I thoroughly enjoyed reading this Wall Street Journal article that traces the story of one home in the Motor City – and through that house, decades of history and change in the neighborhood and the city overall.
Spend a few minutes reading about 1626 W. Boston Boulevard, in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood, from its auto-industry origins to a subprime borrower.
-KG
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We’ve written before on this blog that we were encouraged by Time Magazine’s declaration that it intended to devote resources to covering what is happening in Detroit.
Writes Time publisher John Huey,
“we believe that Detroit right now is a great American story. No city has had more influence on the country’s economic and social evolution. Detroit was the birthplace of both the industrial age and the nation’s middle class, and the city’s rise and fall — and struggle to rise again — are a window into the challenges facing all of …

I know we’ve had a lot on this blog about the current recession and how hard it has hit the auto industry and Michigan.
So, I apologize if you’re sick of reading about it, but I’m posting a link to this sobering Wall Street Journal Story about laid-off white collar workers.
“Mr. Barr, 46 years old, was the type of well-educated, white-collar ‘knowledge’ worker that Michigan hoped would help offset a decline in auto-assembly jobs. But Detroit’s Big Three car makers have aggressively thinned these ranks in the past two years, perhaps …

President Obama will speak just outside Youngstown today at GM’s Lordstown plant, kicking off the a presidential tour of the Midwest on jobs and the economy, according to The Detroit News.

The plant  has been through a series of ups and downs in the past year.
From The Detroit News: Thirteen months ago, then-CEO Rick Wagoner and dignitaries attended a splashy event in the plant to announce a third shift and $350 million investment in the plant to build the new Chevrolet Cruze sedan, which is expected to launch next year and …

Time Magazine has purchased a home in Detroit’s West Village neighborhood, as the media company steps up efforts to chronicle the economic turmoil taking place in the Motor City, The Free Press reports.

The Magazine employed a similar strategy in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Mitchell, a former Free Press reporter and editor and Time magazine bureau chief in Detroit said: “It’s really an enterprising way of storytelling. It’s an interesting situation where the journalist will be not only an independent observer, but a stakeholder” in the city.
Time …

This past week, The New York Times highlighted Sinclair Community College, a school in Dayton helping to retrain workers for the “new” economy.
This glowing piece highlights the school’s low tuition, well-respected programs, aid for displaced G.M. and Delphi workers, and growing enrollment.
“We help people go from $8-an-hour jobs to $18-an-hour jobs,”the school’s president told The Times.
It’s also good to see a Dayton institution get good press after all the negative “dying cities” stuff.
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NPR ran a great piece yesterday about young people moving back to Detroit during this time of unparalled economic turmoil.
The story follows a Chicago banker who, lured by cheap real-estate, moved back, bought a building and opened a restaurant.
Also featured is a Cincinnati music producer who moved to Detroit because he always wanted his own studio and in Detroit the price was right.
Last is a Detroit-born lawyer who returned from New Jersey because he wanted to be part of the city’s revitalization.
This story made me cry. I wish everyone who has …

Two interesting items in this month’s Harper’s Magazine:
End of the Road, a piece about how the decline of the Big Three is linked to declining blue-collar wages and job security, and
These Mean Streets, photos of “scenes from the abandoned city”
Neither is available online unless you are a subscriber, so you’ll have do it the old fashioned way and to pick up a magazine if you want to look at these.
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David Frum of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has written an interesting (albeit pessimistic) account of what went wrong in Detroit (everyone’s favorite topic).

In his National Post article “What Killed Detroit,” Frum argues that poisonous race relations and an insufficient commitment to arts and culture sealed the city’s fate long before the auto giants crumbled.

“The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer?,” he wonders. “The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?”

Some potential good news for the struggling auto industry: The New York Times reports the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program has really taken off – so much so that it is completely out of money.
“About a quarter-million vehicles were sold under the program,” the Times reports, “which offered payments of $3,500 to $4,500 for people who traded in old cars for new ones that had higher fuel economy. The average payment worked out to about $4,000, and the total payout, about $1 billion, the amount allocated by Congress under the …