The general sentiment  in Ann Arbor, based on what I gather from reading public commentary at meetings as well as online comments to news stories, appears to be that the city’s zoning is a sacred covenant between the city and residents.  Exceptions to the zoning of a particular area violate that covenant, and provoke  reactions such as these (paraphrased by Mary Morgan):

“All of the planning commissioners spoke in support of the current zoning, saying that the community had reached a hard-won consensus that was not to be overturned lightly.” “(E)veryone relies on zoning to be stable, not changed because of someone’s preference.” “To make a change now for the adjacent property would be harmful to… any sense of integrity that the city might retain – integrity that a developer would rely on to do business in this town.” “It’s time to adhere to the rules that were established.” “Why aren’t these zoning decisions respected?… Why are they being challenged?”

While I am sure that these sentiments are representative of homeowners & other residents in the older neighborhoods near Ann Arbor’s central commercial districts, I personally don’t share them (as some of my readers may recall).  Nor do I see any reason that Ann Arbor’s current zoning should be treated with such reverence.  Let me enumerate a number of concerns I have with Ann Arbor’s current approach to zoning, and the philosophy that underlies it.

First, it tips the scale of private property rights over to the side of the neighbors, and away from the rights of the owner of a particular parcel to do what they wish with that parcel.  It thereby codifies the existing neighbors’ perceived self-interest (or, more succinctly, their NIMBYism) permanently into law, without regard for the interests of potential future residents or property owners.  (By the way, there’s nothing that enrages Ann Arbor residents more than being called NIMBYs — is there an equally succinct but more politically correct term I should be using?)  As in, I live here, and I have the right to tell everyone else in my neighborhood what they can and can not do with their property.

I grew up in a small vacation town, it was amazing how residents fought every kind of new development… even though almost every resident had moved there from somewhere else.  They basically wanted move there, then fight tooth and nail to pull the drawbridge up behind them.

Snyder asked what had happened to the Ann Arbor that had been a true university town – with a sprawling campus and trees, as typified by the Arboretum and Burton Tower. When and why had the city and university decided it was better to build up? he wondered. But he quipped that UM’s buildings have managed to keep below the low-flying cloud height. Questions like “How big is too big?” and “How tall is too tall?” keep being redefined, Snyder said.

To rezone the parcel would take away the buffer between Forest Court and the densest D1 development of South University, (one homeowner) noted.

While residents are careful never to say it, the city’s zoning policy also has the implicit perceived benefit of keeping out the undesirables.

The advantages of preserving the status quo are subjective to a certain extent.  In Ann Arbor, outside the core areas surrounding downtown and Central Campus, that status quo is 1950s-vintage Euclidean zoning, strictly segregating residential and commercial uses, encouraging single-family housing with setbacks over multi-family dwellings, and prioritizing the needs of drivers over those of pedestrians and other non-car commuters.   It is a land use model that still appears to have plenty of loyal fans.

But Ann Arbor’s zoning has a number of ill effects that are less easily debated:

• By reducing density, it hinders methods of transit besides the car;
• It limits the potential patronage of businesses in the area;
• It reduces the amount of property taxes the city could collect from additional residents and/or businesses that are crowded out by the zoning;
• It reduces the access of families to walkable neighborhoods, which exacerbates obesity (as children get used to riding in cars rather than walking/biking to their destinations), and costs taxpayers more (in school busing).

I seem to be the only person who thinks this is bad apart from the developers.  The rest of the community seems to love being able to exercise veto power over changes to their neighborhood.  I am very gradually coming to accept that I’m in the extreme minority among Ann Arbor residents in my opinion.  Permanent residents seem to want the community to remain small, medium-density,  and low-rise.  As long as they can tolerate the property taxes that accompany the city’s high home prices, we can expect the status quo to continue.

But if that’s the case, the city should probably stop shoveling money into environmental and sustainability initiatives that are undermined by its own zoning policies.  It is ironic that the Chronicle story that inspired this post was accompanied by a report back on a land use and sustainability forum the city held on February 9.  Encouraging greater density is by far the most significant investment in sustainability the city could make, but it is an investment Ann Arbor residents are fighting tooth and nail.  What is the point of these investments when they are undermined and counteracted by the city’s own zoning?

