essay

4

The New Detroit

On an early summer day in 2015, Detroit Bikes, one of at least four high-end bicycle manufacturers in Detroit, opened its first retail shop downtown. The shop had recently signed a lease on the ground floor of the Albert, one of Detroit’s premier new loft conversions, which sits across from Capitol Park, a newly renovated park in an up-and-coming section of the city’s until recently barren business district. Outside, the storefront employees passed out stickers with the company’s logo and chatted up the few pedestrians passing by—some walking their dogs, others biking or walking to work. In most other cities this would be unremarkable. And today, in Detroit, it’s becoming commonplace. But even five years ago, this scene—people walking downtown, shopping, buying hundred-dollar bike saddles—would strike many Detroiters as ridiculous.

Inside the shop, Detroit Bikes founder Zak Pashak served up locally made tamales as potential customers milled about the store and surveyed the company’s offerings: two models of bikes, each priced at $700; $100 leather Brooks bike seats; $65 Bern helmets; some high-end messenger bags; other standard bike gear.

“I love downtowns, and this is the middle of a historic city,” Pashak told me after we took a seat on a bench in Capitol Park. “You just have to be aware of what you’re moving into and be as good a guest as possible.”

Not long ago, Capitol Park was crumbling. But in 2009, the city undertook a renovation of the park and sold several city-owned buildings surrounding it to private developers. Since then, at least fifteen development projects , mostly conversions of historic office buildings and run-down apartments into high-end condos, have been completed. Capitol Park is now one of the most expensive addresses in Detroit. You can still see parts of the old neighborhood poking through—homeless people still hang out in the park, a couple of cheap cafés and delis take up a few corners—but for the most part, the neighborhood now caters to the newly arrived aspirational-class youngsters: there are expensive and hip restaurants, ironically dive-y bars with pricey cocktails, even a John Varvatos store where shoes

start at about $400. Gentrification in much of Detroit seems to have skipped the beginning phase with the artsy folks, the laid-back coffee shops, and the activists and instead jumped straight from broke dystopian metropolis to yuppified playground.

Max Gordon, twenty-four, whom I found wandering Detroit Bikes, moved from one of the city’s wealthier suburbs a few months ago. He’s now the property manager of the apartment building that Detroit Bikes rents ground-floor space in, and he is wholeheartedly in favor of the transition the new buildings have helped bring about.

“Down here is the place to be,” he told me outside the store. “We’re on the cutting edge of everything going on.”

The Albert is jointly managed by two of Detroit’s biggest development companies, Bedrock and Broder & Sachse. Bedrock, the largest in the city, is owned by Dan Gilbert, the head of Quicken Loans, one of the largest mortgage companies in the United States. And Dan Gilbert is a kind of cheerleader for the new Detroit. In 2010, he moved Quicken’s headquarters and its thousands of employees from the suburbs to downtown Detroit. Since then he’s been on a skyscraper-buying spree: he now owns at least eighty buildings downtown . He’s known for curating the feeling of the streets here, recommending park designs to the city, throwing events to draw in tourists, and picking shops that fit in with his high-end yet independent aesthetic. He personally chose Detroit Bikes as a tenant in the Albert.

Gilbert’s mission, he says, is not only to make hundreds of millions of dollars on Detroit’s cheap real estate but also to transform Detroit’s downtown into a world-class destination for tourists, businesses, and especially young people. As his favorite motto goes: “ Do well by doing good .” That mission has made him a lightning rod in the city. He’s hailed by business leaders, city officials , and the local and national media (one article even called him a superhero). He’s also criticized by activists for turning Detroit into somewhat of an oligarchy in which he and a few other powerful people control its redevelopment, especially downtown, which locals now often refer to as “Gilbertville.”

Part of Gilbert’s strategy has been not only to buy up Detroit but also to rebrand it. His development team has plastered hundreds of posters across the city’s downtown with “Opportunity Detroit” in a white faux-graffiti font on a black background. Buses carrying his workers also carry the logo. Some of the Opportunity Detroit posters come with inspirational quotes. “Finding opportunity is a matter of believing it’s there,” reads one.

Max Gordon, sleekly dressed in a green polo, tight jeans, and a watch made in Detroit by Shinola (another new high-end manufacturer in town; their bikes start at $1,000, their watches at $500), is one of new Detroit’s and Gilbert’s true believers. He told me that the thousands of young people moving to Detroit’s downtown were not simply a trend but a movement.

