The movie looks at two primary examples of the arts in Detroit: the city’s financially struggling opera company, and the influx of young artists who have helped boost the city’s population of young people by 59 percent. In the former case, the opera mostly acts as a barometer in the movie for the difficulties faced by the city’s wealthy, white residents as well as the poor black ones who have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. It’s not surprising to know that the Big Three automakers were largely responsible for the corporate support that long kept the opera company running. But it would have been interesting to know how the automakers made decisions to continue — or cut back — their giving, and to have a few individual donors as part of the story. And the movie ends without telling us the fate of the opera companies, or any details about its budget. It ends up feeling sidelined.

And while it’s nice to know, as one young artist tells us that “I would never be able to own a home as an artist…we can experiment here because if we fail, we haven’t really fallen anywhere.” But the movie isn’t clear about whether the very cheap rents that lure artists to the city are helping revitalize its economy, or establishing market values for real estate and other goods and services at a permanently lower level. And Detropia doesn’t put these young white artists in conversation with the black residents, be they former autoworkers or local political bloggers, who are their new neighbors, or who they’re displacing. That would be a fascinating transitional discussion. But it never happens, and we never learn anything about what sorts of institutions these young people are creating or how they’re interacting with old ones. Detropia has parts of a story, but especially on the arts, the version of it that screened at Sundance feels much more like a first act than a complete story.

Before plunging into what looks to be a tremendously exciting season of Justified, a thought: why is it that our great prestige television about cities that aren’t New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC has to be about the drug trade? Baltimore is defined by the drug trade in The Wire. We see Albuquerque largely through the lens of people who participate in the meth trade, or who are trying to shut it down in Breaking Bad — the city’s geography is bounded by the houses of the participants, Los Pollos Hermanos, the laundry, and Hank’s office. And Justified gives us a Kentucky populated by a colorful variety of narcotics wranglers. The Sopranos is a notable potential exception, though drugs are certainly part of the mix, and there’s an extent to which the show is about New Jersey’s relationship to New York.

I understand why we tell stories about criminal enterprises in general and drugs in particular. Cops and robbers, chase and race are both classic storytelling models. And the networks and problems of production, trade, and distribution make for fascinating character and power relationships between criminals and present substantial challenges for law enforcement officers. But are drugs really so psychically important to our country that they deserve this level of attention? I know I’m not alone in considering the War on Drugs both an over-investment and a failed strategy. And while I appreciate living in a neighborhood that isn’t blighted by drug-linked crime, I’m also not exceptionally concerned about Marlo Stanfield or Walter White showing up and upsetting that balance. So is this pattern just a result of the structural rewards of telling drug stories? Or do we see something rotten at the heart of America, a blight worse than the troubles we identify in our great cities?

I wanted to start on that note because I appreciate the way the show used Quarles’ arrival in town to set up a running conversation about real estate, and by extension, territory and a sense of home. When he first showed up, I actually assumed he was talking about the city of Detroit, rather than the criminal enterprise based there that he happens to represent. It quickly becomes clear that it’s not, but I like the idea of Detroit as a criminal conspiracy, the city’s profound troubles providing opportunities for men like Quarles to rise. “You picked a shitty time to get into commercial real estate, and now you’re under water. Detroit did not make an investment. It made a loan,” he warns. “Things are getting tough all over. So if you can’t have the money here by tomorrow, I trust you tell me right now.” He makes good on the threat by the end of the episode, but he’s set a theme that persists for the rest of the episode. There’s Boyd and Raylan fighting over Raylan’s broken promise, with Raylan spitting, “You think we’re in the holler? I’m a deputy U.S. Marshal.” Geography will reach out to pull you back, if you let it. And Raylan and Winona, they lie in bed after making love for the first time since Raylan was shot, property and geography become a proxy for talking about commitment. “Maybe we need more room,” Raylan proposes, baby planning. “After all the time I’ve spent redecorating?” Winona asks, a prickliness that’ll come up again when Raylan tentatively proposes naming their baby Felix, like the cat. “It’s sweet. It’s sweet that you think you have a say in the name,” she tells him.

