In the heart of Detroit, a stone’s throw from the river that separates the United States from Canada, a giant fist goes horizontal. Motionless, suspended two meters above the ground, it seems to strike the empty air, in the middle of buildings and traffic.
This hook carved in dark metal is that of Joe Louis, a legendary boxer, “first national black hero”, they say, following defeating a German in 1938, and symbol of the affirmation of African Americans.
$18 billion in debt
His immortalized veins are those of struggle and life, of struggle and envy. These are also the ones from Detroit, which resists despite adversity. Because Detroit has gone to the mat. The former automobile capital was counted to the ground by the referee. Up to eighteen…
” Eighteen billion dollars (15.3 billion euros, ED. note) debt », announced the Governor of Michigan in the summer of 2013, calling for the city to be placed under trusteeship.
Giving up hectares to Nature
If Ford and GM, the local car giants, have regained some colors, the well-paid jobs of yesteryear have never returned. Neither do the residents – Detroit has fewer than 700,000, up from 1.5 million in 1970. Tax revenues have collapsed.
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The city hall even announced that it was time to downgrade, that to live on such an area – occupying almost 360 km2 , Detroit is three times the size of Paris –, with the costs associated with the scattering of the administered, had become a luxury. The time has come to gather on a smaller perimeter, giving up acres and acres to nature.
This retreat in the face of regaining vegetation has been variously appreciated. Some saw in these wastelands only desolation and death. But others saw it as a project, a future.
“A unique opportunity”
Devin Kuziel, for example. Originally from Detroit, this young woman returned last fall following studying environmental sciences in Chicago, with enthusiasm. “This is a unique opportunity we have”, she explains while wielding the trowel in a garden where she appears to be fighting with giant broccoli.
Around it, buildings, busy streets. The triangular space where she works in the cold was occupied until 2010 by a 13-storey building. Abandoned since the late 1990s, dilapidated and regularly vandalized, it had become a symbol of decline. At the end of 2009, the municipality, for lack of a buyer, had resolved to raze the building.
Since then, it has become a vegetable garden, an orchard, right in the city center. The boss of a local company financed the creation of this oasis, with the help of a landscape architect, for a charming result: long sophisticated and elegant bins, with aluminum-covered walls, for planting all kinds of fruits and vegetables; chairs for discussing everything and nothing; sculptures, mosaics, drawings of children…
After returning from Chicago, Devin quickly joined Greening of Detroit, a non-profit organization founded in the late 1980s. At the time, it was mainly a question, for the founders, to put a little greenery back into the greyness by replanting the trees driven out by industrial development. But with the decline of the great city of Michigan, the project has evolved, expanded.
The association, with 25 employees and a battalion of several hundred volunteers, now plays on several grounds: it transforms abandoned spaces into green areas, cleans soils, manages “urban farms”. Such as, among others, the small garden of the ex-Lafayette Building.
“We work with volunteers, who can take home fruits and vegetables, pursues Devin, who manages the premises. But the bulk of the production is donated to charities. Companies from the neighborhood also come here with their employees and schools. And we do trainings to teach the inhabitants how to consume in a healthier way. »
Planting trees to revive
A utopia is gaining momentum. Thanks, too, to Adam Hollier. Former aide to Mayor Dave Bing who left office at the end of 2013. He has been the vice-president of Hantz Woodlands for the past year. Her job? Planting trees, lots of trees, in Detroit.
“In the fall of 2013, we bought 60 hectares of land from the municipality, which had inherited abandoned or seized properties, or empty plots, explains the young man. And in the spring we planted 15,000 trees, with the help of volunteers, on a part of these lands, on the edge of the Indian Village. After cleaning them of their debris or crazy herbs that had grown over the years. »
Architect’s houses and ruins
The Indian Village is a very well-to-do enclave of Detroit. Splendid architect’s houses, built at the end of the XIXe century and the beginning of the XXe , line up along two streets – Iroquois Street and Seminole Street. In one of them lives John Hantz, a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in finance, the boss of Adam Hollier.
But just a few crossroads from the Village begins a completely different universe. A black neighborhood, where houses that still stand are rare. At the corner of Goethe and Belvidere streets, you have to walk a little further every day to go knock on your neighbor’s door. Although many houses have been razed, there are still ruins. Open doors hint at gutted sofas, collapsed stairs.
John Hantz planted his 15,000 trees in this neighborhood, six or seven blocks from his home, on the many empty plots. On several blocks of houses are now lined up very young maples, oaks still very frail, fragile white birches, which will take time to grow over the next few decades.
The importance of the race issue
The initiative of this billionaire has long been controversial. Was it reasonable for the municipality to sell so much land to an individual? What is known regarding his longer-term intentions? Doesn’t he, above all, make a great financial deal, even if he paid half a million dollars to the city? And then… and then… John Hantz is white.
“The race issue will always play an important role in the United States, even more so here in Detroit, explains Adam, himself a young African-American. A white billionaire who buys here is necessarily suspicious for many people …”
Destroy to erase the decline
But things are changing, he assures : “The people here want us to buy more houses, to destroy them. Look at this crossroads. Only one shack remains, half collapsed. Now the locals want it taken care of, demolished. »
On the grounds of the well-aligned young shoots of Hantz Woodlands, the house of guingois indeed seems even more outlandish, like a very nasty wart. “Before, in the neighborhood, people got used to this show, go following Adam. It should be understood that Detroit did not fall in one day… it’s a long decline. Some of these buildings were abandoned fifteen years ago…”
About 80,000 abandoned buildings still line the streets of Detroit, leading the real estate market in their neighborhood. Because everything is always, in the end, a matter of money. Even destroying it comes at a cost: nearly $10,000 (€8,500) per house.
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An emergency plan for the city’s finances
The City of Detroit, founded by the Frenchman Antoine de Lamothe-Cadillac at the very beginning of the XVIIIe century, on the shores of the Great Lakes, declared bankruptcy in the summer of 2013, following accumulating a debt of more than 15 billion euros. After a legal process, an agreement was reached at the end of 2014 to reschedule its debt.
In the context of these negotiations, which have made it possible to lighten the slate by almost 6 billion euros, municipal employees have made important concessions, especially in view of their pensions. Private donations made it possible to preserve the collection of masterpieces of the city museum, the sale of which was planned.
Almost 1.5 billion euros has also been made available to finance priority services, including the police, where, since 2001, 2,300 posts have been abolished. In 2013, the city still had the highest homicide rate in the country for cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants: 45 per 100,000 people, 10 times the national average.