“To be involved with the young people coming downtown and the Bedrock family of companies is great,” he said. “Living here is like college when you were in freshman year. Everybody’s looking for friends. I think it’s great.”

When asked about gentrification, Max dismissed the word as divisive.

“We have to turn everything upside down to turn it right-side up,” he said, quoting verbatim from one of the

Opportunity Detroit posters that surround Capitol Park. “It’s an area that requires a lot of work.”

Zak Pashak, while a little more toned down in his rhetoric, nonetheless agreed that Gilbert’s critics, and critics of Detroit’s redevelopment in general, ought to ease up. After all, development, even if it comes with “ suspend[ed] democracy ,” as Dan Gilbert once put it, is better than no development.

“I think Gilbert is fantastic,” Pashak said. “You couldn’t ask for a more benevolent billionaire. But a lot of the people are just against change. That’s why I don’t like the word gentrification. Detroit needed change.”

Zak said he believed he was part of that change, but I pressed him on the gentrification question. I asked if he ever felt as if two Detroits might be emerging—the new Detroit, in which people can afford $1,200-a-month studio apartments and $700 bicycles, and the other Detroit, where the per capita income is about $15,000 a year.

“We’ve got to make sure the people here are being lifted up from the rising tide,” Pashak said in response.

The reality, though, is that the rest of Detroit is still struggling economically. And for those who lived around Capitol Park before this latest wave of redevelopment, the new Detroit has been anything but a boon.

Broder & Sachse bought the building at 1214 Griswold Street in 2013 and rechristened it the Albert, after one of Detroit’s most famous Art Deco architects, Albert Kahn. Before 2013, the building housed about a hundred low-income seniors who were able to afford to live there thanks to Section 8 housing vouchers. All were evicted by Broder & Sachse, given vouchers to move elsewhere, and scattered throughout the rest of the city. Now the building houses mostly white millennials. Apartments at the Albert now start at $1,200 a month. Broder & Sachse received a ten-year tax abatement from the city when they began their conversion.

Across the park sits another luxury rental building. That one, owned by Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock, once housed artists. They too were evicted a few years ago. Both evictions caused protest in Detroit. But the evictions, according to Pashak and Gordon, are the price of progress.

“This is the way the market was going,” Pashak said. “Everyone here had the best of intentions.”

Todd Sachse, vice president of the development company behind the Albert’s progress, seemed to hold a similar view: “ I would bet you that of the 100 people who moved out of here, 95 of them are happier today,” he told the Detroit Free Press.

That’s not exactly true: every one of the former residents I spoke with from the Albert seemed at best ambivalent about their departure. Sure, 1214 Griswold was falling apart, they told me, but it was convenient—downtown and near everything. Some had planned on living there until their deaths. Now many have been forced to move to Detroit neighborhoods surrounded by nothing but freeways and gas stations.

Jerome Robinson, seventy-two, used to work the assembly line for Ford and Chrysler. He grew up in what is now called Midtown. When a spot opened up in 1214 Griswold in 2007, he was ecstatic—Robinson’s eyes are bad, he can’t drive anymore, and his pharmacy, bank, library, and pretty much everything else he needed were within walking distance. Five years later he was told to leave. He now lives in a small apartment not too far from where he grew up,

but cut off from the rest of the city by a freeway. There’s little transit around him, no pharmacy, no bank.

“It bothers me,” he told me in his new living room. “We had a riot in ’67. And the Caucasians, I mean they ran. And then in the 1970s, we got a black mayor, and they ran some more. And then these guys come in and start buying up stuff and tearing down and rebuilding stuff, and they’re coming back.

“People can say whatever they want about these rich people coming in and doing this that and the other, but I was comfortable down there,” Robinson continued. “I wanted to stay there. And they kicked me out.”

The rent-gap theory—that capital flows to the rate of highest return, and return is highest after a city has been economically drained and primed for gentrification—explains the economic rationale behind the new Detroit. Detroit has been in decline for decades, but its bankruptcy in 2013 put it in position for a rent-gap rebound: not only was the city broke, but it was now run by an emergency manager named Kevyn Orr, who was intent on slashing city services and making the city more palatable for investment. And that explains why people such as Zak Pashak are now courted by powerful players like Dan Gilbert to fill Detroit’s core, while people such as Jerome Robinson are ignored (and patronizingly told that they should enjoy what is happening). Detroit did not gentrify because of the whims of people like Pashak. Pashak and his friends are the pawns of a much larger strategy of redevelopment.

