The money that built Detroit’s downtown boom came from exactly the kind of public investment David Marcus, in his Fox News column In booming Detroit, voters skeptical of socialism snake oil, dismisses as “socialism snake oil.” Marcus walked Woodward Avenue, chatted up a bartender and an advertising transplant, and concluded that because brunch is back and some voters prefer a moderate Democrat, Detroit has no use for left-wing economics. The vibes are real. The argument has potholes you could lose a wheel in.
I’ll give him this much: the downtown restaurants are real and the people in them are real. That is not the question. The question is what built it, and who’s still outside the frame.
Start with the map. The revival Marcus strolled through covers a sliver of a very large city. Detroit still holds roughly 649,000 people in a space built for 1.85 million. The poverty rate sits around 34 percent. Median household income is around $39,000 — about half the national figure. A $24 cocktail at a Woodward Avenue brasserie is a data point for a specific neighborhood. It is not a portrait of a city. Marcus talked to a bartender, an ad guy, a retiree walking his dog, and a woman with strong opinions about immigration. That’s a perfectly fine afternoon. It’s not an economic indicator.
Now the money, because this is where the whole column falls into the sinkhole. Detroit’s comeback did not spring from some invisible hand laying foundations and pouring concrete. The auto industry — the reason Detroit exists as an American city at all — was rescued by an approximately $80 billion federal bailout in 2008 and 2009. The city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in 2013, and a federally supervised process restructured $7 billion in debt. Since then, billions more have arrived through state and federal tax incentives, Opportunity Zone designations, enterprise zones, and direct public investment in roads, transit, and infrastructure. The block Marcus found so charming was assembled, substantially, by the same kind of government spending he’s telling you is a foreign import.
If that’s the free market, it’s the most expensive free market in the Western Hemisphere.
Here’s the part Marcus doesn’t want to say out loud. For half a century, private capital did in Detroit what private capital always does when the returns are better somewhere else: it left. The auto companies moved production south and then overseas. The suburbs drained the tax base. Banks redlined the neighborhoods. The market was perfectly efficient at extracting value and dumping the cost on the people who couldn’t follow it. The city shrank by two-thirds. That is what happens when market forces run a major American city without a counterweight. The revival Marcus admires — the one he’s using to declare left-wing economics unnecessary — is what happens when the public steps in with money, structure, and a plan, and says, we’re rebuilding this. The comeback is proof that public investment works. It is not proof that it’s unnecessary. You do not get to cheer the barbecue and insult the person who paid for the grill.
What about the voters? Marcus quotes several saying they want electability, not revolution, and prefer a steadier hand on the system. Fair enough — that’s a real sentiment in a Democratic primary, and he’s right that it’s a problem for the more progressive candidate. But notice what none of them said. Nobody said “remove the subsidies.” Nobody said “cut the tax incentives.” Nobody said “let the market sort out the neighborhoods.” What they said, in effect, is that the word scares them. They don’t want to be told that what the city is already doing — using public money to rebuild — has a frightening name. Marcus is banking on the reader not noticing the distance between rejecting a label and rejecting the substance. The label makes people flinch. The substance is what’s keeping the lights on.
This is the trick, and it’s worth running it in plain daylight: when public investment is working, call it capitalism. When someone proposes doing more of it, call it socialism. An $80 billion federal bailout of the auto companies is just responsible governance. A proposal to fund public childcare is the road to serfdom. A city rebuilding itself with billions in public subsidies is “booming.” A politician who wants to extend that investment to the neighborhoods that didn’t make the brunch guide is “too far left.” The word does all the heavy lifting so you never have to answer the actual question, which is: who is the revival for, and who’s still waiting for it to arrive?
Here’s what might actually help a city like Detroit. Community land trusts, so that the downtown revival doesn’t price out the families who endured the decades of decline and stuck around when the money was gone. Worker cooperatives, so that the profits from Detroit’s comeback circulate in Detroit neighborhoods instead of flowing to shareholders in another time zone. A public bank — we’ve run one profitably in North Dakota since 1919 — so the city can capitalize its own recovery rather than begging private lenders who vanished the first time returns dipped. Affordable housing built deliberately with public dollars before the market discovers that cheap land near a newly hip downtown is a thing to extract from, not a thing to build on.
There are neighborhoods in Detroit where the median household income is $39,000 and the poverty rate is 34 percent. Those neighborhoods aren’t on the brunch map.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Somebody built the revival Marcus is celebrating, and they did it with public money. The question for the next senator from Michigan isn’t whether to invest in Detroit. It’s whether the investment will reach past the cocktail bar to the blocks where the median family is making $39,000 a year and the city they were promised still hasn’t shown up.