Hillarysworld

Oh yeah, I remember what the hood was like during the Reagan era. That was when Detroit reached its zenith as the murder capital of the USA. The annual Devil's Night arson spree also began sometime around 1983 or 1984. The Reagan era was Detroit's lowest point.

Things weren't any better under the first Bush. I was in college then, so I spent almost every day in the city. One of the classes I took was at a Detroit public school a half mile from campus. The school itself was nice-- clean, orderly, quiet, with a super principal and a real friendly old lady guarding the door who'd let us in every morning. But outside, there was a high-rise housing project right across the street. We heard plenty of horror stories about how the place was one big dope house (or a bunch of mini dope houses) and our professor kept warning us not to park there, although sometimes we did anyway. The surrounding neighborhood consisted of vacant lots and burned out, abandoned Victorian houses, the kind that would be oh-so-gorgeous if only somebody fixed them up.

Fast forward to the summer of 2000, the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency. The economy had been booming for several years and Dennis Archer was serving his second term as Detroit's mayor. My sister and I were driving through Detroit on the way back from taking our mom to the airport and we happened to pass through this pretty neighborhood with Victorian homes and beautiful gardens and a nice, new apartment complex.

It was the same neighborhood where I had taken that class. I literally did not recognize the place until I spotted the school.

The neighborhood was part of an Empowerment Zone, which was one of Bill Clinton's programs for urban development. Nearly all of the high rises were gone. The old Victorian homes that were salvageable had been fixed up; most of the rest were torn down. The new apartment complex went up where there had once been an empty field. (I learned later that this had once been the site of a supermarket that burned down during the 1967 riots.) A few years later, new houses were built where the projects once stood and the few remaining high rises were transformed into housing for senior citizens.

The down side would be that some poor people were displaced by the middle class during this transformation. But the neighborhood never did become "middle class" enough to qualify as gentrification. The apartment complex is for low-income families, while many of the restored Victorian homes were duplexes or apartment houses with fairly low rents. (There's a lot of variation.) There are a lot of students and artsy types, neither of which have much money. The end result was a mixed-income area that was also more racially mixed. (I'm guessing 70 percent black, 30 percent white, which is about as integrated as anything I've ever seen within Detroit's borders.)

The last time I walked through the area-- yes, it's safe to walk around now that the projects are gone-- was during the fall of 2008. I did not notice any decline due to the recession, but I'm sure it's happening. The neighborhood hasn't seen any new improvements. The houses that hadn't been torn down or fixed up are still rotting away. Any project that was half-finished is probably still half-finished.

To get back to my original point, under Reagan and Bush, that neighborhood was totally neglected, as was every other neighborhood in the city. Even when the national and local economy was doing pretty well in the late 1980s, none of that money found its way back into the city. (The poorer suburbs didn't fare very well, either.) But Bill Clinton provided incentives for people to invest in Detroit, and they did. So to me, this neighborhood symbolizes the difference between Reagan/Bush and Bill Clinton.