Down but Far from Out

By Ed Magnuson

Hurt by the recession, the G.O.P. 's host is fighting back

It's a lunch-bucket town with a world-class symphony. A heavily black city with a black-run government, but an economy dependent on white business leaders. A community that prides itself on its race relations, yet a town where the underlying tensions could still cause another riot. And it's a Democratic town holding the Republican National Convention.

With its many contradictions, Detroit defies labeling and upsets preconceptions. Self-styled sophisticates from elsewhere have long scoffed at the industrial city. Just last week a researcher from one of the television networks had the gall to ask a Detroit spokesman to help put together a list of a dozen "top mugging spots" for convention delegates to avoid. Actually, crime in the city has dropped dramatically in the past few years. And a European reporter who assumed the Detroit River was hopelessly polluted by the city's heavy industry looked out over the waterfront in astonishment at fishermen angling for coho salmon.

More than 20,000 visitors will form their own conclusions about Detroit this week during the four-day Republican Convention. Some 15,000 journalists will jostle with 4,000 delegates and alternates in and around the just finished $27 million Joe Louis Arena, where Ronald Reagan will become the Republicans' presidential candidate. The crowds are overwhelming Detroit's limited hotel and eating facilities; some conventioneers are staying across the border in Canada, or up to 40 miles away in small towns of Michigan.

Both Detroit and the G.O.P. are out to exploit each other, and make no bones about it. Coleman A. Young, Detroit's shrewd and aggressive mayor, hopes to use the convention to prove to the nation that his town is, as its boosters have been boasting, a city in the midst of a revival. He is well aware of the risk in seizing the national spotlight, if only for a week. "We have our warts," Young says with typical candor, "and we see them too." Republican Party leaders, in turn, hope to use Detroit as a theatrical backdrop in their bid to lure blue-collar workers and blacks away from the Democratic Party.

Some of Detroit's warts were highly visible last week. Even as parking-lot operators were putting out potted geraniums to brighten the city's face for visitors, some 425 striking sanitation workers let garbage pile up along the streets. Bus mechanics, too, were on strike, forcing the collapse of local service that carries 200,000 people daily--although some residents claim the system has long been so poor that no one can tell the difference. In all, about 8,400 striking municipal workers (out of 21,700) tried to use the convention as a club to beat the city into granting hefty wage hikes. Young, who came out of the same tough "Black Bottom" ghetto that produced Joe Louis and was once an organizer for the United Auto Workers, bargained hard but at week's end settled for a draw. A new pact gave the workers less than they had asked but more than the mayor had offered--despite Young's repeated plea that "I ain't got no more goddam money."

The mayor had a point. Detroit's economy has long depended on the auto industry, which has been slowed to a sputter by the recession and foreign imports. Rising losses by the carmakers and spreading layoffs (the city's unemployment has reached 18%) have caused city tax revenues to fall and contributed to a financial deficit for the fiscal year of $70 million.

The symbiosis between city and cars is, of course, what makes the Motor City unique. "It is both a great blessing and a great problem," says Edward Cushman, a political science professor at Detroit's Wayne State University. In normal times, more than one-third of the city's 1.8 million wage earners hold jobs directly related to the auto industry. When the assembly lines are rolling, the area's autoworkers, many of whom are black, can take home as much as $30,000 a year. When layoffs are temporary, the combination of company, union, state and federal benefits gives workers up to 95% of normal pay. But Detroit is fearful now that the unemployment will linger on and on.

Still, in this city of contrasts, the good years of the auto industry helped power the undeniable revival of Detroit's downtown. So, too, has the unusual rapport between black city officials and the community's white business executives, who rarely live within the city limits. The outspoken Young, for example, does not hesitate in public to rib his good friend Henry Ford II. When the former Ford Motor Co. boss complained in a speech that the 73-story Detroit Plaza Hotel, the showpiece of the city's celebrated Renaissance Center complex along the waterfront, might be doing nicely in attracting conventions but was not producing enough "transient business," Young took a microphone to declare: "Hank the Deuce just told us we gotta start hot-sheetin' it at the hotel."

This close relationship between white and black leaders began as a community-wide reaction to the race riot of 1967, one of the worst in the nation. A total of 33 blacks and ten whites died in the chaos, and the damage to property amounted to $80 million. Civic leaders formed an interracial group called New Detroit and worked hard to improve race relations, especially between black residents and a white-dominated police force. Three years later, Henry Ford led the formation of Detroit Renaissance, a group made up of chief executives of the major corporations in the city. This power elite had the financial clout to rebuild the downtown, which was so deserted after the riots that Young says: "You could have shot a cannon down any of the major thoroughfares at night and not hit anyone."

