Detroit really is an amazing city. Its culture is rich and vibrant, it’s incredibly diverse though majority Black. Beautiful pre-war brick houses sell for affordable prices, and people GET ALONG. Things are economically tough, though. When white flight emptied the city out, when almost all personal wealth relocated a few miles out into the suburbs, the city faced a crisis in funding from which it has never recovered.

In many residential neighborhoods, it’s common to see one out of every three houses abandoned. Many of those houses are gorgeous, but the money required to get them back up to code is out of the reach of the typical Detroiter. The Detroit Land Bank, by the way, is doing fabulous work to get these houses bought and lived in again, but it’s slow, generational work.

In the meantime, the property tax base cannot support the city infrastructure or the school system. If the whole state pulled together to make it happen, great things could be done. But state level politicians are mired in a worldview of Detroit having been destroyed by incompetent, corrupt Black leaders. It’s true that some Detroit politicians have been corrupt, but it isn’t true they brought about the city’s malaise.

White flight did that. Racism did that. Only all of us working together can change that.