PS:  As always, I could not have written this post without the efforts of Chronicle staff.  Please consider donating to the Chronicle here.

It is conventional wisdom in Michigan that the condition of our roads is among the country’s worst.   I’ve read a number of different theories for why this may be.  One is that we have unusually high weight limits for trucks.  Another is the freeze-thaw cycle that results from our harsh winters.  Another is American road construction standards, which generate cheaper bills but demand more frequent repairs.  Presumably each of these factors contributes to our bumpy rides, to some extent.

What I almost never hear cited as a factor is how incredibly overbuilt Michigan is.  (Credit due to Urbanophile, who has written at length about this phenomenon elsewhere in the country, and Charles Marohn, whose theory of the “growth Ponzi scheme” I’ve praised.)  And by Michigan I primarily mean metro Detroit,  with Genesee and Saginaw counties also shouldering significant amounts of blame.  Is it any coincidence that these areas also have some of the most segregated populations, auto-centric layouts, depressed home values, and dysfunctional inner cities in the entire country? The Detroit, Flint and Saginaw metropolitan areas are the poster children for autocentric sprawl, and have reaped their just desserts for it. Among the consequences of the sprawl is that, of course, we can’t afford to pay to maintain the countless miles of asphalt laid to service it.  And MDOT, unbelievably, responds to this situation by proposing expansion projects like adding lanes to I-94 in the city of Detroit.  You can’t blame respondents to the Free Press poll for thinking that the last thing we need to do is throw more money at the imbeciles running our state’s transportation policy.

In the spirit of problem-solving, here’s my proposal to help solve two problems at once:  our threadbare roads and our decimated industrial inner cities.   Restrict all state dollars allocated toward road construction and maintenance to the oldest paved segments.  Earmark the majority of road dollars toward the core streets that serviced central cities and inner suburbs before, say, World War II, giving an edge to fiscally struggling older communities across the state like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Ypsilanti, Pontiac, and Saginaw, as well as dense and walkable older communities like Plymouth, Rochester or Brighton.

This will never happen, of course, because Michiganders continue to overwhelmingly choose exurban isolation over city life, and dependency on car travel to the exclusion of any other form of transit.  They will continue to do so, even as the roads they travel disintegrate to rubble and eventually, one by one, revert to gravel.  They will continue to lament the potholes and the flat tires because they’d rather complain than pay a nickel more in gas taxes.   Their leaders will continue to subsidize greenfield development over infill, convinced that for their particular community at least the bill will never come due.

It’s the Michigan way.

PS 2-8-12:  I also want to make it clear that I think the proposal, introduced by State Sen. Howard Walker, to scrap the state’s gas tax in favor of paying for roads with a sales tax increase is insane.  The gas tax should be increased, not scrapped, and we should not be shifting the burden of paying for roads from heavy users (people who drive a lot) to light users (people who bike, walk, carpool or ride the bus).   This bill idea deserves to die.

Why they are doing this?  We’re an easy target, and making our lives difficult is an easy way to score points with the vocal & significant percentage of the Republican base that hates us.  They can’t undo Lawrence v. Texas, they can’t ban us from serving in uniform any longer, & they can’t round us up & put us in concentration camps.  This seemed like the easiest way to put us in our place.  This has zero to do with saving money, by the way.  That excuse is a fig leaf for Republicans like Snyder, who know that outright bigotry no longer plays as well with the public at large.

(I focus specifically on Republicans because on the domestic partner benefits issue there were exactly one Democrat apiece in the House & Senate who voted for the domestic partner benefits issue:  Sen. Tupac Hunter & Rep. Richard LeBlanc.  No Republicans in either house voted against.)

Republican voters, and the leaders they elect, like to paint themselves as defenders of marriage and of the family.  I think we are getting better at emphasizing that ‘social conservative’ leaders don’t give a damn about saving marriages or families, they just want to punish people like me for the unforgivable sin of finding romantic happiness. Our task is to heighten the cognitive dissonance experienced by Republicans like my cousins on one side of the family, who love watching shows like Glee and have never made me or my partner feel unwelcome, but who want to sidestep the consequences of the votes they cast.

