Collie Davis Jr looks at children playing in his home in Detroit during a birthday celebration for his wife, who turned 74 recently and who lived in her home nearly 50 years.
By John Carlisle
The two men sat on the crooked front steps of a crumbling old home in a battered east-side neighbourhood where the houses are outnumbered by fields and the grass that smothers them grows waist high.
It was late morning, the day after Detroit filed for bankruptcy. The news made national headlines and signalled a new low in the city’s troubles. But it didn’t mean the slightest thing to these men. They have more immediate concerns.
“I feel like I’m in a war zone,” said Antonio Tucker, 43. “It’s a mile just to walk to the store at night, and you got to go through with no streetlights. It’s dark and it’s scary and these abandoned buildings, you don’t know who’s going to jump out of them or what’s going to happen.”
Both men said they’d heard about the bankruptcy and thought it was unfortunate — in the abstract, at least. But their free-falling neighbourhood trumps that news in their daily lives. For them and for many Detroiters, the city — represented by unlit streetlights, unanswered 911 calls and unfulfilled hopes — has already been bankrupt in many ways for many years.
Tucker had lived near 8 Mile Road on the east side, but his street became so dangerous that he moved back to this area, north of Midtown, where he grew up. So many people have moved out of this area at the intersection of Hancock and Moran over the past several years that the desolation makes him feel safer than his old house did.
Still, he merely traded one kind of bad neighbourhood for another. He sat with his friend, 58-year-old Ralph Strickland, on a neighbour’s porch. “No grass is getting cut, half the streetlights aren’t on in the city,” Strickland said. “It’s terrible. It’s really bad. Can’t find a job down here. There’s no jobs.”
Over the past decade or so, as the residents went away, so did the houses, they said. New businesses rarely open around here, and the old ones are vanishing. Like Boyd’s Party Store across the street, which has been shuttered since the elderly owner died a few years back. Nobody wanted to take over a store in a dying neighbourhood.
“I mean, look at it,” Strickland said, pointing down the empty block. “It speaks for itself.”
When police stopped showing up in James Jackson’s neighbourhood, he took matters into his own hands. Jackson, known by his nickname Jack Rabbit, is a 65-year-old retired Detroit cop who now runs his own tow truck service. Cuts in the Police Department have led to delayed response times around here, where residents waited hours for police to come to things like burglary calls.
So Jackson became his own security force to fill the void, much in the same way that some people step up and mow city parks when the city fails to do so or board up abandoned houses in their neighbourhoods when the city won’t shutter them.
When drug dealers began broad daylight sales on street corners in his Jefferson-Chalmers neighbourhood, a still-solid area of well-kept homes, Jackson would park in front of them in his tow truck and start videotaping, sending them scattering. When prowlers roamed the street looking for easy targets, he’d chase them off. When a string of break-ins occurred, he created a newsletter to alert residents.
“People call him and call me and tell us things they wouldn’t tell police officers,” said Harry Jolliffi, Jackson’s 62-year-old neighbour. He and a few other residents often go along with Jackson on his rounds.
“A lot of time, they don’t want to get involved, they don’t want their house all shot up in retaliation, and they feel confident in telling us,” Jolliffi said. “So we’ll go check it out.”
Jackson is torn about Detroit’s bankruptcy. On the one hand, as the neighbourhood’s unofficial security, he sees bankruptcy as a long-awaited rock bottom from which the city can hopefully begin to rebuild itself. But on the other hand, he gets a pension from the city, and there’s been much talk about cutting pensions.
“I just hope they don’t cut it too much because it wasn’t much to begin with,” Jackson said. “But you’re kind of picking on the helpless folks when you’re picking on the pensioners.”
He sat on his driveway on a hot afternoon, looking over the quiet, leafy street. Soon he would head out on his daily patrol, slowly crawling nearby side streets in his hulking tow truck. Just about every resident knows him, and nearly all of them wave when he passes by. His presence is reassuring.
Bankruptcy just might help where everything else has failed, he said. “To me the glass is half full. I think things will get better now.”
There’s nothing subtle about Andre Ventura’s disdain for city government. It comes through forcefully on the hand-scrawled sign he erected in his front yard, facing 8 Mile Road and its tens of thousands of daily commuters. “Warning! Corrupt Detroit politicians coming soon to jail cells near you,” reads his latest message.
