Detroit haunted by poverty, scandal

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By Andrea Billups

DETROIT | When Charley Ballard tells the story of Detroit's myriad woes, he starts with 8 Mile Road.

The street, located eight miles from the city center, came to worldwide fame through a namesake feature film starring rapper Eminem, a local artist whose music offered biting social commentary about his life navigating between Detroit's white and black cultures.

Mr. Ballard, a Michigan State University economist, sees the thoroughfare as a clear racial dividing line of the city's population — and as an asphalt prologue to the long and twisted tale of how once-proud Motown became a mess of a town over the past few decades.

"You can't talk about Detroit without talking about race," Mr. Ballard says.

Mr. Ballard is a numbers guy who researches tax structures, but he says the figures that chart the fiscal downturn of the city don't tell the full story. It is, he says, the very human elements of the city that have dragged Detroit deeper into despair.

Immediately south of 8 Mile, Mr. Ballard says, the population is 80 percent nonwhite; north of the line, it's about 20 percent nonwhite.

In the 1970s, when Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor, took office in the wake of civil rights strife, many whites fled to the suburbs, polarizing the area and seeding bitterness that remains palpable to this day.

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Chaos in Motor City

When Charley Ballard tells the story of Detroit's myriad woes, he starts with 8 Mile Road. The street, located eight miles from the city center, came to worldwide fame through a namesake feature film starring rapper Eminem, a local artist whose music offered biting social commentary about his life navigating between Detroit's white and black cultures. Mr. Ballard, a Michigan State University economist, sees the thoroughfare as a clear racial dividing line of the city's population and as an asphalt prologue to the long and twisted tale of how once-proud Motown became a mess of a town over the past few decades.

Now, says Mr. Ballard, "one of the unfortunate outgrowths of decades of racial tension is the tendency of parts of the African-American community to circle the wagons."

As many longtime Detroiters fled the crime and grit for an easier and cheaper life away from downtown, the city slowly became a fortress of malfeasance and poverty.

Now Detroit sits on the verge of bankruptcy, beset by political scandal, a declining population, troubled industry, high crime and unemployment rates and one of the worst school systems in the country.