply is not sustainable, and it allows for abandonment of the inner city.
Sorry for writing such a long post! The book sounds really interesting.
Lauren, you will love DETROIT CITY IS THE PLACE TO BE. I really liked the historical information Mark Binelli provided. It really put the problem of urban decline into context.