What Detroit can teach us all

Earlier this week, I was handed a hefty book with photos of classic suburban American family homes. The tome described how Detroit has been so ravaged by economic disaster in recent years that it has become an epicentre for "ruin porn": if you search for images of the city online, you invariably find endless pictures of boarded-up houses.

But Detroit is fighting back. In 329 pages, the book, known as The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan and produced by a public-private coalition, sets out a goal to "intervene" in 84,000 property lots - or one-third of the city's total. The aim is quite literally to clean the place up and remove urban blight, at a cost of $850m.

"The phrase 'ruin porn' did not emerge accidentally [but because] tens of thousands of well-built homes, commercial buildings and clean vacant lots have morphed into an unprecedented amount of ugly blight," it declares. "There is no need to sugar-coat this calamity any more."

It is a striking and highly symbolic move. For what is going on with that "blight" mission is not just interesting in terms of urban planning, it also speaks volumes about the state of politics right now.

These days in the US, the level of cynicism about public bodies and politicians is at an all-time high. Little wonder: Washington has been beset by debilitating gridlock and political polarisation in the past couple of years, and this fragmentation could get even worse.

Also this week, I moderated a discussion at the Milken Institute Conference in Los Angeles about American government. There was near-universal despair about the poisonous nature of Washington. Indeed, the 2016 campaign, I was told, is likely to attract more than $4bn in campaign financing - most of which will be used for negative advertising.

But pundits wailing about Washington gridlock are only half the story. One of the great strengths of the US federal system is that it devolves so much power to local entities that these can often be seen as Petri dishes for some fascinating policy experiments. And if you look at what is now happening in Detroit, in terms of its fight against blight and ruin porn, you get a very different view of politics.

Following the depressing discussion about Washington at Milken, I also moderated a talk about Detroit between Rick Snyder, Michigan governor; Dan Gilbert, a Detroit business luminary; Ken Buckfire, a lawyer; and Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy lawyer who recently served as emergency manager of the city.

The tone could not have been more different. Instead of moaning about gridlock, the group buzzed with enthusiasm about what they planned to get done. The challenge is enormous: Detroit's population has halved since 1950, its local manufacturing base has shrivelled and, in 2013, the city declared bankruptcy, the largest in American public sector history.

Since then, the Detroit government has implemented an $18bn restructuring plan with its creditors - a remarkable achievement since bond holders, unions and city pensioners were at each other's throats. It has also thrown itself into the task of rebuilding the city. This has sucked in all manner of businesses, making downtown Detroit a hub for trendy start-ups. "You can't get office space in downtown, and residential is hard," says Gilbert. And now men such as Snyder are trying to implement plans to revive the city's disastrous public schools, rebuild the crumbling architecture - and, of course, remove that visual urban blight.

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It remains to be seen whether this will really work: although downtown Detroit is in the grip of a wild renaissance, many suburbs remain depressed. But what is most notable about this story is the most obvious point: in Detroit, unlike so many parts of the American political system, something tangible and concrete is being done to combat disaster. Politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders are pulling together in an unusually collaborative manner; or acting, as Snyder says, with the type of "common sense" that is so often missing today.

Can this be replicated elsewhere? It may be tough. One of the reasons why it has been possible to get this spirit of collaboration is size: reforming a city is easier than a state or country. The extreme nature of the crisis also concentrated minds. More importantly, it prompted some unusually courageous and committed local people to step forward and work with government to take big risks. "This is about leadership," says Gilbert.

There is another lesson too. When I asked the Detroit leaders why they had been able to push reforms through, they emphasised the issue of transparency; instead of endlessly ignoring problems - as governments tend to do - they had tried to describe them as honestly as possible to voters and themselves. Hence that detailed task force plan. "This is the first time any city has produced a book like this," enthuses Orr.

Transparency is only a first step: decaying houses still need to be removed. But I only wish that a few more governments - in places such as California, Puerto Rico and Greece - could take a leaf out of that book. The process of honestly and openly measuring all the rot in a region, be that in relation to houses or anything else, does tend to focus the mind; and sometimes encourage - or force - people to act with the type of leadership that western society so desperately needs.

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Illustration by Shonagh Rae

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