I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
DETROIT — “Detroit’s decline has been going on for a long while.” That’s what Time magazine had to say about Detroit in 1961. Now it’s 2009 and Time magazine is still featuring special reports about Detroit’s hardships. Granted, a few things have changed since 1961 and not for the better. Over the past half century, race riots and urban decay have torn the city apart, recessions have come and gone and come again, General Motors and Chrysler have sunk into bankruptcy and the city’s name has been smeared with allegations of corruption.
In a column in Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, writer Stephen Henderson highlights Detroit’s lack of progress by comparing the recent Time magazine report on Detroit to one written in 1961. The similarities are striking and in many ways downright discouraging for those who are seriously working to make the city a better place. Henderson writes:
The similarities speak volumes — about how the national media always descend on Detroit during tough times to report on urban decay and dysfunction and, sadly, about us. The lack of progress this area has made in solving pretty endemic problems is frightening — and embarrassing.
After taking a look at the 1961 attempt to nail Detroit’s troubles, Henderson’s points seem quite valid.
Which leads to the obvious question: if Detroit has been a poster-city for post-industrial decline for the past 50-some years, what’s the real story here? Certainly, photos of decaying factories paired with well-informed commentary are becoming passé.
This was written in the 1961 Time magazine feature on Detroit:
In the face of growing foreign and domestic competition, auto companies merged, or quit, or moved out of town to get closer to markets. Automation began replacing workers in the plants that remained. At the depth of the 1958 recession, when Detroit really began reeling. 20% of the city’s work force was unemployed. Even today, the figure is an estimated 10%, and the U.S. Government lists Detroit as an area of “substantial and persistent unemployment.”
Sound familiar?
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