Our ability to fight back is further constrained by Michigan’s political dynamics.  We are clustered in safe Democratic districts so Republican legislators have no reason to even acknowledge our existence.  They have nothing to lose – certainly not our votes.

In this we have a lot in common with black Michiganders, though I know a lot of black people bristle when sexual minorities draw comparisons between our situations.  Like black Michiganders, we are almost entirely a Democratic constituency.  The rage at PA 4 that has erupted in majority-black communities reflects their realization that with all three branches of state government in Republican control, they are effectively powerless. When the anti-PA 4 activists complain that the act subverts the democratic process, they forget that the democratic process is no friend to them, either: Majoritarian democracy has no inherent protection for minorities.

And we accept it.  The political impotence of Michigan’s sexual minorities is partly a function of our learned helplessness.  But it’s also partly due to our own apathy.  For lots of us, especially when we’re young and uncommitted and have so many other pressing concerns, marriage equality and the family are abstract concepts. And it can seem frivolous to donate money for causes like marriage equality when sexual minorities in so much of the non-Western world face more severe challenges in their own societies.

I myself have been guilty of apathy.  While I supported marriage and adoption equality, neither was much of a priority to me until I finally ended up in a committed long-term relationship & started to have something economic at stake.  Once I began to face decisions about health insurance, tax deductions, estate planning, I began to understand why I could no longer sit on the sidelines.

Last Wednesday two examples of grassroots political activism were juxtaposed in a way that I found both illustrative and frustrating.  One was, of course, the SOPA/PIPA blackouts.  My Facebook feed erupted in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen before, with anti-SOPA/PIPA posts from what seemed like half of my contacts.  Not since the Obama campaign had my Millenial peers, in particular, seemed so politically engaged.

The day of action at the state Capitol protesting the domestic partner benefits ban, in contrast, seemed to get hardly any attention at all except from certain LGBT  organizations like Equality Michigan & Affirmations.  Even the gay football team the Michigan Panthers, who I follow on Facebook, didn’t make a peep.

I felt a wee bit guilty for not taking the day off work to join the protest. That feeling grew stronger when at the day’s end, I read the post* by autBar’s owner Keith Orr reporting back on the event:

(I)f we are going to make an impact, we need more than the 250 people who showed up to work for the cause… (W)e need our straight allies to “come out of the closet”. They need to be active and vocal about our civil rights.

But we can’t expect it of them if we don’t do it ourselves… (I)t felt very real chanting “Gay Families Matter”.

But we need a bigger “family”…

We have to make them care.

And we have to get our friends and family to care.

I agree with Keith Orr that we can do better.  Today, we’re getting another chance to get it right, as a lesbian couple in Hazel Park sued to overturn the state’s ban on adoption by unmarried couples.  You know Attorney General Bill Schuette, whose hatred and contempt for people who aren’t straight is unsurpassed among state elected officials, will fight this suit every step of the way.

If you’re upset by this post and starting to feel a bit guilty yourself, head over to one of the following websites and donate to one or more of the organizations who are fighting hard against the Republican legislature’s agenda of hate:

• Michigan Equality
• ACLU of Michigan

And if you live in a state legislative district represented by a Republican, or you yourself are a Republican, it’s even more important that you contact your Republican legislator or your party leadership to let them know that what they are doing is not OK.  It’s time to stop systematically undermining families and condoning hate. The Party has to do better.

*H/T the Ann Arbor Chronicle

The response far exceeded the expectations of WDET’s staff:

We set a goal of 1,000 responses in seven days. We met that goal in 48 hours, over the course of a weekend. A total of 2,200 respondents were collected at the end of the week, making this the largest known data set of it’s kind.

It’s so rare to see quantitative data on people’s attitudes about moving to Detroit, which up til now have mostly been captured in a jumble of conflicting anecdote.  As the introduction to the summary notes,

The latest iteration of the persistent “Detroit authenticity/Detroit love”  battle shows little evidence of the participants actually engaging with the arguments/ ideas of  the other side. Instead, there is a lot of interaction with existing beliefs, misremembered history,  convenient reformulations of the past and a willful disregard for “live and let live” acceptance.

