Two local writers, Joshua Akers and John Patrick Leary, critique a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, "The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit," which examines the numerous attempts underway to revitalize Detroit.
As people who have lived in Detroit and studied its history, we were not surprised to see this city invoked once again as a benevolent mogul’s grateful creation in Ben Austen’s New York Times Magazine feature, “The Post-Post Apocalyptic Detroit” (titled “Detroit Through Rose-Colored Glasses” on the print edition’s cover, in what seems like a bit of editorial trolling). Detroit has spawned so many of these corporate heroes, from Henry Ford to the pizza-and-sports tycoon Mike Ilitch and finally the Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert, that one starts to wonder if there’s something in the Great Lakes water that encourages the growth of corporate mythologies.
Gilbert, to his credit, has political tact and personal charm that those predecessors lacked, and this partly explains his appeal. Less ruthless than the authoritarian Ford and less creepy than the reclusive cryogenic specimen Ilitch, Gilbert sunnily promotes the city without the racial condescension or outright bigotry still common even among public figures in metro Detroit’s white elite (see, for example, the suburban political boss Brooks Patterson). Gilbert also has a great sense of timing. He saw an opening in Detroit’s historic downtown after the 2008 financial crisis and exploited it. Even before 2008, a generation of shuttered factories and cynical real-estate speculation helped produce the very conditions—low prices, high vacancy, and, since many banks still won’t extend mortgages in Detroit, accessibility for those who can pay in cash—that now lure investors to town.
Gilbert also benefits from an acute ear for the feel-good capitalist bromides of our era: his maxim, he tells Austen, is “do well by doing good.” But embracing the feel-good fog of confidence in “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” leaves two fallacies dangerously unexamined: 1) that private-sector innovation is basically benevolent and 2) that it can revive a city of 700,000, with Depression-like levels of unemployment, picked over by other generations’ innovations. (What is predatory subprime lending, after all, but an innovation?) One of Gilbert’s PR triumphs — putting aside his basketball missteps in Cleveland — is how he has managed to earn a reputation for civic-mindedness mostly by attempting to lure tenants to his properties. Tycoons of an earlier era had to pursue something besides their main hustle to earn the laurels being heaped on Gilbert. Henry and Edsel Ford founded hospitals, endowed schools, built museums. The charitable giving Gilbert makes, however, isn’t an especially big part of his image. He is portrayed as a Detroit benefactor simply for doing what he does: run mortgage and real-estate companies.
Akers is an assistant professor of geography and urban and regional studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Leary is assistant professor of English at Wayne State University.
