Modern times

Art Hobson

ahobson@uark.edu

NWA Times 23 Dec 2006

Toronto and Detroit

              There’s lots to be learned from travel.  Marie and I recently spent two weeks in Toronto and Detroit, cities that offer insights about America and Fayetteville. 

              The cities lie near the Great Lakes, 200 miles apart.  Five million live within each metropolitan area, but only 0.8 million live in Detroit itself while 2.5 million live in Toronto.  Detroit is 82 percent black, while Toronto is more diverse—45 percent Chinese, South Asian, black, Filipino, and others, and 55 percent white.  Detroit has experienced extreme suburban flight--people, mostly white, leaving the city for the suburbs.  Detroit is America’s poorest large city. 

              Detroit, “Motown,” is a classic sprawling, low-density, car-dominated city.  Only 16 percent of the metropolitan population live in the city itself!  Land is underused. Abandoned buildings, ranging from beautiful old salvageable structures to giant collapsing factories, stand alongside vacant fields and ground-level parking lots, along with a few hotels and business establishments.  You wouldn’t want to walk most of these streets after dark.  Very few middle-class or rich people live downtown; those who do live in two- and three-story apartment buildings with no shops, parks, or other amenities within walking distance.  Most of the middle-class places to live are at least 12 miles from downtown. 

              You have to drive to get downtown.  Detroit has essentially no mass transit. There are no subways, no surface rail, and I spotted only two buses during the entire week. There’s an excess of 5-lane and 7-lane highways with no median, demonstrating that city traffic engineers are more concerned with traffic flow than with quality of life. 

              Detroit’s problems stem from decades past.  During the 1920s, General Motors bought up and then destroyed the city’s street car lines in order to replace them with their own buses and, eventually, with cars--a phenomenon that was then repeated in most American cities.  Vicious race riots in 1943 and 1967 stimulated suburban flight.  In the early 1970s, the Arab oil embargo made Detroit’s gas-guzzling cars obsolete, and U.S. management lacked the vision to re-tool for energy conservation.  People were laid off as our automobile industry began a death spiral that continues today. 

              Despite, or maybe because of, its problems, I developed an affection for Detroit and its people.  It’s made valiant efforts to rebuild.  Downtown streets are surprisingly clean for a big city.  An enormous development, the “Renaissance Center,” opened downtown in 1977, but its outsized, imperial setting proved not to be the ticket to reviving the depressed central city. Detroit built an elevated two-car train that zips around a 3-mile downtown loop every 15 minutes, stopping at a dozen stations, but hardly anybody rides it because it’s faster to walk.  Detroit has maintained a major league baseball park and a professional football stadium downtown, and these bring in large crowds--that return to the suburbs right after the game. 

              The first thing you notice about Toronto is its vibrant density.  Crowds of people, of all classes and all races, walk these streets.  The contrast with the vacant sidewalks of downtown Detroit is striking.  Downtown land is in big demand.  You won’t find vacant fields, boarded-up buildings, or flat parking lots here, and you won’t find scary places.  Although there are lots of cars, there are also plenty of buses, trolleys, and subways.  Although it was essential to rent a car to get around in Detroit, we didn’t need or want a car in Toronto because mass transit is so much more convenient, inexpensive, fast, and fun. 

              We stayed in a small central hotel—something that would have been impossible in Detroit.  Downtown Toronto offers plenty of shopping, hotels, restaurants, bars, theaters, and parks.  The key to its success is that lots of middle-class people live there.  They live in apartments in renovated buildings, and in tall apartment/condominium buildings all over downtown.  My guess is that they live there because they feel safe, they like the downtown excitement, they work downtown, and they have convenient mass transit at $100 per month for a city-wide transit card—much cheaper than owning a car.   Toronto streets are narrow by U.S. standards; most multi-lane streets have medians, often with trolley lines.

              The striking differences between these cities hold many lessons for America.  Much of the difference stems from Motown’s, and America’s, automobile culture.  Some of the difference stems from segregation. Except for its dense and thriving Chinatown, Toronto seems highly integrated racially, while Detroit’s downtown is mostly black and its outer suburbs are mostly white.  We found it significant that you seldom see a Canadian flag in Canada, and those you do see are of modest size, while here one sees many American flags, many of them grotesquely outsized.  The most telling difference is that lots of people live downtown in Toronto, while Detroit’s population lives mostly in the suburbs.