Those twitchy power dynamics are all over the episode, and make for some of its best moments. “Didn’t wear your suit,” Raylan observes as he meets Boyd in the conference room. “Why do you say that as if I’ve only got one suit and not the whole closetful?” Boyd complains. And they poke at each other over the question of asset forfeiture. “How sizeable, Raylan?” Boyd asks.”Well over 10 dollars,” Raylan tells him. “If I had that kind of money, I’d be in Mexico by now,” Boyd tells him. One of the reasons things get so nasty is because the stakes are smaller than they are in Albuquerque, but the people involved need the money and the assertions of power more. When Ava clocks Devil with the frying pan and is told she didn’t have to, she forcefully asserts that it is, “Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.” Duffy slaps back at Raylan by treating him like a low priority, saying, “I would love to be of more help but I’ve got to get back to watching women’s tennis.” And Fletcher Nix, who on another show would be a great season-long villain, projects his air of menace in Raylan’s house in part by playing naive. “I look like I know anything about watches?” he asks Raylan. “I could take those off your hands. Give you $20 a piece for them,” Raylan plays along, a little bit classy and a little bit cheap. But he beats him by playing very, very cool. It’s going to be a terrific season.

The 40 mpg 2013 Dodge Dart.

Against the backdrop of the North American International Auto Show, which opens to the public Saturday, anything seems possible, including fuel efficiencies that seemed out of reach just a few years ago. The stylish introductions focused as much on engine and power configurations (hybrid, plug-in, turbocharged, direct injection, etc.) and weight-savings as they did on appearance.

“This year’s auto show proves beyond all doubt that fuel efficiency is no longer just a euphemism for ‘econobox,’” writes the Detroit Free Press. “With the long-term planning horizon offered by the new fuel efficiency rules, automakers can do far more than survive. They can thrive, they can do it with style and — most important to everyone around here — build the cars that people want to buy.”

Now, the Detroit Fire Marshall’s Office has issued a citation at the city’s Nolan Elementary School after finding so many children in over-crowded classrooms that it was become a public safety hazard:

Lt. Gerod Funderburg of the Detroit Fire Department said the fire marshal’s office issued a citation at Nolan Elementary School, 1150 Lantz. “They went out today and issued a ticket for overcrowding,” Funderburg said. [...] The Detroit News reported last week that excessive class sizes at some DPS schools were still a problem six weeks into the school year. Specifically, The News reported that Nolan had 55 kindergartners in one class, while a DPS high school had 72 students in a science course.

Local station WJBK Fox Detroit covered the citation. Watch their video report:

Growing inequality across the country has led many to fear that schools will effectively be re-segregated.

Audi, in marketing a car that only the top few percent of Americans can afford, has focused on the mediocre situation of the nation’s infrastructure in a new ad campaign:

The road is not exactly a place of intelligence. Highway maintenance is underfunded, costing drivers 67 billion a year, and countless tires. Which drivers never check, because they’re busy checking email. This is why we engineered a car that makes 2000 decisions every second.

Watch it:

As Audi put it in their press release on the new campaign:

The ads will call attention to jarring facts about today’s driver, as well as the obstacles presented by today’s American road. More importantly, the ads showcase the ability of the Audi A6 to help overcome these obstacles while enhancing driver safety and enjoyment.

Shockingly, 38 million drivers on the road today would not pass their state’s driver’s exam, and across the nation, drivers encounter over 100,000 miles of crumbling highways and bridges.

Is Audi speaking to the portion of America who is enamored with gated communities, ready to pay for their own comfort and security but uncomfortable with (hating the concept of) paying their fair share for the common good?

Places like Haiti take this to an extreme. Living within one’s walls, with guards, life might be fantastic with perfectly paved streets and 24/7 electricity. Cross the wall and the children might be without clothing and the potholes could absorb a normal car — there you don’t need Audis but Range Rovers. Are those Audi is targeting this advertisement at aiming for an American future resembling Haiti?

Audi is, clearly, aiming for “buzz” about how their cars handle traffic and disrupted roads better than their competitors. They may — or may not — be right. The question for all of us is whether the best solution to our common problems derives from the wealthiest few spending dollars to ease their own lives or whether we all give of our means to make all of our lives better and the overall society stronger. Rather than investing $10,000s more in a car that can handle potholed roads, perhaps it would be better for those who have the ability to do so to consider paying a few $1,000s to help build up and maintain the crumbling infrastructure?

A full half a billion dollars is lost in the transfer from the long-term loan program to the emergency relief fund.

Crippling the clean-car fund to pay for this year’s climate disasters compounds the stupidity of deliberately destroying $500 million of taxpayer funds.