In 2008, Richard Florida, perhaps the most famous urbanist in the United States, came to Detroit to keynote the Creative Cities Summit 2.0. The topic of his talk was “ the re-imagining of Detroit .” In 2013, Florida came back again, this time to keynote the Detroit Policy Conference, where he was joined by Matt Cullen, the CEO of Dan Gilbert’s investment group, Rock Ventures, along with other leaders from around the city to talk about “designing Detroit’s brand.”

“ Already you can see the renewal , revitalization, not from the government, but from the bootstraps, from creative people,” Florida said in a five-part video series released before the conference. “Every single person is creative and what’s key to rebuilding Detroit is harnessing the creativity of everyone.”

And in 2015, Florida was back in the city once more, this time leading Create: Detroit, a conference focused on “building a more creative and inclusive city.” That conference was sponsored by, among others, Gilbert’s Rock Ventures and the luxury goods company Shinola.

“We don’t have to create Detroit,” Florida said at that conference. “Detroit is creating itself.”

In each speech, and in the video series that preceded his second appearance, Florida focused on the downtown and Midtown core of the city—praising its gritty urban fabric and its historic architecture, highlighting that college-educated graduates seemed to be moving there and that new companies were opening doors there. Left unmentioned by Florida at each of those three conferences was the fact that the city was still shrinking rapidly each year, even as

Florida spoke of its rebirth. Detroit, despite its continuous release of creative energies, lost 25 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010. It was still declining in 2015, when its population reached its lowest level since 1850. But Florida did not focus on that part of Detroit’s story. He did not mention that most people in the city, especially those not involved in its creative rebirth, still think it’s a hard place to live: a full third of Detroiters say they plan on leaving within the next five years. But that’s Richard Florida’s business: convincing cities that gentrification is their only choice for an economic reboot.

Ever since his landmark book The Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002, Florida, who is also the director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a senior editor at The Atlantic, has been urging broke cities to attract the “creative class” in order to revive themselves. And since there’s quite literally almost no US city more broke than Detroit , maybe it’s no surprise that, as one activist told me, “they love some Richard Florida here.”

Florida’s 2002 book provided a beacon of hope to cities struggling to rebuild their economies in the wake of a national shift away from industrialized urban centers. Globalization meant factories were closing and relocating, first to nonunion states and then overseas. And it signaled the start of the crumbling of a middle-class aspirational dream of stability and material success. Cities, in their decrepit postindustrial states, became symbols of the end of that dream. Florida provided an antidote.

Florida proposed that cities revitalize themselves by attracting the “creative class,” an amorphous category of workers Florida created to describe essentially any profession in which someone relies on a modicum of creativity to do his or her job—doctors, lawyers, artists, movie producers, accountants, hair salon owners, “high end sales” people (a category including cashiers, managers, door-to-door salespeople, real estate brokers, and models), and so on.

According to Florida, this class of people accounted for 24 percent of the American workforce in 1980 and increased to 32.6 percent of the workforce by 2010. Florida takes this as a sign that the creative class is strong, not that, say, there are inevitably more independent entrepreneurs and creative freelancers when there are fewer full-time jobs. (In this same style of historical forgetting, Florida attributes the decline in unions to the decline in the need to push for better working conditions, not the purposeful and directed attack on organized labor during the last half century.)

The solution to the massive loss of manufacturing jobs across the United States, according to Florida, is to turn every worker into a “creative worker.” How exactly this would be done remains a mystery that Florida doesn’t really elucidate in his book. How does the Starbucks barista serving the creative-class lawyer become a creative barista? How do you turn an entire economy that’s built on low-wage labor into a creative economy? How do you account for the fact that the rise in the creative class seems to be coupled with the decline in the middle class?

