The Michigan Messenger

Covering issues affecting the Detroit area for Michigan Messenger over the past year has been a learning experience for everyone involved. My stories included reports on suburban/urban culture shock, the challenges facing the Detroit Public Schools, the police force, the Chevy Volt, blighted neighborhoods and the beauty in the decay. What they have in common is the hope and the pain of a major American city in seemingly permanent crisis.

5) Police Shortage: One of the first leads I got while writing for Michigan Messenger was of a police officer shortage in Detroit. James Tate, the press contact for the Detroit Police Department told me that Detroit needed 500 more officers than it had and, for once, it wasn’t money that was the issue. The problem is, according to Tate, that there are so few people interested in becoming a Detroit police officer these days. I reported the city had only hired 26 officers all year. In the current economic climate, I was surprised these jobs couldn’t be filled right away. After speaking with John MacDonald, a criminology expert at Penn State University, I realized that this is a national problem. It’s just not cool to be a cop these days.

4) ‘There’s no school’: One of the sadder things I had to recognize while covering the Detroit area this year was the appalling condition of the public school system. The school system made national news when it announced a $408 million deficit. But that number was an abstraction until I talked to my neighbor who has school age kids. Since 2005, approximately 67,000 students left the Detroit Public Schools so the system had to shut down a lot of neighborhood schools just to stay afloat. Some neighborhoods have no public schools. When I visited an abandoned school a couple of blocks away from my house, I found a depressing sight of trash and boarded up doors and windows.

3) Bus on fire!: I have learned to be more grateful for my car while living in Detroit — even when gas prices soared to more than $4 a gallon this summer. While there are efforts in the works to build a light rail line from Detroit to Ann Arbor and a line from Eight Mile to Downtown, people without cars in Detroit still have to wait hours for the bus. I decided to see just how bad Detroit city buses were, by taking a ride on one of them. My story, “Detroit City Buses Worse Than Gas Prices” was all too revealing about just how bad things have gotten. The first thing the bus driver told me was that the bus was about to catch on fire and that everyone was getting off. This was, of course, after I paid my fare.

2) What about the Volt?: In the heat of this year’s presidential election, John McCain declared boldly that the eyes of the world were on the Chevy Volt. But after speaking with a General Motors insider, the Volt seemed less promising than touted. In “Why the Chevy Volt Won’t Electrify America,” I reported what he told me: first, that each Volt is likely to cost about $40,000 which is too expensive for the average auto consumer, and second that GM may be sabotaging its own technology to appease the powerful oil giants that have dominated the auto industry for so long. He recalled that in 1999, GM discontinued the EV-1, an electric vehicle that actually got more mileage per charge than the Volt.

1) Green Detroit: Does that sound like a contradiction to you? “The Reclaiming Of Detroit” is one of my favorite pieces because the contradiction is not necessary. The story illustrates Detroit’s potential as a green city that can return to the land when industry fails. Some areas of Detroit, especially on the east side of the city, offer a counter-intuitive blend of rural and urban life. Plants and trees overgrowing abandoned factories and buildings is a strange and beautiful sight in the summer. Seeing corn stalks shooting up on vacant lots is a vision of hope on the drive home. In what other major U.S. city, could I clear undergrowth from around peach trees in my backyard with a machete? Only in Detroit.