WDET wisely engaged the services of a social scientist, a PhD candidate at Brandeis named  Sara Elliott, to help design the survey.  The survey questions they developed were concrete and specific, and admirably, Elliott and her collaborators at the station steered clear of extrapolating too much from the results.

Still, when ’84% of city residents said they would be unlikely to move to the suburbs in the future,’ I suggest we’re a bit closer to guessing why, in spite of the conventional wisdom that Detroit is a dying city, over 700,000 residents remain.  Those who survived the exodus of the 2000s are a resilient bunch and have compelling reasons to stay.

Another interesting data point pertains to how Tree Towners and other Washtenaw residents view the city:

Paradoxically, a smaller percentage of survey takers were from Washtenaw County and this group comes to Detroit less frequently than those living in Wayne or Macomb counties, yet this group was the most likely to say they would be likely or very likely to move to the city in the future (50%). The next largest group of respondents who said they would be likely or very likely to move to the city in the future lived in a county other than Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne (outside Metro Detroit) (42%). Smaller percentages of survey takers from Wayne (35%) or Macomb (34%) counties and Oakland County (31%) said they would be likely or very likely to move to Detroit. The largest group of survey takers was from Oakland County, but they were least likely to say they would move to the city in the future.

Responses to the statement ‘I would support a friend or family member’s decision to move to the city of Detroit’ were more positive than I’d have expected:

There is data to back up an observation that I’ve seen made frequently (and have made myself), which is that younger people view the city in a more positive light than older generations:

Over half (55%) of those under 25 years of age said they would be “likely or very likely” to move to the city in the future, compared to one third (36%) of those 26-45 and one-quarter (24%) of those 45 and above. As age increases, likelihood of moving to the city decreases significantly.

And there are some clues for whoever ends up in charge of the city as to what priorities they should focus on:

A few factors stood out as mattering to more of the respondents who said they were likely or very likely to move to the city in the future…

• Better city services (57% of likely movers compared to 51% of unlikely movers)
• Better public transportation (60% of likely movers compared to 36% of unlikely movers; this factor rises past lower crime to the #1 issue among the very likely subset respondents) 
• Increase walkability (53% of likely movers compared to 41% of unlikely movers)

Note the walkability figure;  in spite of pockets like Greektown, Midtown, Corktown and Mexicantown (basically any neighborhood ending in ‘-town’), Detroit lags many of its suburbs in that respect.  Also, the most likely recruits appear to be swayed more by service provision (including both schools and transit) than by “lower taxes” or “better jobs” which are way down the list.

Surprisingly, I haven’t seen reaction to the survey from Detroit’s other media outlets such as the Free Press or the Metro Times.  Perhaps they were embarassed they didn’t think of it first.

For more, check out the summary of the survey results (PDF).

I just finished a long-postponed entry on WDET’s ‘Move to Detroit’ survey.  I’m mulling over a post on my thoughts on the 2012 Apocalypse, aka what exactly is going to happen to Detroit when the city runs out of money in a few months.  Perhaps I should change the title of this blog to “On Motown From TreeTown” since I never really say anything about Ann Arbor anymore.  Part of the malaise about this blog that motivated my last post stems from my own sense of inadequacy compared to my fellow Ann Arbor bloggers.  Damn Arbor pretty much has the cultural, foodie, & bike porn beats covered;  TeacherPatti has cornered the market on beer; I can’t match Local in Ann Arbor‘s wonkiness and budget expertise;  and I wouldn’t even dare to compare my armchair bloviating to the heroic investments by the team of the Chronicle.  It astounds me how much intellectual firepower and civic passion there is in Ann Arbor.  It makes for contentious local politics, and a level of hair-splitting that I sometimes find tedious.  But it reflects a populace that is unusually engaged in its own affairs, with a corresponding degree of self-empowerment.  It gives me confidence that our community will continue to hold its leaders accountable in a way that Detroiters haven’t for decades, thereby ensuring competent management.

