bloomberg | Walking to meet friends for a drink
at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar in bustling downtown
Birmingham, Michigan, Cindy Boudreau said she never goes into
Detroit except for an occasional Red Wings hockey game. She
doesn’t see the point, especially now that the city is bankrupt.
“We would rather stay in the suburbs,” Boudreau, a 66-year-old retired real-estate manager, said in an interview about
a block from a park where children played on an Astroturf-covered mound. “We’ve got all we want here.”
Boudreau’s view exemplifies a generations-long divide
between Detroit, where the per-capita income is $15,261, and
suburbs such as Birmingham, where it’s $67,580. Detroit’s record
$18 billion bankruptcy case raises questions about how affluence
can co-exist with poverty, and whether urban areas with hollow
cores can thrive.
Cities in Oakland County, which abuts Detroit, constitute
what amounts to a parallel community that is whiter, richer and
more Republican. L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive for
20 years, argues that Oakland can function apart from a failed
Detroit -- that Michigan’s prosperity no longer depends on its
largest city. Republican Governor Rick Snyder says the entire
state’s future is bound together.
Urban Island
“That’s the debate that we really need,” said Lou Glazer,
president of Michigan Future, an Ann Arbor nonprofit working to
improve the economy. “What’s Detroit going to be? Is it going
to be connected to the region or not? Is it going to be vibrant,
and if it is, what’s the role of the suburbs?”
Detroit became the fourth-largest U.S. city by 1950 with
the growth of the auto industry, as what are now General Motors
Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC churned out cars.
Since then, 1 million have left for places such as Oakland
County, whose population more than tripled to 1.2 million.
The county is the state’s wealthiest, according to U.S.
Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics. Cities such Birmingham
and Bloomfield Hills, where auto executives and former
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lived, are only a
few miles from Detroit’s vast tracts of decay.
