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Flint Series, Chapter 6
William Sundwick
Gordon Young published Tear-Down
in 2013. It’s his memoir of
returning to Flint as an adult after presumably leaving the city forever to
pursue a journalism career in San Francisco. It was written before the Flint
Water Crisis (2014 - to date).
Young describes the Civic
Park neighborhood of his youth, his strong family ties and social
engagement shared by most in the city during the seventies and eighties. He knew about the massive depression
enveloping the city after the departure of General Motors; the unemployment,
the crime, and, most of all, the collapse of real estate values! That’s what
motivated him to buy a reno house for $3000, close to his old neighborhood, abandoned
and in need of major repairs (stripped of its copper plumbing, among other
things).
Through the course of working on his house, he met many of
the figures who might begin to make Flint a real city again. He was impressed
by what he encountered. But, in the end, he gave up and returned to San
Francisco. It was “too heavy a lift,” he decided. The resources required for
scaling his efforts up to make a significant dent in the blight were too great.
Hence, his subtitle: “Memoir of a Vanishing City.”
Yet, even with the Water Crisis seemingly adding another
nail in Flint’s coffin, a little bit of online research (and my own 2014 visit
to Flint) points in a more positive direction. It may not be cause for
unbridled optimism, but the replacement of pipes and mains throughout the city
is still scheduled to be completed sometime in 2019,
and the water source has been switched back to safer “Detroit water.” There are
still nearly 8000
GM jobs in Flint (a far cry from the 80,000 jobs of forty years ago,
but still). And, some downtown renovation is apparent, a thriving farmers’
market, and a vibrant
arts scene encouraged by local community organizations. The Flint Cultural Center
is still a going concern sixty years after its founding with C.S. Mott Foundation
largesse.
As the population of the city declined, and private or
charter schools arrived, Flint Community
Schools dwindled as an institution. This makes me sad, but it should
not be considered an unmitigated negative. Even in my day, some of Flint’s
brightest lights were products of the strong parochial schools in the city (see:
Michael Moore’s memoir, Here Comes
Trouble, 2011). In the mid-sixties, there were four public high schools in
the city, now there is only one – Southwestern Academy (formerly Southwestern
High School).
The brain
drain experienced in Flint over four-plus decades is no different
from that of any other rust belt city in decline. Job markets
control demographics for the better educated even more than for the unskilled,
who often don’t have the means to leave. Additionally, “white
flight” to suburban locations was no less a factor in Flint than
many other cities in mid-century America.
Yes, it’s largely about racism. Flint did have one of the
first open
housing ordinances in the country (1967), and one of the first
African-American mayors (Floyd J.
McCree, 1966). During this period new GM plants were built in the
suburbs – before closing completely! Genesee County’s
population didn’t decline nearly as much as the city over that forty-year
devolution of Flint.
In June 2014, I returned to Flint for a Sundwick cousins’
reunion (no aunts or uncles left by then, except one in Traverse City, who
couldn’t travel). The Flint water supply had already been diverted to the Flint
River by then, but none of us knew it. We didn’t drink city water, anyway. My
cousin Carol, who hosted the reunion, lived in suburban Grand Blanc. Cousin
John was kind enough to take me on a tour
of the city, such as it was by that time. We saw downtown, we saw
Civic Park, we saw the East Village and Cultural Center, we saw Carriage Town,
the birthplace of General Motors more than a century earlier.
And, we saw the house
on Winona
Street where I grew up. It
was clearly occupied, as were most in the Ballenger Highway neighborhood. In
fact, if anything, the neighborhood was more attractive than I remembered it
from the sixties – the trees were more mature, offering plenty of shade on that
summer day. Houses were generally well-maintained, with fresh paint,
landscaping, mowed lawns. But, nevertheless, when I suggested getting out of
the car and walking, John was quick to say, “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
Why? It was the middle of the day on a Sunday, seemed peaceful enough, although
I don’t recall seeing anybody on the sidewalks. I believe John’s fears were
based on us being white! That hadn’t even occurred to me at the time. It seems
so bizarre to me, having lived in the cosmopolitan, diverse world of Northern
Virginia more than half my life now.
But, John had different experiences. They were,
unfortunately, more akin to my father’s fears of 1965 when Dad declared, “We
have to move outside the city. You know they’re almost to Welch Boulevard!?” No need to explain who “they” were. My parents
sold the house, for about the same price they had paid 12 years earlier, then moved
to Flushing as soon as I graduated from high school. They didn’t even wait to
find another house – we lived in a rental apartment for a few months, before
they moved into a new townhouse development (back in the city, but behind a
wall and gate!). Their paranoia about crime and property values was the final
straw for me. I went off to college in Kalamazoo that fall, cured of any desire
to return to such unpleasant dynamics.
The city did experience
a long,
slow decline. But, somehow, through it all, there has consistently
been a core of community activists and concerned citizens who have insisted on
making lemonade from lemons. The Flint
Public Art Project (FPAP) has been sending volunteers to turn
abandoned houses into works of art. A developer has converted the historic
Durant Hotel in Downtown to loft apartments. The rococo Capitol
Theatre downtown has been renovated and reopened. Farmers’ Market
reopened in 2014 and has become a community gathering place in the center of
Downtown. University of Michigan-Flint has an active Resource
Planning and Social Work department where students have been
imagining Flint futures, especially for the Civic Park neighborhood. Public
organizations have raised funds to renovate and rehabilitate some grand old
Victorian homes in Carriage Town. Kettering
University, at the base of the Carriage Town neighborhood, is a
respected engineering school, formerly known as General Motors
Institute.
It would be unrealistic to expect any future population
growth for Flint. The industrial framework that supported tens of thousands of
unskilled workers will never return. But, perhaps there is an even more noble
future for this city – one that grows organically from deeper roots in that
former logging transit across fords on the Flint River.
Some will stay. They will provide a different kind of growth
for Flint. It will be growth in spirit and heart. The factories are gone, but
they were the transient parts of my Flint experience, anyway. Something else is
still there. It is Flint’s soul.
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