Exclusive Interview with Rep. Dan Kildee on the Flint Water Crisis, how to save America's cities, and the 2018 Governor's race

I recently interviewed Rep. Dan Kildee to discuss the Flint Water Crisis, long-term solutions to Flint's problems, and the 2018 governor's race. The full Q & A is now available at Next City.

Young: The water crisis is just the latest catastrophe in Flint. In the last 30 years, the city has struggled with joblessness, crime, poverty, and blight. Why do these bad things happen to Flint?

Kildee: It’s a manifestation of a philosophy of government that puts the people in places like Flint at the very bottom of the list of priorities. It's an overarching approach that is just dismissive of their interests, as if they have nothing to offer. The Snyder administration and other political leaders who share this approach absolutely view policy questions the same way corporations view their profit margins — short-term, dollars and cents first. Everything else is just noise to them. They treat Flint like a problem to deal with, or an annoyance, but certainly not a community of people that have hope, that have aspirations for their kids.

Read the full interview here.

Flint Artifacts: Highly Inaccurate Souvenir Plate

Souvenir plates from a shrinking city like Flint do not age well. Six out of nine landmarks on this platter are demolished or closed.

Shrinking City Stats

K-12 enrollment in Flint Community Schools 

1968: 46,557

2014: 6,720

Is Money Laundering Driving Real Estate in Miami?

In many ways, shrinking cities like Flint don't have a functioning real estate market, because supply is so high and demand is so, so low.

Miami doesn't really have a housing market as we would traditionally define it, but for the opposite reason.

Henry Grabar at Salon reports:

"But the crop of downtown Miami condos from the last cycle, according to the Downtown Development Authority, are over 95-percent occupied, whether by part-time owners or, more likely, by tenants. Miami neighborhoods may lack the organic texture of 57th Street or Mayfair, but their buildings are not lacking for people. 

"Is it crazy to add 23,000 units – the crop of the current cycle – to a market with scant local demand, in a metro area with the highest foreclosure rate in the United States? Is downtown Miami a bubble? 

“'Greater Downtown Miami is always in a bubble,' the report finds, 'because 90 percent of the demand is external, and hence not tied to economic fundamentals.' 

"Whereas a traditional housing market draws its strength from job growth and new residents, 'safe haven' housing markets are fueled by global instability. And there’s certainly plenty of that to go around."

A Highway With a View

David Carr has a brief reflection in today's New York Times about the disappearance of an inspiring view from a less-than inspiring stretch of highway in New Jersey leading to the Lincoln Tunnel. It's a compelling piece of writing that reminds us of what is lost and what is gained as cities inevitably change.

"But something glorious, a view held in common by thousands of people who come to New York for the same reasons people always have, will now belong to a precious few. It’s not only a perfect metaphor for our times, but a cold fact that I stare at every day. I often mutter oaths, not at the men and women building it — everyone has to work at something — but at the people who decided that a view that is the visual equivalent of Wagnerian opera was something to be auctioned off. 

"There’s still a brief interlude of New York cityscape I can see from my bus or car seat if I pay attention, but I don’t look that way so much anymore. When I look toward the city, I don’t see the glorious handiwork of human hands — I see what happens when those hands don’t know when to quit."

Illinois Avenue: A Tale of Two Houses

My grandparents' former home on the 1500 block of Illinois Avenue is still beating the odds and looking good on Flint's troubled East Side. Only three owners in its history and none was a speculator or a slumlord.

I can't say the same for the house across the street.

Flint Photos: The Former Sweet Marie's Candy Shop on Chippewa Street

Will Hipsters Save Detroit and Other Shrinking Cities?

After years of chronicling just how bad things have gotten in America's shrinking cities, the national media now seems obsessed with stories about how to save places like Detroit. It's a welcome change, although the coverage often tends to underplay just how much work remains to be done, while overplaying the role of urban homesteaders and other newcomers in the revival.

As Ashley Woods points out in the Huffington Post, long-time residents who never left their cities are frequently left out of the equation:

Last month, Thomas Sugrue, the scholar who literally wrote the book on Detroit, traveled to the Motor City to deliver a tough message to business and political leaders. Detroit's comeback, he said, depends on whether the city can improve the lives of working-class African-Americans.  