It is certainly a contrast to analysis of Detroit, which is mostly heat with very little light.  I was listening to Craig Fahle’s year-end conversation with Stephen Henderson and Bankole Thompson last week.  While gritting my teeth every time Thompson said “I mean” or “you know” (which happened pretty much every sentence) it occurred to me that neither of these supposed experts on metro Detroit affairs seemed to have any more of an idea what is going on in the region, or what would happen to the city, than I did.  The Metro Times has some pretty great coverage, but it only comes out once per week, and a lot of their staff focus on very specific beats (e.g. Larry Gabriel on weed policy, Detroitblogger John on the lumpenproletariat, the Wonder Twins on partying and local music, Lessenberry on cussing out politicians) leaving me plenty of room to explore.

So my New Year’s resolution for this blog is to set it free and see where it goes.  If it continues to be light on Ann Arbor & heavy on Detroit, well, hopefully that lights a fire under Ann Arbor’s ass to up its game (ouch, mixed metaphor, I know) and make some news.  I also have some pretty hefty reserves of polemic accumulating on the topics of density, zoning, parking, and the car, so stay tuned for some rants on those themes as well.

I also am still struggling with the whole issue of anonymity.  That might be what really kills off this blog.  It just feels shady when Ben, Vivienne & others are posting under their own names, and Maxine Berman lambastes and accuses of cowardice those who comment anonymously.  I’m still trying to figure out what to do about that.  Mainly I just need to settle on a good pen name.  I’ll buy a pony and a drink at the Village Pub for whoever comes up with the winning idea.

• Nevada – 13%
• California – 11.3%
• District of Columbia – 10.6%
• Mississippi, Rhode Island – 10.5%
• Florida, Illinois, North Carolina – 10%
• South Carolina, Georgia – 9.9%
• Michigan- 9.8%

That’s right.  No fewer than 7 Sunbelt states (8 if you count D.C.) have higher unemployment rates than Michigan including two states that were until very recently economic development darlings, North Carolina and Georgia.  Also for the first time in many years, to my knowledge, we’ve moved ahead of Illinois. This remarkable progress was driven by the biggest drop in unemployment of any state, -0.8%.

The usual caveats apply:  this just reflects a change in how many people are actively seeking work and doesn’t reflect all the poor souls who just gave up and left the labour force.  No one will deny we have plenty of those.  I’m not by nature an optimist.  But I’ll take the good news where I can.

A sample of early reactions:

I can understand Megan Owens’ reaction, since the ‘six years of work’ she refers to are, in large part, hers.  And I certainly won’t dispute her characterization of the mayor as  ’a moron,’ since he’s proven it over and over again more or less since his first day in office (but that’s a topic for another post).

But as readers of this blog may recall, I’m not terribly surprised by this news given that Detroit as an independent political and fiscal entity will likely not exist in its current form within six months.  Nor does it necessarily entail a worse long-term outcome for metro Detroit’s transit riders, especially the vast majority that do not live or work along Woodward south of 8 Mile.  The governor has made it clear that his vision for a new regional transit system centers on bus rapid transit, and that vision, along with the loss of control over its own finances the city will shortly face, was the controlling factor here.

If light rail does eventually come to Michigan, it will makes its debut in one of three places:  1) Ann Arbor (between UM’s North & Central Campuses), 2) the Woodward corridor in southeast Oakland County, or 3) Grand Rapids.

The new Backstreet holds a special distinction: According to their website, “no other gay bar in Michigan has a 4am dance permit.”  We were gone by 2, as I’m in bed by 1am most Saturday nights.  But if I were 18 again, I imagine I’d be pretty excited about it.

They redid the interior nicely (although the potted palms are a bit much).    Cocktails were overpriced ($9 for a Sapphire & tonic, no lime) & I’d advise against the $15 pitcher of Long Islands, which tastes like poison.  The DJ played an unusual amount of hip-hop for a gay bar, which, hey, not really my thing. The parking lot appeared to be well-patrolled, which is welcome given the neighborhood.

The place was crowded with guys of a wide range of ages; although skewing slightly to the young & twinky, again, not my bag, there were a lot of good-looking men as well.