“It is staggeringly shortsighted to pay for the economic losses of climate disasters by choking off funding for policies that reduce the threat of future climate disasters,” Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told ThinkProgress Green when this bill was passed out of committee in May. “The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program is helping US companies right now, to remain competitive and protect good manufacturing jobs, by producing highly efficient vehicles that cut dependence on foreign oil.”

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) first proposed the plan.

As is his nature, Romney quickly switched positions in light of the rescue’s success and actually claimed last month that he “had the idea first.” However, Michiganders are not buying it. Rep. John Dingell (D) said yesterday that he hopes Romney “has answers for Michigan’s working families he abandoned two years ago” and “threw them under the bus.” Former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm offered a pithier take in her own op-ed titled, “Let Mitt Romney Go Bankrupt.” Now, even Michigan Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter is wiping his hands of Romney. McCotter, who “supported the government intervention for General Motors and Chrysler,” sent “a Michigan message to Mitt” on his auto failure:

“Motor City hospitality dictates a Michigan message to Mitt that our struggling families, entrepreneurs and workers think Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama are not rivals, they’re running mates,” McCotter, who is considering his own run for the White House, said in a statement.

Watch video of his remarks:

Of course, President Obama actually delivered the auto rescue McCotter asked for. Conversely, auto industry officials say Romney’s rejection of that rescue “would have led to liquidation and the loss of more than one million jobs nationwide.” McCotter’s argument that Obama and Romney are similar when it comes to their health care plans and beliefs that global warming is a real problem, however, is much more accurate.

Whatever his current positions may be, it’s clear that Romney’s failure to back the auto rescue when it was most needed and his general “anti-auto sentiments” may prompt Michiganders to kick him to the curb. As Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer noted, “I don’t think we’ve seen a less inviting homecoming since LeBron (James) went back to Cleveland.”

Higher gas taxes, slowly phased in, would stabilize volatile gas prices, encourage the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars, fund critical infrastructure needs, and keep billions of American dollars from going overseas to oil companies and petrodictators.

You basically never read anything cheery about Detroit and these education cutbacks are no exception:

Detroit Public Schools would close nearly half of its schools in the next two years, and increase high school class sizes to 62 by the following year, under a deficit-reduction plan filed with the state.

The plan, part of a monthly update Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb gives the Department of Education, was filed late Monday to provide insight into Bobb’s progress in his attempt to slash a $327 million deficit in the district to zero over the next several years. Under it, the district would slim down from 142 schools now to 72 during 2012-13.

Bobb has said school closures, bigger classes and other measures would be needed if he cannot get help from lawmakers to restructure finances in the state’s largest school district.

The terrifying thing is that these don’t even seem like terrible ideas. The city really should be operating fewer school buildings, and though large class sizes aren’t ideal it’s more important for kids to have access to effective teachers than for kids to have low student:teacher ratios. But obviously this is death spiral stuff—the more the city pares back, the more the people with means and opportunity will leave and the worse things will become. The really important thing, though, is not so much to help the city as it is to help the people who live there. I’d rather see money put in the hands of Detroit’s residents rather than into the municipality’s coffers. Citizens with more cash in their pocket would end up boosting the city’s per capita tax base, but trying to leave is a perfectly rational response to the objective situation and if that’s what people choose to do with their assistance then so much the better for them.

(cc photo by Bob Jagendorf)

James Poulos responds to the idea of granting special visas for foreigners who might want to move to Detroit by saying the city is too malgoverned for anyone to succeed there:

On the other hand, maybe America still offers the kind of opportunity that turns former residents of doomed regions into hardworking winners. The sad spectacle of Detroit suggests that’s not the case. But Detroit is badly misleading, because Detroit has been captive to a crushing (liberal-approved) agenda of unearned government dollars and public-sector corruption for decades. That’s not the only reason Detroit is on the skids. But it’s a powerful, perhaps dominant, contributing factor. All the luck and pluck in the world won’t make winners out of immigrants condemned to eke out an existence under that kind of yoke. Before we think about sending the foreigners in, it’s time to think about rooting the government rot out.

This seems to me like a textbook case of subordinating actual analysis of the issue to a political agenda. It’s quite true that Detroit suffers from corrupt, inept governance. But precisely the point of my proposal is that though the situation in Detroit is bad enough by American standards that people have been leaving in droves, it’s good enough by global standards that people might want to come in droves if given the opportunity. Is Detroit more corrupt than China? Than Belarus? Than Armenia? I doubt it.