"Revitalization" is a buzzword in the city, which filed for bankruptcy last year and grapples with widespread blight and high unemployment and poverty rates. In spite of all this, Detroit is often celebrated as a hipster paradise and tourist destination by national media outlets.

But Sugrue said Detroit's recent successes in its downtown area and in Midtown, the city's cultural center, aren't benefiting the majority of residents.

While plucky urban homesteaders make for inspiring stories, many of the more pragmatic efforts to turn these cities around don't get much coverage. In a recent essay for Belt Magazine, I made my pitch for land banks:

While it lacks the emotional appeal of stories about the young idealists who venture back to these struggling cities, land banks are a more far-reaching and clear-eyed attempt to help places like Flint. They don’t focus on getting residents into abandoned housing; instead, they concentrate on eliminating empty structures. 

Admittedly, the land-bank approach appeals more to the head than the heart. It requires cities to let go of the past and admit they might never regain the growing populations, thriving economies, and broad middle-class prosperity of the post-war boom. Though it’s not an economic plan that will generate new jobs, it is a logical step toward stabilization and it lays the groundwork for the future.

If they are in it for the long haul, newcomers to cities like Flint, Detroit, Cleveland, and Gary can play a role. But let's not forget the current residents who are doing the heavy lifting, or the programs and policies that will bring about the biggest change:

There’s no silver bullet that will solve the problem of abandoned houses in America’s shrinking cities. Well-meaning Rust Belt expatriates like me can lend a hand. Dedicated urban homesteaders can save some houses with money, carpentry skills, and sheer force of will. Innovative projects like Detroit’s Write A House, which gives a renovated home to writers who move to the Motor City, can play a role in stabilizing neighborhoods. But the staggering number of empty houses means that these laudable efforts are only a small part of the solution. Land banks and other initiatives to demolish the structures that no one wants will have a far greater impact.

Hoping for the Best in an Age of Uncertainty

Sherry Lee Linkon, writing about Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City in Times Higher Education, reminds us that there are no tidy, clear-cut solutions for shrinking cities like Flint:

While scholars and urban planners throughout the US and Europe debate strategies for revitalising former industrial cities that are “shrinking”, “forgotten” or “failing”, Young reminds us that storytelling, including the kind of inconclusive ending we might find in a contemporary novel, sometimes reveals more than the most careful study can. Better yet, a good story shows us why we should care, even if it doesn’t provide any solutions.

And she points out that while Flint may seem unique to me and those of us who grew up there, the city's plight is, in many ways, all too familiar:

Flint will survive, he tells us, because it has many “tough people fighting…in their own ways”. But it will be a long, hard battle without a triumphant conclusion: Flint will never again be “a bastion of the middle class”. At best, it might become “a different place that still had pride and dignity”. That may sound like a disappointing conclusion, but it’s an honest one. The economic and social challenges of the post-industrial austerity economy are complex, and we may never return to past prosperity. Like Flintoids, we need to keep fighting in our own ways.

Read the entire review here.

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

"She admitted that I’d initially done a great job selling our possible return to Flint. We could get out of the rat race and make a difference in a place that needed help. With a laugh, she confessed that geography had made it very appealing in the abstract. Michigan is a warm, fuzzy-looking mitten of a state surrounded by the beautiful blue of the Great Lakes, those landlocked oceans of the Midwest. But while the Wolverine State photographs well from a satellite, the close-ups can be disturbing. My tales of murder, arson, poverty, and general lawlessness had convinced Traci that Flint wasn’t the small town she had in mind. And my frequent descriptions of the city’s economic free fall had led her to question just what the two of us could do to change its downward trajectory. She was getting tired of our life revolving around Flint. I couldn’t blame her."
—Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Is Flint, Michigan Home to "Genuine Citizenship?"