They also have a lot of special events lined up in the next couple of months, including lots of top-tier porn actors, which to me suggests it’s being managed well.

***

Meanwhile, just around the corner from my condo in Ann Arbor, a new neighborhood bar just opened.  The Village Pub is, to my knowledge, the only bar in the vast expanse of strip mall that straddles Washtenaw Avenue from Stadium to east of US 23.  (There are restaurants with liquor licenses but it’s not quite the same.)  I haven’t made it over yet, but I want to make it over soon to check it out.  Even if it ends up being mediocre I suspect I’ll be a regular, just to keep the place open as an option within walking distance.

If you’ve visited either the new Backstreet or Village Pub, share your experience in the comments section.

Miller almost immediately gets off on the wrong foot with me:

Whether Barlow realizes it or not, through his words he has brought the late Mayor Coleman A. Young back to life. Or at least the former mayor’s sentiment. In his twenty years in office, Mayor Young successfully drew a sharp divide between the residents of the City of Detroit and the suburbanites. The race riots of the late 1960s forced middle class whites to flee the city, but it was Mayor Young who kept them away. The polarizing mayor made the Eight Mile border a dividing landmark between the races.

Ahh, yes, the myth of mean old scary Coleman Young who hated Whitey.  White people were scared of Coleman Young, and in retrospect he created a PR disaster for the city, but he was no more responsible for its downward spiral than was Detroit’s white-dominated establishment that picked up and moved en masse.  No mention at all of the executives at all the auto suppliers & ancillary industries who moved their headquarters and factories out of the city, nor of suburban officials like L. Brooks Patterson who race-baited just as gleefully.  There are a lot of older white people who love to perpetuate the myth that it was all Young’s fault because he was a convenient scapegoat and it absolved them of responsibility.  It’s just depressing that well-intentioned people like Rabbi Miller are continuing to buy it and repeat it.

Then there’s the misty-eyed tale of exodus in response to mean old Mayor Young:

Both of my parents grew up in Detroit. They both graduated from Mumford High. Their families left the city, but not because the big homes with big yards in the suburbs were so appealing. They left the city because the city was changing for the worse. They left reluctantly, but who wouldn’t?… I sat with my parents last year as we watched the stage production of Palmer Park, which accurately portrayed the tense race relations in that Detroit neighborhood in 1967. My parents had tears in their eyes (and so did every other native Detroiter of their generation who sat in the theater) because this production brought back the emotionally jarring, difficult times of that period.

My grandparents’ generation didn’t turn their backs on the City of Detroit. They continued to work in the city and support its culture. They were saddened that they had to move out because they didn’t have a choice.

Oh, please.  Your grandparents’ generation — and by that I mean the white people of their generation — left when it was convenient to them to do so.  Mind you, they didn’t owe the city anything and were free to leave when they wanted.   If I’d been a homeowner in, say, Brightmoor, I would have thrown in the towel sooner or later too.  But let’s drop this pretense that “they didn’t have a choice,” that they were hapless victims.

Miller contends,

The people who are paving the way for this renaissance do not live in the city. Yes, these business people are working hard to get young talent to move to Detroit and live affordably in Midtown or Downtown with attractive stipends. But at the end of the day these executives are driving back north to their homes in the suburbs.

Now, this is true.  Metro Detroit’s elites have shelled out tons of money to the city and have for decades;  that’s the only way the DSO, the Michigan Opera Theater, the DIA have stayed afloat.  What they don’t do is live in the city, and there is a simple reason for that:  there is no reputational cachet in a Detroit address for rich people.  There never will be, until there emerges some tiny enclave in Detroit that is prohibitively expensive.  Even the most expensive addresses in Detroit — in Palmer Woods and some of the new developments in downtown and Midtown — are simply not pricy enough yet to provide the necessary cue.  Rich people choose to live in places that signal exclusivity; for that reason, the rich will continue to cluster in a few pockets of central Oakland County, the Grosse Pointes, and, increasingly, Ann Arbor.  Detroiters are never going to get most of these status-conscious capitalists to move to the city, but they’d be imbeciles to turn down the money they are shelling out.

