Habitat for Humanity Breaks Down, or 2 Tales of a City

As in Ecclesiastes 3: There is a time to break down, and a time to build up.
This NYT story about how Habitat for Humanity now tearing down homes in Saginaw, Michigan is not surprising to me, but might be to others unfamiliar with the state, er, condition, of Michigan.

Saginaw, with some 56,000 people, was, by some estimates, nearly twice as populous when the automobile business boomed. These days, the biggest employer is the health care industry, city officials said. Saginaw, a 100-mile drive from Detroit, is a city of contrasts: neighborhoods of enormous, well-kept homes (this was, after all, a lumber town before it was a car town) but also blocks of vacant lots and shuttered houses.

Perhaps Saginaw is a smaller version of Flint, which is a smaller version of Detroit, which is a smaller version of Berlin, circa 1945. Matt Labash's surreal and devastating report from Detroit in the Weekly Standard recently should cause any thinking person in America to ask, Who did this? Where are the bad guys? I suppose with all the dramatic inconclusive and obscurantist finger pointing that goes on DC these days, it should be obvious that no one will ever own up to the mistakes, let alone the outright corruption and sin decades in the making.

I suppose because Detroit fell apart one piece at a time over 40 years, it doesn't seem like any one thing did it in. From a distance you should be able to discern something, but politicians and policy makers and lobbyists and auto mobile executives and union bosses, when they're not pointing fingers at the other guys, are about as clueless and helpless as a 800-pound man who won't admit he got that way one buffalo wing bucket at a time.

There is another take on Detroit. Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic last December wrote of Detroit's "Tragic nobility." He says Detroit is a "victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for blue-collar workers." Carmakers, pushed by unions, promised workers "something that all Americans covet"--steady purchasing power, comprehensive health care benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights."

While the costs and "managerial constraints associated with that efforts" have created the mess in Motown, it's not really their fault: "ultimate responsibility lies beyond Detroit." Okay.....where?

In a more enlightened society, after all, government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe.........

Yes, you see, the feds fell down on the job, wasting an opportunity to follow the Swedish model:

Even though it takes high taxes so support such a generous government, the Scandinavian economies are strong.

But now there's a new opening, and not just for Detroit, but for the whole country:

As it happens, Obama's agenda includes universal health insurance, more subsidized child care, and better worker retraining, not to mention labor-law reforms.

"While Obama hasn't been talking up Sweden lately" [it doesn't poll well?] the agenda is still what Cohn calls the Nordic or Scandinavian model.

The bad news for Detroit, Flint and even Saginaw: "Even if Obama succeeds, it may come too late for the automakers."

Cohn closes by visiting the Flint site of the old GM plant, where GM razed the old factories buildings. Indeed, another time for "breaking down, and not "for building up." But it takes wisdom to know the difference, and wisdom is a very rare, even unsought, commodity in these days of rubble, weeds, vacant lots and empty homes. When I visit my old birthplace, Detroit, when I see the pictures, when I think of better times, I come close to breaking down, too.

Comments

[Tom Gilson]

Perhaps Saginaw is a smaller version of Flint, which is a smaller version of Detroit...

I grew up about 15 miles from Saginaw. Yes, definitely, it's the same story as Detroit and Flint: an auto manufacturing town (Delphi, formerly known as Saginaw Steering Gear, a division of GM), dominated by the UAW. The rest of your analysis seems very accurate, too.