While Florida acknowledges the limitations of the creative class—it won’t solve economic inequality, it won’t magically revitalize entire cities—he nonetheless devotes most of his book to laying out a strategy of how to structure

entire cities to cater to its preferences, with the idea explicit throughout that if they come, your city will become rich, or at least richer than it is now. Florida’s book is essentially a blueprint for gentrification. He tells cities to attract artists and other “bohemians” by catering to the whims of millennials, who, according to Florida, love things like running and living an active lifestyle (but not team sports), art galleries, buying antiques and other unique items, and fun dining experiences (not white-tablecloth restaurants). Millennials, Florida says, are on a never-ending “quest for experience ,” and it’s a city’s job to provide a road map for that quest if it expects to take in enough money to govern.

It’s not enough for cities to just hope for these things to happen, Florida writes. Cities must plant the seeds of creative growth by investing in the three areas that attract creative people: technology, talent, and tolerance . In other words, cities need to invest in the high-tech sector, in education, and in ensuring that their cities are tolerant of creative people (especially gays and lesbians, who Florida says are often the creative class’s canary in the coal mine) if they expect to become bastions of bohemia.

Cities seem to gobble up Florida’s ideas not only because they’re delivered with the excitement and verve of a Baptist preacher but also because they promise a relatively easy and business-friendly solution for postindustrial American cities. No taxes need to be raised, no new roads need to be built, no new laws have to be passed—just a few tax cuts here, a few incentives there, a sprinkle of advertising and branding, and bam, your city’s a boomtown.

That’s part of the reason Florida’s book has become required reading in many urban planning and economic development departments. The original edition sold 300,000 copies , an unheard-of number for an urban planning book. And while there are no official surveys to back this up, I’d bet that every single head of every economic development team in nearly every midsize city in America is familiar with the book.

Downtown and Midtown Detroit are the crown jewels of Florida-led new-age urban revitalization models. There are new restaurants and galleries and lofts on every block. Average incomes are up. The anchor institutions of the city—Quicken, Rock Ventures, Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation—are all bringing new jobs to the city. If you stand on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Selden Street, it’d be impossible to deny that a lot of new stuff is happening here after years of no growth. Detroit, at least this narrow part of it, is a Florida-inspired success story, and so Detroit, at least this narrow part of it, is the new place urban planners point to as a success. The Congress for New Urbanism held its 2016 conference in Detroit. In addition to the usual hotel-based workshops, attendees could sign up for tours of Detroit’s revitalized neighborhoods. The year prior, UNESCO dubbed Detroit a “City of Design,” and launched a campaign with local branding firms and business groups to showcase Detroit’s “commitment to the creative sector around the globe.”

Urban planners and other Florida followers seem to believe Detroit proves that attracting the creative class works. All you have to do is ignore the rest of the city and its (mostly black) residents, who keep slipping further and further off the grid.

To his credit, Florida essentially admits this problem in his book: “ One problematic consequence [of the rise of the

creative class] is the accelerated sorting of people and cities into an economic hierarchy. Our society is not just becoming more unequal, its inequities are being etched into our economic geography.… The new geography of class might be giving rise to a new form of segregation—different from racial segregation or the old schism between central city and suburb, and perhaps even more threatening to national unity.”

And Florida has said in a series of articles for The Atlantic that some cities, including Detroit, are beyond salvation by the creative class: “ We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.” Detroit was one of the places Florida mentioned.

But believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality. Gentrification may provide a new tax base, but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality, reliant on it to self-fund, yet still unable to meet the needs of their poor. A real solution to the economics of American cities would require more work—more taxes, more laws, more intervention from the federal government. Those things are hard. Gentrification is easy.

So with little money in municipal coffers and little hope for a better future, it seems that politicians and planners (and in the case of Detroit, the corporations and nonprofits that have replaced them) have managed to turn a blind eye to the warnings of the profession’s foundational texts. Cities have pursued whole-hog Richard Florida’s strategies for wooing millennials without considering the serious limitations of those strategies and the profound effects they may have on everyone else. They ignore that Richard Florida has admitted that the creative class is not a silver bullet, and they forget that Jane Jacobs, the other most famous urbanist in America, talked not only about what makes city blocks cute and community-oriented but also about all the ways in which governments encourage the destruction of places for the middle class. It seems that in their desperation to find something, anything, that will get their cities going again, city leaders have deemphasized all the risks and potentially lackluster results inherent in the gentrification-as-renewal strategy and instead embraced a strategy of “please just come.” Like Detroit’s former economic development czar said: “ Bring on more gentrification . I’m sorry, but I mean, bring it on.”