Randall Mawer of the Lost Coast Review writes:

"The style of Teardown is Rolling-Stone-style journalism, relatively informal, strongly first person, loosely organized. But there is modern history, too, and wide-ranging inquiry into economics and (especially) politics. The strongest narrative interest, though, springs from Gordon’s contacts with Flintites old and new, people doing what he is contemplating. They are attractive, enthusiastic, clearly willing to help Gordon with his project. The heart of the writer’s ambition is not the hypothetical house, effective symbol of the whole--the city, the citizenry--though it may be. This rather is the friendships of the house-holders, who provide one another expertise, save one another cash, and embody the genuine citizenship represented by loyalty to one’s block, one’s lawn, one’s “residence” in the largest sense of the word. The small, locally owned coffee shop, market, and bar are thus extensions of the homes, and the lack of waste ground between them shows quite literally how such residences fuse into real community."

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

From Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young:

Delarie was the only one of six children still living in Flint. “I’ll stay here as long as my mom stays,” she said. “I see this block as the soul of the neighborhood. Every night you hear shots from the other streets, but not on our street. But I still don’t leave home without my gun. I just feel better carrying it.”

She showed me her nine-millimeter handgun, a black Taurus Ultra Slim she kept loaded with hollow-point bullets. She carried it in a small holster on her waist. The gun shattered the reassuring sense of normalcy that had enveloped me, the feeling that Civic Park wasn’t that far removed from the place where I grew up, a neighborhood where three people could spend a pleasant afternoon sitting on the porch and talking without the need for firearms. She left the gun on the table, and it was distracting. I kept glancing at it.

“She’s concerned about my safety,” Betsy explained, sensing my
discomfort.

“I’m concerned about my safety, too,” Delarie added.

CounterPunch Weighs In on "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City"

Flint Expatriate Michael Donnelly has a compelling and very personal take on Flint and Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing city at CounterPunch:

"My closer-to-downtown Flint neighborhood around now-shuttered Cook Elementary School was one of the first to succumb to White Flight and shift in a matter of years from white to mostly black back in the 60s. Like its larger shrinking city neighbor Detroit, America’s most segregated city, Flint had been and still is one of the most segregated communities in the land. As the Cook School environs changed overnight, it became a very dangerous place for a teenage male – black or white. I, my siblings and friends – black and white – all carry scars – physical and internal – from the many ever-escalating brawls, assaults and attacks that were based solely on the color of our skins.

"The first African-American family to move in down the block was the Johnson’s. Jimmy and his brother Anthony (Cleo) were the same age (11 and 8) as me and my brother Mark. We became quick friends, sharing interests in sports, music and, not-so-oddly really, injustices towards Native Americans. Jimmy and I played on a very good basketball team that had five white guys and five black guys from the neighborhood. It was so unusual that someone from the city did a slideshow documentary on us. Cleo is a family hero as he single-handedly saved my sister from a serious assault.

"I, like Young, had a family that believed/believes in Integration and the collective prosperity that would come from it. My uncle Dr. William Donnelly was instrumental in the Open Housing movement which outlawed “redlining” in Michigan – the segregationist practice of providing or denying mortgages in areas solely based on race. Uncle Bill lost a lot of his suburban pediatric clientele over it. He responded by opening an Inner City office and becoming the head of pediatrics at Pontiac’s public hospital. He helped many young black students, many he attended the births of, to get into his Alma mater: University of Michigan."

Listen to the Teardown Podcast

Now's your chance to determine if I still have my Michigan accent after 20 years in California and learn about Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City at the same time. Listen to the Teardown podcast here.

Interview: Design Faith and Gordon Young Talk about Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Kenneth Caldwell at Design Faith, a great blog about art, architecture and culture, came up with some great questions for me after reading Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City.

What about Flint’s history contributed the most to its decline?

Depends on who you ask. General Motors is an obvious culprit for eliminating close to 80,000 jobs in Flint. Some say it’s the United Automobile Workers union’s fault because the union was too militant and too demanding. Of course, labor agreements are the result of negotiations. General Motors didn’t have to give in to union demands. And union workers didn’t have anything to do with the horrible management decisions General Motors made over the years. Then there are U.S. policies that effectively swapped our industrial economy for the so-called service economy. The middle class withered, but we get to buy a lot of cheap crap at big box stores. Others point out that Flint never diversified its economy, but who diversifies during the glory years? Is Silicon Valley trying to diversify and develop something other than technology right now? So it’s a complicated question, and it’s probably a combination of all those things.

This pattern of corporations using up and wasting towns seems to be a global trend, not just a U.S. one?