So to reiterate, it seems to me that for all Detroit’s problems if we said to the world “in addition to existing legal avenues for immigration, we’ll hand out extra visas to people who want to live and work in Detroit” that a whole lot of people would take us up on it. Some entrepreneurs would probably want to set up industrial production facilities in Detroit to take advantage of the low-wage labor force. And the new migrants would inhabit Detroit’s large quantity of existing vacant structures, investing “sweat equity” in refurbishing them, and providing new customers for existing Detroit retailers, new tax revenue to fund social services, and a source of stabilization to the local property market. The city would be better off and so would the migrants.

(cc photo by donjoz)

I want to say more about yesterday’s idea for a Detroit Special Immigration Zone but some of the important objections raised are too hard for me to adequately respond to so quickly. In particular, there’s an argument that if Americans are fleeing Detroit because of lack of jobs, simply bringing foreigners into the city will only increase the people:jobs ratio. I have a theoretical argument about why that’s wrong in mind, but I’m trying to do my homework and read up on the issue.

I did, however, want to be clear that I’m not at all proposing to “Sequester Dusky Immigrants In Dying Detroit”. The right way to think about my proposal is that I favor increasing the number of green cards the United States issues, but I’m frustrated by the political obstacles to doing this. It seems to me, however, that if local politicians in a city like Detroit were interested in asking congress to create special “Detroit Visas” for people to live and work in the city over and above the current level of legal immigration that this would lead to an outcome that’s better than the current immigration status quo or the current plans to save Detroit by demolishing it.

The spirit of the proposal is much more along the lines of homesteading. Give people in the developing world an extra opportunity to move to the United States—if they want to—by coming to an area of the country that it seems most Americans prefer to leave.

(cc photo by Bob Jagendorf)

Susan Saulny’s post about Detroit demolishing structures in order to save the city is necessarily melancholy, but it’s difficult to dispute the policy judgment that Detroit needs a policy of planned shrinkage. When your population falls far below its peak level, it simply becomes uneconomical to maintain infrastructure and services at the previous geographic scope. What’s more, Detroit doesn’t have the good fortune of a Baltimore, which though depressed is smack in the middle of a rich state and closely linked to nearby more prosperous cities. Instead, Detroit is like an island of economic bad fortune located inside a lake of somewhat milder economic bad fortune, so the prospects for population rebound are bad.

Still, reading this story alongside the “border security” madness out of Arizona makes me doubly sad. There are clearly insurmountable logistical, legal, practical, constitutional, and political obstacles to doing this but I can’t help but think that with 165 million people around the world telling Gallup they’d like to permanently relocate to the United States that it would be possible to find 1.3 million people who’d be interested in permanently relocating to Detroit and bringing the city back up to its peak population level. Economic and governance opportunities in Detroit are poor by American standards (or even by Italian standards) but they’re great compared to what you’ll find in Haiti, Gaza, Myanmar, Chad, or Nicaragua. There’s discussion of trying to turn Detroit into some kind of hub for wealthy immigrants who are just trying to escape a bad political situation, but there’s simply a limited number of such people, and the real opportunity is in thinking bigger and creating a kind of Detroit Special Migration Zone that would become a diverse, bustling hub of economic opportunity for the world’s poor while providing new taxpayers for Detroit’s government, new customers for Detroit’s businesses, and a new source of value for Detroit’s property owners.

It’ll never happen for a million reasons, but I’d love to see it.

In that motion, the attorney general’s office asked the EPA to reopen its proceedings in light of the recent evidence that the reports the EPA was relying on for its decision contained erroneous and/or unverifiable global temperature and other data. We will file a notice of appeal with respect to today’s ruling.

Cuccinelli’s suit against the science of global warming is baseless, as numerous Virginia climatologists have told the Wonk Room. Furthermore, the auto industry stands fully behind this new program,” as Dave McCurdy, President and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers has written.