He’s not shy about complaining about life on a collapsing block. Not long ago, the sign said, “Warning! This city is infested by crackheads. Secure your belongings and pray for your life. Your legislators won’t protect you.”
Nearby, two American flags fly upside down over the empty lot on the corner. A symbol of distress. Shortly after putting up the signs, Ventura got attention from the police — they’d stop and have their pictures taken with it. So did firefighters. “They’re the ones getting shot at,” he said. “They know how it is.”
Ventura, 43, grew up in the suburbs but moved to Detroit a decade ago to fix up dilapidated houses and open adult foster care homes. He’d been a disaster relief worker in the South, travelling to towns devastated by hurricanes and tornadoes, and felt his skills could be applied better in his hometown, which had undergone its own kind of disaster.
But years in a crime-infested, crumbling neighbourhood near I-75 began to wear on him, and his frustration burst forth in those signs. He started putting them up a few years back, after watching his neighbourhood deteriorate with little help from city government. He’d shoot off letters about his neighbourhood’s conditions to any officeholder whose address he could find, but rarely did he get a reply.
He said his neighbours, the ones still left, were indifferent to the big bankruptcy news. “Out here, they don’t know, and they don’t really care,” he said. “They’re worried more about their lives and everything they got.”
Ventura is glad the city has an emergency manager.
“Kevyn Orr is about the best thing Detroit’s had,” he said. “He’s done more in the three months he’s been there than they’ve done in the last 10 years.”
Ventura sat with a few neighbours in the community garden he helped plant across the street from his house, which is covered in bulletproof siding. A dozen kids ran around the playground he’d made on an empty lot next door. The parks nearby are too overgrown and dangerous for them to play in.
Down the street, several homes were blackened by arson fires. Others sagged and tilted, appearing on the verge of collapse. The weedy fields between the homes grew high.
“This city’s been bankrupt for years,” Ventura said. “Everybody out here is broke. It’s getting bad out here. It’s getting worse.”
Sydney Jackson sat on her aunt’s front porch and looked out on her street, just off a ravaged part of 7 Mile Road on the east side. It was about to rain, and her family had left their backyard birthday party to find shelter under the front awning.
She’s nervous about the city’s bankruptcy — it poses a tangible threat to her. She retired from Detroit’s water department eight years ago and lives off a modest pension. She keeps reading and hearing people say how legacy costs like her pension and health care are a drain on the city’s resources that led to this moment, and need to be cut.
“I’m very worried ‘cause that’s my main income,” the 60-year-old said. “What happens to these people? How do they continue to pay the bills? How do they continue to live here?”
Jackson was a lifelong Detroit resident until recently, when her longtime neighbourhood near Indian Village took a downward turn and she moved to Redford. But she still considers herself a Detroiter. “I want to see the city revitalised,” she said. “I would love to be a part of that.”
Inside her aunt’s well-kept home, a big spread was laid out. There was steak and quail and ribs on the dining room table, along with greeting cards and presents. Family portraits looked down from a wall. A picture of boxer Joe Louis with a relative was propped up by the window.
Patricia Davis, Jackson’s aunt, turned 74 that day. She has lived in her home nearly 50 years, through different mayors and different neighbours, through the downward spiral in the parts of the city that seem so far from the developments taking place downtown.
Though her street is still holding on compared to some devastated blocks just streets away, things used to be a lot better around here. Her street still has nearly all its homes, but some are beginning to show signs of wear and neglect.
“If you ride through the neighbourhood, you can see that at one time it was a beautiful neighbourhood,” Davis said. “We don’t get any kind of consideration. We don’t get no help out here from the people downtown. It’s really sad. We pay high taxes and get no services.”
Davis still remembers when the side streets were regularly plowed, when you could set your watch to trash pickup time, and when 911 treated emergencies as just that and quickly sent police or firefighters out.
Now the long decline of the city, manifested here in the collapse of those city services, had culminated in bankruptcy. She’s unsure what it will mean for regular people like her, those who don’t have city pensions or health care and don’t have a direct financial stake in the outcome of all the filings and hearings.
But, she thinks, after all the mayors and councils, after the consent agreement and the emergency manager appointment, maybe this will finally be the thing that turns things around. Maybe things will finally start to get better for the residents in the neighbourhoods.
“Will it be different?” she wondered. “I don’t know. What are they going to do for the people? Because we have been suffering for a long time. We are the forgotten communities.” — Detroit Free Press/MCT