Corporations abandon cities to varying degrees all the time. And that is one of the factors creating shrinking cities all over the world. Some of the statistics are pretty surprising. More cities shrank than grew in the developed world over the past 30 years. Fifty-nine U.S. cities with more than a hundred thousand people lost at least a tenth of their residents over the last 50 years. Flint and Detroit are high-profile examples because they lost half their population, but the same thing happened in Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. But don’t assume this is just a Rust Belt phenomenon. The Great Recession ensured that cities in the South and the Sunbelt are part of the trend now.

Read the entire interview here.  

Flint Photos: Riverbank Park by James Harvey

A recent shot of Riverbank Park in downtown Flint. Budget cuts and layoffs make it tough to maintain public land in a shrinking city. Photo courtesy of East Sider James Harvey. Visit his Facebook page for more of his photos documenting Flint.

Nothin' But Blue Skies

Chicago journalist and Lansing native Edward McClelland has a new book that chronicles the "story of how the country's industrial heartland grew, boomed, bottomed, and hopes to be reborn."

Nothin' But Blue Skies covers various cities in the Great Lakes Region, including Flint, which gets two separate chapters. I just finished an advance copy, and McClelland provides an insightful and sympathetic take on the people and places that make up the Rust Belt. In particular, he captures the agonizing contradictions of trying to run a shrinking city.

"The emergency manager law was written to rescue cities from corrupt or incompetent mayors," McClelland writes. "[Dayne] Walling, a cross between a Webelo and a West Wing policy wonk, was not corrupt. Nor was he incompetent. It would have been impossible to balance the budget of a city that's lost half its people and over 90 percent of its middle-class jobs without making it look even more like the set of Escape from Flint. If a city is too poor to afford democracy, it's not a city anymore." 

 Nothin' But Blue Skies is a must read for anyone trying to understand the forces aligned against cities like Flint. Thankfully, it also presents compelling, heart-felt portraits of the people fighting to save the city.

Tax Foreclosures Translate Into More Land Bank Holdings in Flint

An abandoned house on Humboldt Street in Flint's Civic Park neighborhood.

After the latest round of tax foreclosures, 14 percent of all parcels in Flint are now owned by the Genesee County Land Bank.

The land bank concept was made a reality in Michigan by Dan Kildee, now the Democratic U.S. congressman representing Flint. It was partly a response to Kildee's frustration with speculators treating Flint houses like disposable property and his desire to demolish derelict, abandoned housing, discussed in my profile of Kildee for Slate:

For many years, Kildee had no real way of making this vision—Utopian or not—a reality. As the treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint, he oversaw a tax foreclosure process that often took seven years to complete, and private speculators always had first dibs at public auctions. Kildee simply couldn't get his hands on very many abandoned houses. So he helped craft legislation in Michigan in the '90s that enabled public "land banks" to quickly gain control of delinquent property—and the revenue it often generates. Once it acquires a property, the land bank can sell it, rent it, or demolish it. It also collects interest penalties and principal from property owners behind on their taxes, rather than selling off the debt at a reduced rate to private investors, as many municipalities do. 

The flow of property to the land bank isn't likely to dry up anytime soon. Ron Fonger of The Flint Journal reports:

The number of properties in foreclosure is almost exactly the same as 2012, when the county took on another 2,772 parcels for failure to pay 2009 property taxes.

[County Treasurer Deb] Cherry said the large number of vacant properties in Flint will likely keep the number of foreclosures consistent for several more years.

"The good thing is, it at least has stabilized. At least the number did not go up, (but) we see the same pattern — it's maintaining," Cherry said.

Flint Northern High School Will Close

More Flint school closings are on the way. Dominic Adams of The Flint Journal reports:

"Flint Northern High School will close as a 7^th through 12^th grade building. Students currently at the school will move to Northwestern and Southwestern high schools. Flint Northern will become the Northern Alternative Education Center and offer a new program for sutdents in 7^th through 9^th grade. The students who previously attended Zimmerman will move to Northern. Byrant, Dort, Washington elementary schools and Zimmerman will be closed."

Have College Degree, Will Travel

If you're hoping for something positive when New York Times columnist David Brooks references Flint, you're bound to be disappointed:

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.