On Tuesday, I wrote a post praising Dan Gilbert’s design vision for the old Serman’s Building on Randolph. I said the rendering released by Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate demonstrates they are taking aesthetic criticism to heart.
As is to be expected, we received that inevitable comment — "those that criticize Dan's design choice should contribute their own money to the city skyline" — arguing such criticism was invalid because critics aren’t billionaire real estate investors like Dan Gilbert. The “haters,” goes this line of thought, should put some “skin in the game” or shut up.
Detroit has heard this appeal to smarm argument before, not only about Gilbert, but Mike Ilitch before him. It’s also used to deflect criticism from political figures as diverse as Kwame Kilpatrick and Rick Snyder. Detroit Economic Growth Corporation CEO George Jackson is legendary for employing the “what have you built?” response to any and all criticism of his shop. It’s only a matter of time before it's used to defend new mayor Mike Duggan and the next real estate wunderkinds.
This illogical thinking has gone unchallenged for too long. You don't need to invest your own money into Detroit's skyline or anything else to criticize Detroit's urban design policy or anything else.
Haters or customers?
The “no skin in the game” argument is particularly ironic with Dan Gilbert’s downtown gambit because his placemaking efforts are largely based on the ideas Jane Jacobs, the greatest urban planning critic ever.
While Jacobs wasn’t a developer, a billionaire, or a powerful bureaucrat. But she had to live in the New York City imagined by Robert Moses and all the other makers and job creators of her day, and she didn’t like it. Few people blocked more “progress” than Jane Jacobs. Thank God for that because New York City would be a lesser place if Greenwich Village was replaced with a freeway. As Jacobs' life proved, public criticism isn’t hate. It is a necessary check on misguided power.
Unless Dan Gilbert is buying up downtown just to play real-life Monopoly, he needs plenty of those “no skin in the game” folks to live, work, shop, and eat in all that property he’s acquired. This is how that thing we call capitalism works.
Gilbert critics aren’t haters, jealous of his success, when they say they don’t like the NBD Building's day-glow redecoration. These people are, for all intents and purposes, his potential customers.
You can’t please everyone, sure, but any shrewd businessperson knows its folly to ignore feedback from potential customers. Gilbert is almost certainly shrewd, even if his fanboys usually miss the bigger picture.
The High Cost Of Sycophancy
Detroit has seen its share of well-intentioned downtown efforts fail to deliver the promised revitalization. Trapper’s Alley, the Washington Boulevard pedestrian mall, riverfront condemnations for casinos, as well as countless demolitions and urban renewal clearings were also sincere efforts to improve Detroit championed by the hyper-powerful. They all ultimately failed simply because they were crafted to appeal to the whims of their backers rather than the everyday people who would live, work, and play in this city.
Al Taubman, Henry Ford II, and Max Fisher were sincerely trying to make Detroit a better place with their riverfront garrison architecture projects. Unfortunately, good intentions, deep pockets, and even Coleman Young’s blessing doesn't change the reality that isolated, gated complexes didn’t invite ancillary development.
If only someone had listened to “the haters” back in the 1970s, maybe Riverfront Towers wouldn’t be a “green zone” outpost on the otherwise barren west riverfront. Maybe the Renaissance Center wouldn’t be so physically isolated from the rest of downtown. Maybe, maybe, maybe…we could have at least taxed Max and his pal, Al?
Give me a Detroit run by lowly skeptics—haters, if you must—over the present city largely crafted by smarmy and hyper-powerful incompetents.
Citizens, Not Stakeholders
This is still the United States of America. People of any means or standing have the right to criticize and praise any public activity they wish to criticize or praise.
The alternative to freewheeling open discourse is a society in which a small group of self-selected Important People makes policy for the rest of us. I have no doubt such a system would be popular at the Fort Shelby Doubletree happy hour—Saunteel Jenkins totally could be City Council President forever, you guys!—and in Wall Street and Silicon Valley boardrooms, but isn't the more egalitarian and republican vision of our Founding Fathers (however messy, it may be) preferable to neat-and-tidy oligarchical fantasies.
If you disagree, instead of telling your fellow American citizens to put “skin in the game,” maybe you and your fellow Important People should move to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He’ll be happy to help silence the haters while catering to the whims of the hyper-powerful.
And, hey, good luck with that.
Signed,
The Haters
