Growing up in California in the late '80s and early 1990s, I knew Detroit for only a handful of things: my father's Oldsmobile was built there (or at least I was thought to believe it was), the Cecil Fielder-era Tigers were in full swing, and the much-hated Detroit Pistons were putting beatdowns on their opponents - most notably my beloved Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls. But what really perked my mind about Detroit was a brief passing through my father's 1995 World Almanac in the "U.S. Cities" section. The data read something like this -  

1950 - 1,849,568

1960 - 1,670,144

1970 - 1,514,063

1980 - 1,203,368

1990 - 1,027,994

The numbers seen above equal the population of Detroit for the respective years listed. So I continued to look at the top 100 American cities and noted a similar decline in neighboring "Rust-Belt" cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland. Even Chicago, which in the last 15-20 years has seen a greater stabilization of its population due to a heavy influx of Latino immigrants in conjunction with gentrification. 

But Detroit, as even ABC news and Forbes put it in a February 10, 2009 posting (1), was listed as the 7th most miserable place to live in the United States. Reasons you may ask? Nothing new by Detroit standards - high unemployment, one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, a former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, getting jailed for four months due to his involvement in a sex scandal, and U of M having its first losing football season in 40 years. Could it get worse? Sure it can, the Lions had a big zero in the win column this year - the first time an NFL team has gone winless since the Carter administration of 1978. I was so young thirty years ago I was not even a twinkle in my mother and father's eyes. 

Mitch Albom, a former columnist for the Detroit Free Press, noted in a fine Sports Illustrated article posted in a January edition how Detroit has been consistently kicked and kicked and beaten and beaten by society at large over the course of four or five decades. While Congress and president-elect Obama wager partisan war in Washington over the current tax rebate/infrastructure bailout valued now at $787 billion with the majority of the population in support of its passing, what has been the reaction to Detroit automakers requests? Anger. Vehement "No auto bailout" responses by the public at large. Even the United Auto Workers union conceded on an array of items, including the elimination of paid "idle" hours and restructuring of pensions, wages, and benefits for incoming and present employees - which were seemingly unheard of even two years ago - for the benefit of the auto companies as a whole. Does this matter? Not to the majority of us in this country who have seen union membership decline from a clip of over 35% of total private employees (1) in the mid-1950s to 12.5% in 2008 according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Do I understand this reaction to the auto companies? Absolutely. I am not a supporter of a company, in this case GM, that has ran a bad business for the better of 35 years being the moderately conservative economic individual that I am. A few good years due to the high margins brought on by SUV sales in the 1990s does not erase the company's inability to adjust to the times. Even though some American cars (i.e. - Ford Focus) have actually received equal or better safety and standard ratings than some top flight Japanese cars, many people still know Ford as "Fix or Repair Daily" for a reason. Just ask my mother and father who had the unfortunate experience of driving an '87 Ford Aerostar for a number of years or the people who's Ford Pinto's blew up in the 1970s when they were hit from behind.  

But the workers in Detroit and the other surrounding Michigan cities deserve dignity and respect. Those blue-collar men and women who go to work every day to a Chrysler or Ford factory in order to make a living, they deserve having the chance of a decent pension and respectable health benefits that are reasonably affordable like Barack Obama hammered home on his campaign. And it is those people, like the ones Michael Moore depicted in his documentary "Roger and Me" (if you haven't seen it, please do - his most complete story told on film), who have been consistently kicked. NAFTA did not help their cause, but neither did the auto companies' leadership - a leadership that consistently refused to seriously invest in future technologies like fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles early-on while rivals churned out Prius after Prius after Civic Hybrid after low-maintenance/high-mileage internal combustion vehicle. Granted all the money GM invested in Cadillac Escalade's, GMC Yukon's, and Suburban's was profitable and a sparkle to people's eye for a short while, but didn't they read study after study that consistently showed that yes, gasoline and oil are finite products in which their is a declining supply. And what happens when there is less supply with inelastic demand? That's right, prices increase GM. Time to invest some capital in well-run, high mileage vehicles? You'd think so, but not at GM apparently. And the leadership that made such long-term errors - the Roger Smith's of the world - will still sit pretty like the bank CEO's while the autoline workers who worked in the plant everyday to build the vehicles their leaders envisioned will keep conceding and conceding with less and less to show for. 

My hope is that these workers will find brighter pastures through government-funded job re-training or find employment in the green technology fields that the United States plans on seriously investing in over the next 4-8 years. It's just too bad Detroit's autoworkers and all part suppliers like those working at Delphi will be kicked around more in the near future with only a glimmer of hope in sight. Meanwhile, that census-estimated 2007 population figure of 916,952 - a 50+% drop since 1950 - will most likely continue to go in the direction of the US auto industry and Detroit as a whole - in a tumbling downward spiral. One only hopes that this city once built for 2 million people, this crown jewel of the 1950s union days, will keep its spirit flickering with that glimmer of hope in mind. Lord knows that sometimes hope is all we have in this world. Just ask those who voted for our current president. But it is the people's hope and spirit, in the face of Detroit's most desperate times, that Mitch Albom wrote about in that January SI article that I hope to witness one day with my own two eyes - pen and camera in hand to document and witness it live.