Some of Miller’s talking points make a lot of sense:

Even if the majority of employees who work in Detroit head back home north of Eight Mile at the end of the day, Barlow should be grateful to them. They’re paying income taxes to the City of Detroit where he lives but doesn’t work (a simple Internet search shows that Barlow works for an organization that is based in Dearborn, not within the city limits)…

The City of Detroit is 144 square miles of land that is too big to manage… The old mentality that the City of Detroit doesn’t need or want white suburbanites coming into to “our City” is unfortunately still alive and well (just ask business leaders how difficult it is for them to get city contracts).

Others are such ingrained, oft-repeated conventional wisdom one wonders why Miller bothered to recite them:

For many energetic young people like Barlow Detroit seems like a euphoric metropolis now, but will they continue to reside Downtown when their kids are ready for school? The fact is that Detroit still has a high crime rate. How will that impact these enthusiastic Detroiters’ decision to stay put as their kids get older?

And then there’s the lecture on the great things that have come from the suburban shopping mall:

In his article, Barlow cynically writes that it’s great that suburbanites might know the Faygo song but they probably don’t know about “the College of Creative Studies’ massively incredible new Taubman Center.” Hold on one second. How does Barlow think the CCS got that massively incredible new Taubman Center? Let me explain. From the generosity of Al Taubman. And I wonder if Barlow knows where Mr. Taubman got the money to support such a center that he finds to be massively incredible? He made that money owning malls. Big malls. In suburbs. In fact, since Novi is the first suburban city (of many) Barlow condescendingly mentions in his article, it’s ironic that without Twelve Oaks, the massively incredible mall that Taubman built in Novi, there probably wouldn’t be a Taubman Center at the CCS in Detroit. Barlow writes, “Nothing good ever came out of suburbia.” Perhaps he wants to rethink that one.

I’m thinking, no, he probably doesn’t.  I would not cite enormous shopping malls as one of the key examples of the great things that have come out of suburbia.

And then he concludes by scolding Barlow for his alleged ingratitude:

Rather than criticizing the suburbanites who choose to stay in their suburban homes, Barlow would make more sense if he thanked the suburbanites who work in the City of Detroit and come to the city for sports events, casinos, dining, and entertainment. It’s the money coming from the suburbs that’s going to spur the renaissance for the City of Detroit. No matter how much grocery shopping and dry cleaning Barlow does in the city, suburbanites like Dan Gilbert and Peter Karmanos are the ones turning the city around. And even if they head north on the Lodge Freeway to go home after work each day, they are Detroiters. And so am I.

Well, you are & you aren’t.  As Supergay Detroit explained, you don’t have to put up with the bullshit — the crime, slovenliness, the shitty public services —  from other Detroiters like residential Detroiters do.  And you aren’t shoveling the same amount of tax dollars into the ravenous abyss, never to be seen again, the way (employed) full-time Detroiters do.  (I’m not going to lie, I pay a lot more in property taxes in Ann Arbor, but I feel better about how my money will be spent than I did when I paid City of Detroit income tax.  The buses run on time here.)  So I have to agree with Toby & Supergay that residential Detroiters have a certain earned cachet.  They have certified their ability to put up with the plethora of inconveniences of living in Detroit in a way that people on the outside haven’t, a certification of fortitude (if not necessarily financial savvy).

I have mixed feelings about piling on to this increasingly tired argument.  Innumerable commenters on innumerable posts on Detroityes.com have wasted innumerable hours circling one another, pointing fingers and flinging accusations, and all it does is continue to cement the region’s image as dysfunctional, insular, petty, and racist.  Now metro Detroit’s passion for assigning blame been broadcast nationally via the HuffingtonPost.  There are some nice things about living in Southeast Michigan, but the litigation of Barlow v. Miller (aka Young v. Whitey) has reminded me how this region disgusts me sometimes.

*In which Craig Fahle also, somewhat randomly, flips out on Rabbi Miller at one point, when the latter insinuates that a building he passed was a crack house.  I’m always amused by such outbursts from Craig.  Hot-tempered, that one.