The redevelopment of the waterfront area has been economically successful, although critics differ over its aesthetic appeal. The main cluster of new buildings is the $350 million Renaissance Center, consisting of five glass towers containing office space and topped by the spectacular Detroit Plaza Hotel. The center has helped the city raise its convention revenues from $56 million in 1970 to a projected $115 million this year. More than 90% of the center's office space is rented. Although the complex looks a bit like a mother ship from Star Wars--or perhaps because of the fact--visitors flock to its more than 20 restaurants and stylish boutiques.

While the grandest and gaudiest redevelopment has occurred downtown, Detroit has also built a number of privately owned housing projects around the city, including the remodeling of 125 houses and 175 apartments by General Motors Corp. near its headquarters three miles north of the downtown area. Obviously well intended by GM, the project is resented by many blacks, who fear that it will raise real estate values in the area until only affluent whites from the suburbs can afford to buy houses there. GM is planning to provide some subsidized housing.

General Motors Chairman Thomas Murphy discovered how quickly Detroit could respond when an auto company needs a lift. He told Young in June that GM's Cadillac division and the Fisher body plant that supplies it might have to leave Detroit in a search for more space. Within a week, the city assembled a land package of more than 500 acres in a deal with Hamtramck, a municipal enclave surrounded by Detroit. The plan will involve the razing of 1,500 homes and the relocation of churches, businesses--and even a cemetery.

Not all Detroiters, however, cheer all of the reconstruction that is going on in the city. To check decay, Young and other city officials have granted tax concessions to developers willing to build in the area, but they are criticized for doing so as city deficits grow. So far, however, most residents seem to agree with Bob McCabe, president of Detroit Renaissance, who defends Young: "This city is in a fight for its life. It needs to be competitive. You need tax abatements not to make developers rich but to make the developments possible."

A tougher challenge that constantly confronts Detroit's government is trying to improve the lives of the city's poor. About 60% of Detroit's 1.2 million people are black, and about 80,000 have incomes below the poverty line. Some 300,000 are eligible for food stamps. Large sections of the city are 90% black, the public school system is 85% black; the students are up to two years below national standards. As in most major cities, unemployment figures for young blacks are astronomical: estimates range as high as 60%. Sources of racial resentment remain. Walter Douglas, the black who heads an organization that expedites new construction, points out that the privately operated Detroit Golf Club is in the middle of a predominantly black area, but has no black members. Says Douglas: "It's a damn shame."

Young has served his constituents well by leading a drive to expand black influence in the city. First elected in 1973 by a mere 12,000 votes (out of 250,000), he has helped blacks win six of the nine city council seats, including its presidency; a majority on the Wayne County board of supervisors, which sits in Detroit; and 16 of the 23 judgeships in the city's criminal courts. In addition, the deputy mayor, superintendent of schools and chief of police are black.

Young's pressure on the police department has been effective in two ways. By sharply increasing the percentage of black police officers (from 15% in 1974 to more than 40%), he has diffused some of the emotional conflict between police and the black community. At the same time, the force has become more effective. In Young's first year in office, Detroit was known to headline writers as Murder City. Its 714 homicides constituted the highest per capita rate of any major U.S. city. Last year the murder toll was down to 451. Lesser crimes decreased too--so much so that other police departments have sent representatives to see what Detroit was doing right.

There are still muggings, of course, but downtown streets that were once an eerie no man's land after dark now come alive with normal night life, as the Republican delegates undoubtedly will discover. Detroiters tend to live it up to the lyric of an old Motown song: "By day we make the cars, by night we make the bars."

After years of decline, the city that produced such jazz greats as Kenny Burrell, Yusef Lateef and Joe Henderson is enjoying a resurgence in the music style. Unfortunately, rock and to a lesser extent soul have faded since the Detroit days in the '60s and '70s of Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Alice Cooper. Detroit's main musical pride today is its highly respected symphony directed by Antal Dorati, 74, who has done for Detroit what he had achieved earlier for Dallas, Minneapolis and Washington.

Yet the beat to which Detroit moves remains, for better or worse, the rhythm of the assembly lines. The $45 million that Detroit merchants expect to ring up at the convention may inspire a few more "hallelujahs" in celebration of the city's revival, but it cannot affect the auto industry's deep-seated problems. Mayor Young remains optimistic -- and defiant. "Detroit has always been a feisty city," he says. "We've known trouble, but we're not afraid to take it on."

--By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Barrett Seaman/Detroit

With reporting by Barrett Seaman

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