How Motown lost its bounce

They've already started giving away the rare fish from the century-old Belle Isle Aquarium, a green-tiled architectural gem that is one of the highlights of Detroit's most cherished public park. Nearby, the stables, the children's zoo and the boathouse are all closed and crumbling. On April 3, the aquarium, too, will shut its doors -- the latest casualty in the agonizing decline of one of America's most storied cities.

Courting bankruptcy and groaning under a $235-million (U.S.) deficit, Detroit is closing buildings and slashing services left and right. It is reducing bus services, laying off 700 municipal employees and cutting the pay of those who remain.

Detroit's Roman Catholic Archdiocese announced last week that it would close 18 area schools, saying it had lost 47 per cent of its enrolment in just five years. That followed the public board's decision to shut 34 schools in June.

On a recent day, an employee at the venerable aquarium surveyed the crowds that had come for a last look at the 60 tanks teeming with freshwater and tropical fish, including a giant gar, a massive electric eel and a bamboo shark. "This is everybody coming to see grandma on her deathbed," he said, summing up the mood in the border metropolis known in bouncier days as Motor City, or Motown.

Once the fourth-largest city in America, Detroit has lost half its population since the early 1950s and soon will drop out of the top 10. Last year, its murder rate was second only to Baltimore's and more than five times New York's. It is what John McIlwain, a U.S. urban expert, describes as an "extreme example of a Rust Belt city."

Places such as Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia may be enjoying an urban revival, but times are still tough in hollowed-out relics of the industrial age such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. "Lots of things have been done to see what could be done to revive these cities," said Mr. McIlwain, senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. "But to date, nothing has clicked. And there's a question of whether anything ever will."

Despite massive investment in new downtown baseball and football stadiums, a trio of casinos and the development of loft housing, a walk through the Detroit core remains an eerie experience for a visitor, akin to wandering through some post-apocalyptic city where once-elegant skyscrapers loom abandoned over empty sidewalks.

Still racked by racial division and overly dependent on the shrinking auto industry, Detroit is a city that continues to export its population to the suburbs. The latest estimate is that the population is 900,000, compared with close to two million 50 years ago.

"It isn't white flight any more. It's the flight of anybody with money and who has kids," said Kurt Metzger, research director at Wayne State University's Center for Urban Studies, who notes that middle-class blacks are fleeing the city for the lower taxes, lower crime and better schools in the suburbs.

Yavonkia Jenkins is just the kind of resident Detroit could not afford to lose, but did. Two years ago, the 30-year-old public-relations specialist, who grew up in Detroit, bought a condominium in suburban Canton. "The taxes are great and the insurance is a lot lower," she said. "In Detroit, I was paying as much insurance for my car as I'm paying now for the car, the house and life insurance."

Mr. McIlwain said cities such as Detroit have failed to reinvent themselves: "You've got these older cities that were built to serve the Industrial Age and they have not found a new reason for existence in a postmodern age of information services.

"What is it that is the competitive advantage of the Detroit region? You've got the automobile industry that's the main driver economically, but it's an industry that's extremely mature and not growing," he said.

Manufacturing now accounts for only 40,000 jobs in the city, compared with 180,000 in 1972. This week, General Motors, the last of the Big Three automakers that is still based in the city, announced a $1-billion loss amid skidding sales and questions over its future.

But Detroit's problems go beyond the auto industry. The city also suffers from a total lack of regional co-operation and simmering racial tensions between a city that is more than 80-per-cent black and prosperous suburbs that are overwhelmingly white.

"In the three counties that make up metropolitan Detroit, there are over four million people," Mr. Metzger said. "There are 120 municipalities, 70 school districts and three counties." There is no regional government and no co-ordination. Bus riders travelling from the city to the suburbs usually have to get off Detroit transit's decrepit buses at the city limits and transfer to suburban vehicles.

City and suburbs are at loggerheads on most issues. A classic example is the planned expansion of the Cobo Center, the city's downtown convention centre. The auto industry has threatened to move the North American International Auto Show out of the centre if it isn't expanded, but the suburbs refuse to invest, saying they prefer a private-sector alternative.