Killing the endangerment finding — as numerous state legislatures, attorneys general, and lawmakers in Congress are trying to do — would destroy the stakeholders’ fuel economy agreement. The United Auto Workers describe that “California and other states have agreed to forgo state-level regulation of tailpipe emissions and abide by the new national standard that will be created by these NHTSA and EPA rules.” If the denier Dirty Air Act efforts go through, UAW explains the “critically important progress” will be “overturned”:

However, the critically important progress that was achieved with this historic agreement will be undermined if EPA’s endangerment finding is overturned. Without this finding, EPA will not be able to proceed with its current rulemaking on light duty vehicles. If the joint rulemaking process collapses, NHTSA has indicated that it will not be able to meet the statutory timetable for implementing any fuel economy increases for the 2012 model year. And in the absence of the EPA standard, California and other states would certainly move forward with their standards, thereby subjecting auto manufacturers to all of the burdens that the one national standard was designed to avoid.

The fears of UAW that multi-state standards would be catastrophic are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though the American auto industry can certainly handle multi-state standards, a return to the Bush era of recrimination and lawsuit instead of a focus on competitiveness and innovation would be crippling. Cuccinelli is not only wasting taxpayer money trying to overturn EPA’s scientific finding, he’s trying to dismantle the historic agreement that all stakeholders agree will create American jobs and increase national competitiveness.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are on the verge of finalizing a landmark national program to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and increase new car average fuel economy to an unprecedented 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. Just as when the process started a year ago, the auto industry stands fully behind this new program and is proud to have played a major role in its development.

While this new national program takes gigantic steps towards our shared goals of increasing fuel economy, enhancing energy security, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the auto industry feels that to achieve longer-lasting success, the EPA and NHTSA should quickly start the process of planning for 2017 and beyond.

Clearly, crafting a program for the years past 2016 will be just as important, if not more so, than what we’ve accomplished in the last year. Our goal is to avoid going down the same path that lead to the unnecessarily complex and uncoordinated regulations that we have now fixed by crafting a strong national emissions and fuel economy plan. The EPA, NHTSA, states, and other stakeholders can promote the continued and unparalleled innovation so greatly needed from the auto industry, by creating an even more unified and harmonious set of goals beyond 2016.

In the last several years, the auto industry has begun reinventing itself, making drastic changes in the way vehicles are conceived, designed and, ultimately, built. We currently have hundreds of models of vastly more fuel efficient cars on the road than were available even 5 years ago. In 2010 there are close to 50 models of hybrids and clean diesel vehicles available and nearly 200 models that achieve 30 miles per gallon or more on the highway. 2009 marked the 5th straight year fuel economy standards for autos increased. This regulation will ensure that trend will continue through 2016 and beyond.

But rest assured, the auto industry is not only making dramatic improvements to old combustion technology: within a year, plug-in vehicles that use even less fuel will start reaching consumers. And further down the road, technologies such as fuel cells and advanced next generation biofuels promise to make an even larger variety of low and zero emissions technology available.

Yet, although we plan on bringing all of these amazing solutions to market, if we ever hope to successfully address our climate concerns and enhance our energy security, these solutions need to be embraced by consumers and most importantly they need to be affordable. Ultimately, the sooner automakers can start planning for 2017 and beyond, the more cost effectively all of these new technologies can be brought to market.

Detroit Boat House (cc photo by Bob Jagendorf)

Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley have a very interesting piece looking at successful turnarounds of dying European industrial centers and laying out a vision for making Detroit work again. A lot of this has to do with possibly wishful thinking ideas about government governance. For example, the idea that “State and federal governments should place the city’s most dysfunctional agencies in receivership as a quid pro quo for federal investment . . . [t]hese higher-level governments should also insist that the city and its suburbs end their wasteful bickering and act as one on issues that naturally cross borders, like transportation and the environment.”

But perhaps the most interesting part just has to do with the physical state of the city itself:

Even if Detroit were to rebuild its economy, it would still face a fundamental obstacle to recovery. It is just too big for itself, with a landscape that even locals compare to postwar Dresden. Nearly one-third of the land in the city is empty or unused, and some 80,000 city homes are vacant. [...] Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare. Even more than its European counterparts, which had much less severe population losses, Detroit will have to become a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its boundaries.

I’m not sure how well this fits the European cases, but my sense is that one of the further challenges facing Detroit is that a healthy proportion of the remaining 900,000 are essentially too poor to move. Under the circumstances, modest amelioration of circumstances might merely lead more people to leave. Maybe large underpopulated cities like Detroit could be the locations of guest-worker programs or something? Rather than outsource low-wage industrial production to Mexican factories, bring the low-wage factory workers to Detroit where their presence would fill empty space and tax coffers while creating demand for other kinds of goods and services. Of course that would cut against everything about the way we do things in the United States so I wouldn’t count on it happening.