In the years preceding Detroit’s official bankruptcy, a confluence of neoliberal policy doctrine passed down from the leaders of successfully gentrified cities such as New York and prophets like Richard Florida, along with capital from people such as Dan Gilbert who were finally willing to take a risk on Detroit (and take advantage of its rock-bottom real estate prices), set the city up for a radical refocusing.

No longer would Detroit present itself as a poor city in massive need of help. Instead, it would become a boot-strapping, millennial-attracting juggernaut, and anyone not on board would be left behind. That meant redirecting the

energy and resources of the city’s government from adequately governing an entire city to remaking a relatively small, gentrifiable area. In 2010, the city’s mayor, Dave Bing, proposed shrinking the municipal boundaries of Detroit, cutting off the money-losing sections of the city in favor of the downtown core. The proposal drew immediate protest from the people who live in those outer sections (the majority of Detroit’s population), but the idea behind it stuck.

Since then, planners, creatives, and the corporations they work hand in hand with have focused nearly all their energy on downtown, Midtown, and a few other select areas, while ignoring the rest of the city, denying it media coverage and equal political representation, allowing its houses to crumble, and starving it of transportation networks. The new Detroit is now a nearly closed loop. It is possible to live in this new Detroit and essentially never set foot in the old one.

When a new (usually white-owned, hipster- or yuppie-oriented) store opens, it’s often profiled by Model D Media, a news outlet funded by nonprofits and corporations to cover what’s happening in Detroit in a positive light. Big Detroit-centric foundations such as the Knight Foundation or the Kresge Foundation might issue press releases about the new businesses to drum up support. They might give out small grants to help with renovations. Urban Innovation Exchange, which is partially funded by Knight, might help that business connect with the plethora of other nonprofits in the area dedicated to helping “innovative” new businesses thrive—Hatch Detroit, Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3), and TechTown, to name a few. The city, through its Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, might get involved—issuing more grants, paying for historical renovation costs, promoting the business on social media. Then bigger media outlets such as Curbed or the Detroit Free Press might do a little profile on this new business that seems to be making it in a down-and-out neighborhood despite supposedly long odds. Eventually, the New York Times might come to town and declare that the business is, for example, “ a gleam of renewal in struggling Detroit .”

In that article, the Times profiled five businesses, all owned by white Detroiters. Detroit is 83 percent black, but the new Detroit—the one that gets all the attention and press—is overwhelmingly white. Research by Wayne State University grad student Alex B. Hill found that 69.2 percent of the grantees of nonprofits, fellows at various nonprofits committed to revitalization, and those chosen to take part in tech and business incubators were white.

Given this echo chamber, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the young leaders of this new Detroit are somewhat crass defenders of their cause, seemingly impervious to criticism that their newly revitalized city is also an exclusionary one. The new Detroit is unable to account for the fact that while the tide of particular sections of Detroit does indeed seem to be rising, the rest of the city continues to fall to pieces.

“So many people walk in and say, ‘Oh, I guess they couldn’t find a black entrepreneur,’” said Angela Foster, a white former suburbanite and the owner of a coffee shop called Coffee and (___), located in a predominantly black neighborhood. Coffee and (___) received grants from the city to open. “It’s not a black and white thing. It’s whatever neighborhood people want to do something in. That’s it. That’s absolutely it.… I don’t see how a city this big with so much property and so much opportunity, I don’t see how anyone could be left out.… I guess I’m not buying into this

conspiracy theory. You have to know where to look. Some people aren’t social creatures. So maybe those are the people being left out.”

One business association made up of young white entrepreneurs even called themselves the Conquistadors. The group busied itself with ensuring that the food pantry run by a church in Corktown, one of the city’s newly hip areas, did not detract from its surrounding hipness by providing a safe space for homeless people to stand outside while they awaited food.

“I mean, I wouldn’t starve people by any means,” Phil Cooley, the owner of Slows Bar B Q, perhaps Detroit’s most famous new business, and a member of the group (which no longer calls itself the Conquistadors), told me. “But just continually giving them food, giving them food, giving them food, without having anything surrounding them about how you could get a job or get out of this vicious cycle—it’s frustrating.”

