Detroit haunted by poverty, scandal

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.

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.

Forbes magazine recently ranked Detroit No. 2 on its list of America’s emptiest cities, behind only Las Vegas. The city, according to some estimates, has 60,000 to 80,000 abandoned homes and businesses.

The median price for homes sold in December 2008 fell to $75,000.The median household income dropped 24 percent over the last eight years to about $35,000, well below the $54,200 figure statewide.

The shining silver high-rise headquarters of General Motors Corp. looms over downtown, a symbol of the city’s storied automotive history. Yet, locals in the inner city have no major grocery store in which to shop.

A deal to expand the massive Cobo Hall Convention Center, which houses the city’s annual North American International Auto Show, now may be lost. Once the largest convention complex in the world, Cobo now has plenty of competition. German automakers threatened to pull out this year and showcase their wares at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a venue more befitting their stature.

A failure of the Cobo expansion plan, which sparked political and business infighting, would stymie hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue brought from show-goers and exhibitors as well as cause the loss of convention events because the current space is too small by today’s standards.

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