Origins of the Urban Crisis

My Hero

“Denby, three years ago, was a warehouse for children,” said Wilbourn, a Spelman College alumna who is currently working on her PhD in education. “It was plagued by gang activity, a lack of culture, direction, and vision, and had undefined roles for adults and children. It wasn’t safe.”

Her stated goal is to help Denby become one of the city’s top high schools, which is a distinction currently reserved for Renaissance, Cass Technical, and her alma mater Martin Luther King High School, better known in DPS as the “Big Three.” Her hope is that Denby becomes “The Renaissance of the East Side.”

Wilbourn has made waves by being the rare administrator in the Detroit Public Schools to vocally challenge the city on the issue of blight, which surrounds Denby along Kelly Road. The school is located in the 48205 zip code, which the FBI named the deadliest section in the city last September.

“I’ve driven through parts of this city and this neighborhood and, as a former social studies teacher, it reminds me of the days of slavery,” Wilbourn said. “I’m waiting for the North Star and Harriet Tubman. That’s just how desolate it is. How can you drive down a street, and if you didn’t know it was 2012, you could very easily think this is the 1800s?”

In the area surrounding Denby, 37 abandoned properties sit within a two-block radius. These, along with alleyways and very few, if any, working streetlights, lead to the area being compared to a war zone. That analogy often rubs Detroit city leaders and residents the wrong way, but Wilbourn refuses to back down from it.

“It’s worse than a war zone on so many levels,” Wilbourn said. “You have better odds as an African-American male going to Afghanistan than surviving the streets of Detroit. So when these young people show up every day, I get it.

“We’re talking about children that are in poverty, the highest level in the United States right here in Detroit.” On April 22, Wilbourn and her son led a group of Denby High students, along with volunteers from the nonprofit organization Better Detroit Youth Movement, in boarding up and cleaning three abandoned duplexes across the street from the school.

While she respects the hard work the city has done in trying to bring back downtown, she stands by her position that the city’s “comeback” has a lot of work left. “Truthfully speaking, I would say Detroit is coming back, but who is it coming back for?” Wilbourn said.

“Just like we speak of ‘No Child Left Behind’, there are communities and groups of people who are being left behind. Until we have that conversation about what it means to be disenfranchised, what gentrification looks like and who will be displaced, then we’re not ready to have the true conversation about what it means for Detroit to come back.”

Wilbourn is not the only principal who feels this way about the conditions surrounding her school and the city. She is just the most outspoken. The neighborhoods around nearby Osborn High School, along with Cody High School on the city’s west side, have deteriorated as well. She sees the myriad of issues as systemic throughout DPS and the city itself, and feels that the city has not taken enough ownership.

“I think we have begun to give other groups of people too much credit for why we as a people are in this situation,” Wilbourn said. “I think for the city of Detroit in some ways, and I know some folks won’t like to hear what I’m saying, is that we’ve forgotten about the back of the bus. If you remembered the back of the bus, you would fight like hell to have your place in the front of it.”

She also feels that an inordinate amount of blame has been placed on teachers for many schools’ problems: “It takes an entire village to have both hands, both feet, heart, head, and habits of mind on creating a better community.

“The young people who robbed Pastor Winans, those are the same kids who sat in somebody’s classroom in Detroit. If they have the mindset to be so brutal with (Winans), imagine what a teacher has to deal with everyday? The city of Detroit is perfect. It’s the systems and the people in it that gives [sic] it the reputation.”

Her love for her students and the school come through in how emotional she becomes while talking about them. She credits her assistant principal, Tracie McCissick, and the rest of the faculty with much of her success, but knows there is so much more work to be done at Denby, as academic standards have not improved nearly to her or anyone’s liking. The school tested in the bottom five percent in the state in 2010.

“If I have to hold a parent accountable for his or her child and get them to the place where they move beyond their current socioeconomic and academic status, that’s what we’re going to do. We need to have that hard conversation with parents, community, and ourselves to why we are failing.

“Relative to the city of Detroit, it’s going to take new leadership. It’s going to take vision. It’s going to take some of the stuff that Coleman Young was made of. It’s going to take come of the stuff that Mayor Dennis Archer brought to the table.

“Whether people want to hear it or not, it is even going to take some of the stuff that Kwame Kilpatrick brought to the table — the positive elements. This city is not the ‘diamond in the rough,’ it is the actual diamond.”

http://thegrio.com/2012/06/04/detroit-principal-fights-for-troubled-school-in-troubled-city/

Living on right side of county line means more life, better health

-Gladwin County has the highest percentage of smoking adults (31 percent); the lowest rate of smokers is in Ottawa County (11 percent)

-Saginaw County has the highest rate of obesity (40 percent), but even in the skinniest counties (Ottawa and Washtenaw), a quarter of adults are considered obese.

