Detroit’s lessons for industrial America
Dante Chinni
Posted: 10.05.2009 / 7:53 AM PDT
Detroit is in the news again, amid last week’s revelations that US auto sales dropped by 41 percent in September and Michigan’s unemployment rate hit 15.2 percent – the worst of any state in the nation.
The retrenchment of the auto industry is remaking the Detroit metro area, and looking at Detroit through the scope of Patchwork Nation shows just how broad the impacts of the city’s epic struggles have been.
While every city is unique (and most cities didn’t rely so heavily on manufacturing or one industry for survival), there may be warnings wrapped in the Detroit crash for similar places elsewhere in Patchwork Nation.
Not just the city
First off, the malaise in Detroit is not just about the city proper or the Big Three automakers. True, Detroit and its abandoned buildings are eyesores and catalysts for crime. But many inner-ring suburbs have also taken a hit as auto suppliers and shops suffer from the knock-on effect of the auto crisis.
In August, 5,600 homes were in some state of foreclosure in Wayne County, Detroit’s home. But just to the north in Macomb County – blue-collar suburbs – 2,200 homes were also in some state of foreclosure.
While the July unemployment rate for Wayne County was 19 percent, in Macomb, that number was 18.6 percent. To the west, in Oakland County, home to white-collar suburbs, the rate was still 15.5 percent.
In Detroit, even people who don’t work for the Big Three or their suppliers rely on them. Everything from real estate values to retail has taken a hit. Driving the streets of the northern suburbs – Warren, Center Line, Sterling Heights – it’s impossible to miss the vacant storefronts.
The larger meaning
Detroit’s example can be easily overlooked as a worst-case scenario. But there are messages in Detroit’s collapse for other “Industrial Metropolis” counties where the manufacturing cores are hollowed out.
Look at Philadelphia. Along Germanton Avenue, tree-lined streets of nice homes give way to struggling neighborhoods and urban decay that look very similar to Detroit. The same is true across the Delaware River in Camden, N.J.
July unemployment rates in these counties were well below Detroit’s – both just under 11 percent – but they were above the national average of 9.4 percent. As we noted last week, the Economic Hardship of the past year has hit the big cities of the “Industrial Metropolis” especially hard.
Philadelphia has come much farther than Detroit in moving beyond manufacturing, but the problems of those disappeared manufacturing jobs – low-skill, poorly educated workers making less money – remain.
The economic downturn has helped deepen those problems as the lower-paying jobs that replaced the manufacturing jobs have also been hit hard.
Last week, two professors at Rutgers University in Camden released a report saying that, considering the number of jobs lost in the recession so far and the projected recoveries, a jobs deficit may exist in the United States until 2017.
In other words, while Detroit’s problems are particularly bleak, they are not remote. Detroit may be suffering the most, but other “Industrial Metropolis” localities are facing the same challenges.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:53 am PDT
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October 7th, 2009 at 7:11 am PDT
There are clear fundamental reasons for the growing ranks of permanent job losses and a serious downward trend in middleclass wealth and lifestyles. Despite having graduated at the top of their classes from the finest universities short sighted U.S. leaders dogmatically rely on unproven global ideology and have given our manufacturing base away including steel and other essential industrial commodities that provide financial stability and national security. We buy billions of dollars of Chinese goods each year, yet the huge container ships depart west coast docks empty. We buy 4 million Japanese vehicles, yet Japan with the world’s second largest economy, only imports 10,000 from us. And we educate the very people who compete against us. The fact is true superpower status can not and will not be sustained by a deficit ridden service economy built on derivatives, strip malls, $10/hr jobs, and cheap imported goods. Research, manufacturing, mining, education, and a solid industrial base are what made America strong.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm PDT
Concerned citizen should realize that the party which supports “free market economics” and less regulation “also” support letting market forces run their courses….that party believes continued tax cuts to the business class amid a heavily competing global community will somehow cause business leaders (the same ones who took business overseas for cheap labor) to somehow become benevolent with a desire to invest and “create” new higher paying jobs in America! Well, I would say the track record of those who control the current resources of our economic engines are suspect, and new jobs ARE NOT replacing the ones lost Our economy is transforming (information, research & technology, education and services) and our competitive advantage with other nations must be reassessed….time we accepted these facts and make the long-term investments necessary to create a whole new class of small business owners who will lead us into the future. We still have a competitive advantage in a few of the areas you mentioned, we just haven’t organized for success……
November 18th, 2009 at 7:57 pm PST
[…] Detroit’s lessons for industrial America […]
November 19th, 2009 at 8:15 pm PST
it is my contention that unions are nolonger a democratic movement.uniions were developed in response to the autocratic practices of rapidly diveloping manufacturers at tte turn of the 20th century by the likes of henry ford.today we have the federal labor departm ent enforcing laws mandatitng two worker societies thruout the country ,one being paid., wages reflecting their economic performance and the other union members pampered by wage rates based on archaic hourly payrates.the former downtrodden now the cause of the products of our consistenty superior inventive society being overpriced internationaly.what is more frightening stillis labors political control over the current. presidency
November 19th, 2009 at 9:22 pm PST
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