Despite his somewhat uncaring attitude toward the less fortunate, when the New York Times profiled Slows in 2010, the paper opened with this line: “ How much good can a restaurant do? ”

Cooley has embraced his role as a kind of poster child for the new Detroit. Quotes from him have been included in seemingly every story about the city’s revival, from the New York Times profiles to Model D Media’s feature on how Slows helped transform the neighborhood of Corktown and the Crain’s profile of him done as part of the newspaper’s “20 Detroit Power Brokers in Their 20s” series.

“I guess I chose to live here because I’m young and dumb,” Phil told me from the second-floor offices of Ponyride, the co-working and artist studio space he started in Corktown. Ponyride has received funding from the city and various nonprofits, and attention from Martha Stewart and American Express. “I wanted to feel like I was doing something. And Detroit felt like a place where I could have a voice. Detroit is a democratic city.… We never wanted Detroit to be an island.”

But the new Detroit is in many ways being built as if it were an island, or perhaps more accurately a city-state within the city, in no way related to or governed by what exists outside it. Soon you’ll be able to travel within its gentrified core by foot, bike, and light rail without ever leaving. It is quite literally becoming a closed loop.

The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a nonprofit funded by some of the city’s biggest corporations, including General Motors, has built a path along the city’s riverfront that connects the downtown to its east and west. From its east side along the river, you can take the Dequindre Cut, a former railway turned bike and pedestrian path, to Eastern Market, a 150-year-old farmers market that recently was upgraded with more artisanal offerings. If you’re trying to get from downtown to Midtown (the other hip section of Detroit, which was called Cass Corridor until recently, when real estate interests rebranded it), you can walk, bike, or now take the brand-new M-1 Rail, a 3.2-mile-long trolley that was marketed as public transit but funded mostly with private dollars from the likes of GM, Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, and a slew of nonprofits.

Anti-gentrification activists are quick to point out that more and better transit options aren’t in and of themselves

bad for a city sorely lacking them. Transportation advocates have for years been trying to get Detroit to take public transit seriously. But when you consider that Detroit is 142 square miles—bigger than Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan combined—and that all its new transit is located within the 7.2 square miles that make up the city’s gentrifying core, the question must be asked: who exactly is this transportation for?

The M-1 Rail is perhaps the best example of Detroit’s gentry-focused new infrastructure. It was originally envisioned as a real public transit system that would connect Detroit’s northern suburbs, where many commute from, to its downtown, where many work. Now, however, the M-1 will be about a fifth its original length and will only connect the business-heavy downtown with the residential, art, and education district of Midtown. Speculators have already begun snapping up real estate to turn into high-end apartment buildings along its route. The M-1, its supporters freely admit, is no longer public transit, but a real estate development tool.

“It’s a circulator to get people in Midtown and people in downtown circulating in a bigger marketplace,” Sue Mosey, the head of Midtown Detroit Inc., the city’s most powerful neighborhood economic development organization, told me in her glass-walled offices one afternoon. “It isn’t the responsibility of M-1 to do the public sector job to get transit for the region or the rest of the city. That isn’t M-1’s job. That’s the city’s job. That’s the regional government’s job, the federal government’s job, the state’s job. Our jobs are not to solve everybody else’s problems in the city.”

M-1 is also a good example of the modus operandi of Detroit’s development these days—touted as good for the public, planned by a confluence of powerful nonprofits that have little accountability to Detroiters, and funded by, and largely for the benefit of, the city’s most powerful companies.

But the flowery rhetoric employed by Detroit’s redevelopers often masks that fact. In the parlance of new Detroit, Zak Pashak isn’t just creating expensive bikes, he’s making sure people here are being lifted up by the rising tide of bicycle manufacturing. Phil Cooley isn’t just a profiteer, he’s participating in the burgeoning democracy of Detroit. Dan Gilbert’s favorite business phrase—“Do well by doing good”—seems to be the official slogan of the new Detroit, embraced by hundreds of young white entrepreneurs who believe they’re not only making money but helping rescue an entire city. That’s why speaking with Midtown Inc.’s Sue Mosey was refreshing. She can talk about the profit motive of the new Detroit without resorting to euphemisms for trickle-down economics.

