Suppose I told you that most of what you thought you knew about Detroit was wrong, that the city was largely thriving, Jack Lessenberry ask in Dome magazine:
* That it has one of the highest job creation rates in the nation, despite taking a serious hit from the near-death experience—and permanent contraction—of the domestic auto industry five years ago.
* That most Detroiters are white, affluent, and that there has been very little real population loss.
All that may sound crazy. But there is, in fact, more than one Detroit. The one covered incessantly in the national media looks nothing like what I’ve outlined above.
One Detroit is the desperately poor city whose ruined neighborhoods largely look like a third-world African village in the ruins of a bombed-out German city at the end of World War II, Lessenberry writes.
But that Detroit is surrounded by the rest of the story.
"The rest, that is, of Detroit: The 3.7 million or so other people who live in the six-county metropolitan region. They are much better off, have better schools and opportunities. Meet one of the residents in an airport in San Diego or Atlanta, and they are unlikely to say they are from Canton, Bloomfield Township, or a dozen other places nobody knows. They will say they are from Detroit. Then, they will begin to explain …"
Why is the original Detroit in such terrible shape?
There are many reasons, but the fact that there are two “Detroits” is a big part of the reason.
