The only thing better than learning from your own mistakes is learning from someone else’s. Unfortunately, today’s urban leaders haven’t been paying attention. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, New York, and other cities could have avoided their current dire conditions if only they had heeded the lessons of Detroit.
In 1950 the Motor City was home to nearly two million people and built half the cars in the world. Today two-thirds of those people are gone and its auto industry is a shell of its former self. After decades of decline, Detroit is on the way back with a new can-do attitude. But its troubled history gives today’s urban leaders a master class in how not to govern.
Leaders who make the same choices today that Detroit made starting sixty-five years ago have a 100% chance of seeing the same failure. The proof is in today’s headlines.
Detroit’s path shows that urban success depends on four factors, which all of today’s failed cities have fumbled. Conversely, all successful cities — Houston, Phoenix, and Charlotte, for example — take a different tack and have the growth and prosperity to prove it.
Lesson #1: Protect your people. If law-abiding taxpayers don’t feel safe, they head for the exits. Citizens rightly expect to be insulated from harm, for criminals to be arrested, and for convicted wrongdoers to be punished. San Francisco and other failed cities have turned justice on its head, normalizing criminal behavior and refusing to keep bad actors off the street.
Lesson #2: Provide good schools. Families with school-age children are the backbone of a livable city. Parents have to feel their children are getting a quality education. Today Chicago has some of the poorest performing students in the country. Though enrollment has fallen, the school budget has skyrocketed while test scores remain abysmal. Educators and politicians blame everyone but themselves.
Lesson #3: Keep costs manageable. Failed cities see each resident and business as a piggy bank to be plundered. They squeeze out every dollar possible with local income taxes, soaring property taxes, taxes on utilities, fees for everything. Los Angeles drains its people dry. Houston nurtures them. That’s one reason why a hundred people a day move from California to Texas, and why Houston will overtake Chicago in 2030 as America’s third-largest city (you heard it here first).
black families in Detroit that summer earned 95% of white income and enjoyed an unemployment rate lower than the national rate for whites. Groundbreaking black reporters including Louis Lomax, the first African-American TV journalist with a national following, and Sandra West, a UPI reporter who lived in the riot zone, wrote that the destruction was instigated by professional out-of-town operatives. Blacks and whites set fires together, watched stores burn together, went to jail together. The first sniper arrested by police was white. Congressman John Conyers tried to calm the situation, telling his fellow black residents to stop looting and go home, and had his office torched for his trouble.
These are not the characteristics of a race riot. Yet history has been hijacked to paint a picture very different from reality. So, instead of being guided by the truth of the past, cities are subject to being driven into a ditch by revisionism and heresy.
Every failing city in America follows the old Detroit playbook: fail in key leadership areas and then cover up the facts. Inexcusable. The true history of the Motor City allows urban leaders and voters to see into the future: if they enact the same misguided policies today, they will achieve the same tragic results tomorrow.
Detroit has learned from its past and is now a city on the rise. The sooner other cities take its lessons to heart, the sooner they will prosper.
John Perry is the author of more than a dozen books on American history, biography, and current events, as well as a prolific ghostwriter. His latest book is The Detroiting of America: What happened to the Motor City, Why other cities followed, How Detroit is coming back (Fidelis, 2024).
Image: Ken Lund
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