The biggest problem, Mosey told me, is that there is practically no city government left in Detroit. Midtown Inc., which has no accountability to anyone except those who fund it (developers and nonprofits such as the Kresge Foundation), has become the de facto department of planning for its section of the city. The real city government, which went through bankruptcy in 2013—the largest bankruptcy in municipal history—does not have enough money, expertise, or manpower to plan its own streetscape.

“We’re rezoning everything right now,” Mosey said. “We pay for all the planning, all the specialists, we hold all the meetings. Then we work with the city to meet all their requirements.”

Mosey admits that leaving basic city services such as transportation and planning up to people like her privileges

the sections of the city that can afford to get those things done. Midtown, thanks to its proximity to downtown, is a profit-producing locale—major companies and many of Detroit’s big foundations are located there. That provides Mosey and Midtown Inc. with a budget of about $10 million a year to govern their own little micro-city. Midtown Inc. can hire planners. Nearly every other neighborhood in Detroit cannot.

“I do agree that a broken public system does not help challenged neighborhoods, and that needs to be fixed,” Mosey told me. “It’s not right. And it shouldn’t be like that. But that’s not my fault. I’m doing my job. I’m paid to do my job, and my organization does it, and we do it well.”

Hardly anyone is saying there’s anything wrong with new restaurants and new stores, new buildings and better security. Most Detroit residents I interviewed were not begrudging toward the newly arrived white hipsters from the suburbs and the coasts. After all, those who came had reasonable reasons: cheap housing, the ability to start a new business, new jobs. And most native and longtime Detroiters have complex and conflicted views about downtown’s redevelopment—some even praise Gilbert for stepping in and investing in the core of the city when no one else would.

It’s not the investments and new people themselves that are necessarily harmful; it’s the attention, in press and money, that’s paid to those investments and people. While Dan Gilbert is lavished with praise by the city government and newspapers, and while he and others receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives, a new rail line, and bike lanes, the rest of Detroit has learned to live without streetlights and regular trash collection, without a consistent or helpful police presence, with hundreds of thousands of foreclosures on bad mortgages (some made by Gilbert’s Quicken Loans), with the persistent threat of water shutoffs from a broke water utility, with blight and bad schools and high poverty. Sure, it’s great that Detroit is to some extent being revitalized, but Detroit has been in need of revitalization for decades. Its population has been shrinking since the 1950s. Black people in the city have been working that entire time to try to keep Detroit from falling apart. Why, some have asked, is it that the country seems to pay attention only when the white people show up?

On a side street downtown, surrounded by dozens of Gilbert-owned buildings, sits Café D’Mongo’s Speakeasy, a thirty-year-old bar that looks much older than that. The spot had been a gathering place for Detroit’s black elite—it wasn’t uncommon to see council members and mayors at D’Mongo’s back in the day. But in 1993, Larry Mongo, its owner, shut it down. The area had become too run-down, the crime too high to justify staying open.

“The white people left,” Mongo told me, sitting on one of the diner-style stools at his bar. “Then it got so bad the homeless left, then it got so bad the pigeons left. Then it was only me.”

The place remained locked up for fifteen years, until 2008, when a drunk driver smashed his car through the front glass of the bar. Mongo was out of the city, and by the time he showed up, a group of white kids—new gentrifiers in

the city’s downtown—had gathered to protect the café from potential vandals and thieves. Mongo saw these new kids, who were apparently willing to live in Detroit’s bombed-out downtown, and decided to reopen his bar. It’s been open since then, and it’s nearly always packed.

On a recent Saturday, Mongo, who is black, held a special event for the people who’d convinced him to reopen. That night, a jazz band played in one cramped corner as a standing-room-only crowd, almost all of whom were white and dressed in the kind of clothing sold by Detroit’s hippest new retail shops, chatted and sipped classic cocktails. Mongo sat at a table outside. He told me he was calling the celebration “Pollinator Night.” To Mongo, the term pollinator describes what gentrification has become in Detroit: the white kids move into a neighborhood, and investment and attention follow. Mongo said all the kids from Quicken, Rock Ventures, and the rest of the companies moving downtown are great for D’Mongo’s Speakeasy, but he can’t help but think it’s troubling that the city seems on its way back up only now that they’ve arrived.

“The city doesn’t really see black life as life,” he told me. “When the pollinators come, that’s when the civilization comes.… It makes me angry, but you know something? That’s the way it is.”