-Lake County has the highest teen birth rate, at 64 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19; that’s more than four times the teen birth rate in Livingston and Washtenaw counties (13 per 1,000).

Despite being the home to five of the state’s top-10-ranked hospitals, Wayne County ranks last in health outcomes such as poor physical and mental health, low birth rate and premature death.

By contrast, Washtenaw, with the state’s top-ranked medical facility (University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers), is ranked fifth. (Leelanau County is tops in health outcomes.)

“This is about changing economic opportunity,” Udow-Phillips said. “Health is about poverty. And the best way to get people out of poverty is education.

“If we invest in early childhood education, health issues (will improve)” eventually, she said, because education is positively correlated with better jobs and better health.

“This is a long-term issue,” Udow-Phillips said. “It’s not going to be solved by hiring more doctors.”


http://bridgemi.com/2013/04/living-on-right-side-of-county-line-means-more-life-better-health/

Living on right side of county line means more life, better health

Photography of the ghetto / urban decay / Detroit

Photos based on Flickr

The Ghetto
http://www.flickr.com/groups/theghetto/

Urban Detroit
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tooloose-letrek/sets/813247/with/8534197890/

Urban Decay
http://www.flickr.com/groups/decay/pool/with/8534197890/#photo_8534197890

The Living City

http://www.flickr.com/groups/thelivingcity/pool/with/8534197890/#photo_8534197890

Evolution or gentrification: Do urban farms lead to higher rents?

http://grist.org/food/evolution-or-gentrification-do-urban-farms-lead-to-higher-rents/

Where the Poorest Americans Live

Many metropolitan areas never recovered from the decade’s first downturn, in 2000. Midwestern and Northeastern Rust Belt metro areas, and several in the South, experienced the steepest increases in concentrated poverty as they shed manufacturing jobs and income throughout the decade. Chicago and Detroit chalked up among the largest declines in the 1990s but yielded back much of that progress in the 2000s.





This research merely confirms what we've suspected for some time: extremely poor neighborhoods and their residents are last to benefit from growth when times are good, and first to feel it when tough times arrive. Progress against concentrated poverty is possible when growth is strong and sustained, and buttressed by housing, education and transportation policies that guard against segregating poor families. With projections of high unemployment for years to come, the outlook for this indicator is grim.

But that's no excuse to throw up our hands in the fight against concentrated poverty. If anything, we need to redouble our efforts at growing not just any old jobs, but better-paying jobs, and jobs that are accessible to workers living in these disadvantaged communities. Now that we’re finally paying attention to rising inequality in America, it's a good time to focus on helping the places that bear the most severe burdens of an increasingly unequal society.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/11/where-the-poorest-americans-live/419/

The End of the Neighborhood School

Kids being uprooted from neighborhood schools are often the ones that can least handle the sudden change. "A lot of the children who are affected by this trend are already at risk because of poverty, drug abuse, violence, family upheaval, lack of healthcare," says Julianne Robertson King, a mother of four who lives in D.C.'s Ward 5, which is set to see four schools close this year. "These are people who have not been able to capitalize on the promise of America. When you remove one thing that they can count on... ."

According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.

Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)

"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/

While 3,100 American soldiers have died in the war in Iraq, 1,518 Detroiters have been murdered during roughly the same four-year stretch from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2006, says Cox.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1596454,00.html

Detroit's Property Tax Black Hole, in Map Form

To get a handle on how bad of a tax mess Detroit is sitting in right now, look no further than this depressing map showing every property in the city suffering "tax distress."

What looks like a big hunk of moldy cheese is in fact the property-tax status of 84,861 properties, as logged by Wayne County's online tax portal. The lighter yellow boxes represent more than 59,000 distressed buildings where the owners haven't paid their taxes. Squished among them are a honeycomb of orange boxes, indicating that these properties have such a large backlog of delinquent taxes that they're now subject to foreclosure. (Count those up and you arrive at about 74,000 doomed properties.) The plots shown in red, meanwhile, are the 18,246 properties that have already been foreclosed.

On the bright side, gray areas mean those places don't have tax issues. Lucky!

