PEOPLE LIKE TOWNS, THEY HATE CITIES:

Destroying Detroit (in Order to Save It): It took over 300 years to build this city. It'll take about four to knock it down. Howie Kahn rides shotgun with the men who are demolishing the abandoned, godforsaken homes of Detroit—all 70,000 of them—and paving the way for one last shot at the future (Howie Kahn, May 2011, GQ)

In 1950, with nearly 2 million people living within its boundaries, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in America. Over a forty-year period, the auto industry had boomed in a way that changed the country, and Detroit's population more than sextupled. But starting in the '50s, the city fell into decline. Factories closed. Jobs vanished. In the wake of the 1967 riots, race relations collapsed and the city became increasingly segregated. By 1980 the population had dwindled to 1.2 million. With far fewer Detroiters to shelter, many of the city's houses were orphaned, threatening the existence and safety of everything around them. Blight metastasized across town, leaving much of the housing stock better suited for crackheads and squatters than for legitimate investors, possible gentrifiers, or working-class families with any remaining desire to stay. Today only 700,000 souls call Detroit home, and nearly a fourth of the city's houses—a number approaching 72,000 units—are empty.

In March 2010, after ten months in office, Detroit's mayor, Dave Bing—former Piston, NBA Hall of Famer, multimillionaire founder of Bing Steel—gave his first State of the City address. In it, he made residential blight public enemy number one. "Tonight," he said, "I am unveiling a plan to demolish 3,000 dangerous residential structures this year and setting a goal of 10,000 by the end of this term." The de-blighting started immediately. The city had averaged only about 1,000 annual residential demolitions over the previous five years, and the mayor knew he had to pick up the pace. This was his problem now.

Detroit politicians have been delivering Save Detroit sermons for as long as I can remember. (I was born there in 1978.) But there was something different about Bing's speech. The mayor talked about the city as a whole, not just the nugget of Downtown that local leaders have been cradling, coddling, and polishing since the '70s. The notion of "bringing Detroit back" has always focused on several square miles of partially occupied office buildings, luxury-boxed sports stadiums, and casinos—and on keeping solvent the city's most iconic contemporary-era building, the Renaissance Center, which looks like seven stacks of obscenely waxed tires. (It has been the headquarters of both Ford and General Motors.) Meanwhile the neighborhoods, the places where the people actually live, have been almost uniformly scrubbed from public awareness. This neglect left everywhere but Downtown withered and has long set the rest of the city up for a comeback.

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