Jim Goad mercilessly mocks Detroit’s $10 million “I’m a Believer” ad campaign with a series of unpleasant facts he doesn’t merely believe:
Crime
Last year, a CNN survey selected Detroit as one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Since 1950, Detroit’s homicide and robbery rates increased by about 600 percent. The average teenage male in Detroit is likelier to wind up in prison than to graduate high school. Over the past few decades, Detroit has perennially snatched the crown as the nation’s murder capital, arson mecca, or its overall most dangerous metropolis. It rarely seems to fall out of the top three in any of these categories. Its homicide rate is typically five to six times the national average. A recent investigation revealed the city systematically under-reports violent crime—and STILL shows up at or near the top of every list. The city is also said to have the nation’s highest rate of police suicides. Things are so bad that in 2010, Mayor Dave “The Believer” Bing’s GMC Yukon was stolen. A few days later, Detroit thieves stripped a visiting Reverend Jesse Jackson’s SUV of its wheels.Housing
Detroit used to be known as “The City of Homeowners,” but now a third of its housing units are said to be vacant. Even the dead are leaving Detroit in record numbers. In 2009, the city’s average residential unit sold for $12,439, down from nearly $100,000 in 2003. Thousands of buildings were destroyed in Detroit’s cataclysmic 1967 riots, thousands more have been burned down during the annual pre-Halloween “Devil’s Night” arson fest, and the rest were either neglected or abandoned. Huge swaths of the town represent a post-nuclear nightmare that has spawned a photographic subgenre known as “ruin porn.” An estimated one-quarter of the city’s entire land mass is now abandoned and reverting back to nature, overgrown with rats and weeds but probably too toxin-drenched from industrial sludge to ever sustain farming. Detroiters refer to such literal urban jungles as “feral” areas.Employment
Several decades ago the city was said to have boasted the nation’s highest median household income; these days, it’s close to dead last. Detroit has the highest unemployment rate of any major American metropolitan area. Official city unemployment is around 29 percent; unofficially, it’s said to be 50 to 60 percent. Much of the blame is placed on the auto industry’s decline. Then again, there are no steel mills left in Pittsburgh and not so many meatpacking plants remain in Chicago, yet neither city’s economy is nearly so lifeless as Detroit’s.Education
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called Detroit’s school system “a national disgrace.” Fewer than a third of Detroit’s students graduate high school. In 2009, Detroit students produced the lowest scores in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, even though more is spent per-capita on Detroit students than the national average. A staggering 77 percent of Detroit’s eighth-graders scored “below basic” in math. It is estimated that a mere one percent of males who graduate from Detroit high schools are educationally equipped to handle college.Until last summer, Detroit’s School Board President was Otis Mathis, whose difficulties with basic language caused him to be placed in special-education classes in fourth grade. Depending on whom you believe, he graduated from high school with a GPA ranging somewhere between .98 to 1.98 (Mathis claims the latter number). A special program through the G.I. Bill allowed Mathis to attend Detroit’s Wayne State University even though he was deemed “academically unqualified.” When emails surfaced in 2010 revealing Mathis to be sub-literate at best, he replied that he’s “capable of reading a lot of information and regurgitation.” A colleague of Mathis insisted he was still the right pick because his job “is to represent the community” and his “lack of writing skills is [sic] prevalent in the community.” Mathis resigned in June 2010 after a coworker filed a letter complaining that he’d touched himself inappropriately during several one-on-one meetings with her.
Government
Detroit officials oversee a population that has dwindled to less than half of its peak during the city’s boom years. The pivotal 1967 riots led to what is perhaps the most significant case of white flight in American history. City government shifted from having a widespread reputation of white bigotry and police brutality to being a hotbed of black-nationalist ideology infused with ghastly levels of corruption and police indifference.The city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, assumed power in 1973 and clutched onto it for 20 years. Inner-city blacks tended to love him, while the suburban ring of whites surrounding Detroit viewed him as an arrogant race-baiter determined to make the city all-black. Young, who referred to himself as Detroit’s “Motherfucker in Charge,” saw employment plummet and crime rates soar during his reign.
In 2001, Detroit elected “hip-hop mayor” Kwame Kilpatrick, only to watch him self-destruct in ways which make Coleman Young appear dignified. Kilpatrick apparently spent most of his time as mayor sending text messages to a female coworker that included such bons mots as “I’m HEADED HOME NIGGA….NEXT TIME, JUST TELL ME TO SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, and DO YOUR THING! I’m fucked up now!…I’m GOING TO BE ALL OVER THE BIKINI WAX SECTION OF YOUR BODY. LOL.” Kilpatrick, who now sits in prison, still faces numerous felony corruption charges. There’s also the unsolved matter of the stripper who allegedly performed at his mansion, was reputedly assaulted by his wife, and wound up murdered with a pistol of the same caliber used by the Detroit Police Department.
After Dave Bing recently became mayor, he proposed cutting all services to roughly a fifth of the city’s territory, essentially surrendering it to the homeless, the lawless, and all the public defecators stranded in between.