The map is the creation of LOVELAND Technologies, a Detroit-based maker of "crowdfunding and social mapping systems." On the full, interactive version, you can zoom down to the level of streets to see who's behind on their payments on your block. Then, when you've selected an individual property, the map offers several ways to balance the tax debt – paying the fees online, for instance, or seeking a poverty exemption or financial assistance from grant-giving institutions. That means this bit of urban cartography isn't just neat to look at, but might help repay a little of the $444 million in taxes and penalties owed around Detroit.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/01/detroits-property-tax-black-hole/4517/

Detroit Tops The 2012 List Of America's Most Dangerous Cities

“If you want to change crime at a place you have to change the nature of the place.”

Roman said urban homicides tend to come in four forms: Women killing their children, family members killing each other, people killing other people they know, and “stranger crimes,” such as killings committed during a robbery or a drug deal gone bad. This last category is dwarfed by the other three, he said, and getting smaller all the time. Better policing has a lot to do with it, plus inventions like the cellphone, which has reduced the number of affluent customers wandering into dangerous parts of town to buy drugs

Detroit, where mobsters brought in Canadian whiskey by the boatload in the 1920s, is now a major transit point for foreign-sourced Ecstasy and other drugs, Hakala said.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/10/18/detroit-tops-the-2012-list-of-americas-most-dangerous-cities/2/

Hip-hop Artists from Detroit

Esham
J Dilla
Big Sean
Black Milk
Danny Brown
Bei Maejor
The Cool Kids (based in Chicago and Detroit)

Rollin Detroit: Gangs, drug dealers, decline of the economy


Once upon a time, Detroit was the heart of the American Dream. Good jobs, big cars, and the world's most profitable companies placed the city at the heart of the global economy. But as this empire of cars began to crumble and the jobs evaporated, Detroit became the crime capital of America, and a new business, illegal drugs, took over the economy. Now the city lies in shambles: Detroit is the poorest and most violent major city in America. The heart of the American Dream has been shattered. From corrupt narcotics cop Henry Marzett to the infamous Young Boys Inc, White Boy Rick, and the Best Friends Murder for Hire gang: see the Kingpins and Killers that called Detroit home and became the Henry Fords and Lee Iacoccas of a new generation. What happens when the Ceo's and Politicians fail in their plans? It's called DETROIT.

Lose purpose, focus, no engagement in an institution, high school, college, unemployed.

Change your culture. Change your neighborhood. Because when you go back, you go back to the same dirt. Morale in the city is very low.

"Everyone is desperate."

Snowball effect of there not being a real economy in the city. By the time they're 19, they've already ruined their lives.

People need to build Detroit, not tear it down anymore.

The Origins of the urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, is the first book by historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue in which he examines the role race, housing and job discrimination played in the decline of Detroit. Sugrue argues that the decline of Detroit began long before the 1967 race riot. Sugrue argues that institutionalized and often legalized racism resulted in sharply limited opportunities for Detroit blacks for most of the twentieth century.

The Detroit Black Community Food Security network is a coalition of organizations and individuals working together to build food security in Detroit’s Black community. Our mission is to build self-reliance, food security and food justice in Detroit’s Black community by influencing public policy, engaging in urban agriculture, promoting healthy eating, encouraging co-operative buying, and directing youth towards careers in food-related fields. D-Town Farm is a seven acre farm on Detroit’s west side that features organic vegetable plots, mushroom beds, four bee hives, four hoop houses for year-round food production, and a composting operation.

Malik Yakini

Osborn Promise Neighborhood Zone (Detroit, MI )

Osborn Promise Neighborhood Zone (Detroit, MI )

About:

Our PN Revitalization Plan will address cradle to career pipeline gaps to achieving outcomes in these categories: early childhood education; school readiness; before-, after-, and summer school programs; dropout prevention; college/career readiness programs; jobs/economic development. The applicant, Black Family Development, Inc. (BFDI) is a 501©3 non-profit that has delivered highly effective social services and educational programs for Detroit. Since its founding in 1978, BFDI has significantly increased community and parent partnerships with area schools, increased neighborhood safety, and mobilized evidence-based systems for family and community support.

A Growing Divide in Urban Gun Violence

The places way above the line for gun murders, like Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Newark, St. Louis, and Chicago, all have large, very segregated black communities with a history of disinvestment, outmigration, and, except for Chicago, not big immigration in recent decades. With the exception of the South Bronx, New York never had demographic collapse on the same scale. What the Detroit's and Baltimore's of American cities also had was extremely high concentrated poverty that mapped onto race.

There are quite a number of cities — Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and others — which are far above the line.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/growing-divide-urban-gun-violence/4328/

Mapping the Census: A Dot for Every Person

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/12/mapping-census-dot-every-person/4273/