"There seems to be an attitude that the sooner the city implodes, the better off we'd be," said Peter Zeiler, a project manager at Detroit Economic Growth Corp., a private-public partnership set up to help the city revive.

Meanwhile, Washington plans to reduce spending on inner-city programs to help narrow its own budget deficit. "Republicans know that their political strength is not in the central cities," Mr. Metzger said. "There is no reason for them to care. They're going to reach out to African Americans, but the ones who live in the suburbs."

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said relations with the suburbs are still tinged with the heritage of the 1967 riots. "It's all race. There's this deeply ingrained anger on the part of the suburban community because of how they left the city. They left angry."

Racial issues temper everything, even the planned closing of the aquarium. Kathleen Alan is chairwoman of the Friends of the Belle Isle Aquarium, has been told that the city's mind is made up unless the group manages to gather $500,000 to save the facility.

A suburban resident and white mother of two, Ms. Alan admitted her group has been accused of being "suburban hobbyists" who don't grasp the crisis facing the city.

She gets no sympathy from Claude Cline at Detroit's Prevailing Church, a backer of Mayor Kilpatrick. "They want us to pay for it, but they enjoy it," he said. "If it's not self-sufficient in the world in which we live today, I'm in favour of shutting it down."

There are some signs of improvement. Benefiting from tax credits and the ready availability of cheap land and underused buildings -- the city itself owns as many as 40,000 properties seized from tax defaulters -- developers have begun to lease and sell loft apartments to singles and empty-nesters anxious for an urban experience.

On Woodward Avenue, the main north-south drag, business was brisk at the Atlas Global Bistro on a recent weekday evening. The two-year-old eatery wouldn't look out of place on King Street in Toronto.

"Business has been actually very good," said manager Ian Maley, a native of Miami who said he believes that Detroit is "definitely on the upswing."

"I think that Detroit has a very promising future," agreed Paul Hillegonds, president of Detroit Renaissance, a redevelopment group supported by the city's biggest corporations. "There are 23 new restaurants that weren't here three years ago. We hope to finance."

Yet he admits Detroit faces huge problems, and he and his own family prefer to live in the suburbs. "I go to Toronto and Chicago and dream about what we could be."

Mayor Kilpatrick -- a controversial, larger-than-life character who was elected at only 31 years of age and, at 35, is still known as "the hip-hop mayor" -- admits that Detroit will never resume being the metropolis it once was. "Our city is going to become a smaller city and Detroiters have to come to grips with that," he said. "We've got to prepare for depopulation. It's never been done before. . . . What we can be is a major American city and be comfortable with our size of 900,000."

Camilo Jose Vergara, a Chilean-born photographer and sociologist, has been chronicling the collapse of Detroit for years, finding himself attracted to the city's dilapidation. In fact, he has proposed transforming 12 blocks of the central core into a skyscraper-ruins park that he calls American Acropolis.

"It's the biggest concentration of ruins anywhere in North America " Mr. Vergara said by phone from his home in New York. "Brand-new things bore me and I can't think of anything more sterile than a huge patch of new stuff. But anything that's gathering dust becomes anathema to an American sensibility. To me, it acquires a patina of beauty."

For Mr. Vergara, nothing better symbolizes the city's death wish than its People Mover, an automated monorail train that was built in the 1980s. The two-car trains follow a three-mile loop through the centre of the city, carrying a handful of passengers at any one time. "The car industry wanted to make the thing useless," he said. "They designed it to make circles around the ruins. It takes you from parking garage to parking garage.

"The place that invented planned obsolescence," he has said, "has become obsolescent itself."

Alan Freeman is a correspondent in The Globe's Washington bureau.

Detroit's downturn

Detroit's population has been falling rapidly for decades, and its racial balance has shifted intensely. Although homicides have fallen, as they have across the United States, today's shrunken Detroit still has a much higher murder rate than other major cities.

Population and racial change over time

Percentage African American

1910: 1.2

1920: 4.1

1930: 7.7

1940: 9.2

1950: 16.2

1960: 28.9

1970: 44.5

1980: 63.1

1990: 75.7

2000: 81.6

Population 2003

Homicides per 100,000

SOURCES: STATISTICS CANADA, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENTS, FBI UNIFORM CRIME REPORT