Detroit Is Back, But It Never Really Left

Award-winning documentary tells a powerful story that’s relevant for all American cities

Trivia question: What U.S. city can lay claim to having been all of the following: the arsenal of democracy; the center of the U.S. economy; the manufacturing capital of the world; and the wealthiest city per capita in the United States?

If you guessed Detroit, Michigan, you’d be correct, but few would probably think of Motor City in relation to any of those categories, much less all of them. According to two-time Emmy Award-winning Detroit filmmaker Stephen McGee, a big part of that is because of the narratives we’ve created around Detroit, narratives he’s trying to rewrite in his new film Resurgo: The Rise from Within.

When Detroit burned to the ground in 1805, Father Gabriel Richard coined what would become the city’s motto, Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus, or, “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.”

Exactly 200 years later, when Stephen McGee moved to Detroit in 2005 to take a job documenting abandoned buildings for the Detroit Free Press, Detroit was still living by that motto.

According to McGee, Detroit is a place that’s been at the bottom and the top of America and everywhere in between. His documentary (which is being presented by the Fresh Coast Film Festival on May 1 at The Alluvion in Traverse City) seeks to provide a compelling lesson for all of America in how a city can reach the stars, fall into the mud, and then rise again, all thanks to the hard work and solidarity of those who never left.

Interviewing Those Who Watched the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth

The United States built much of its wealth through the Industrial Revolution, and Detroit stood at the center of that economic activity. From 1850 to 1950, Detroit became the nation’s fifth largest city, eclipsing 1.8 million residents in 1950.

But when U.S. corporations began undercutting the mostly unionized workforce by offshoring production to cheap labor in foreign countries, Detroit began to backslide, and it happened fast. Today, Detroit is America’s 26th largest city at just 645,705 residents, and that’s up from the COVID-era rock bottom of 639,000.

McGee shows in his film that Detroit’s population surge and decline followed economic investment and divestment, at least for one ethnic group. Case in point, while generations of Black Americans continued to move from the south to the city during Jim Crow to seek economic opportunity, the white population trend followed a boom-bust model, which devastated the city’s growth trajectory.

Residents interviewed for the film tend to agree with McGee’s thesis. They say Detroit has always had flowers of localized growth despite the 1950s and 1960s-era destruction of prospering Black neighborhoods like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley for the purpose of building interstate highways and other “developments” that promised to “save” an already declining Detroit.

“You notice how, in an urban setting, you’ll have a crack in the sidewalk, and there’s something pretty growing up through it,” says artist Gilda Snowden being interviewed for the film in 2012. (She passed away in 2014.)

“I began to look at it like a metaphor,” Snowden says. “If they [plants] can do it, you can do it. You can acknowledge all this beauty that’s all around you in this city that everyone’s always dogging. ‘Detroit’ this and ‘Detroit’ that. It’s like the poster child for negativity in the media. But there’s flowers in Detroit. There’s people growing.”

McGee interviewed artists like Snowden, as well as architects, bankers, businesspeople, Native American tribal leaders, community activists, musicians, store owners, religious leaders, educators, and many others, including Detroit Poet Laureate and film producer Jessica Care Moore. A common theme across each discussion was a desire to hold on, a wish to keep the city in the hands of those who never let go, and to allow them to determine Detroit’s future.

“Every time we tear down a building, every time we decide, well, we can’t save it—for whatever reason, whether it’s for a physical reason or an economic reason—every time we do that, we lose a piece of that history,” says Craig Wilkins, architect and historian, when interviewed for the film.

“When we do that, we become a city that could be anywhere, because we don’t have a specific Detroit identity anymore,” Wilkins concludes. “And it’s sad.”

Detroit’s Story has Lessons for the Nation

After watching the film, we had a chance to sit down with McGee, and the message he wanted to convey the most was that Detroit’s rise, fall, and rebirth has lessons for all of America.

“Many of the abandoned structures and parcels in Detroit had been bought and held onto by wealthy folks who didn’t even live in the city or even the state, because they thought maybe the real estate could one day be a lottery ticket to success,” McGee tells us.

“Because outsiders owned the land of Detroit for pennies on the dollar, they literally perpetuated the city’s decline by not letting Detroit decisions be made by actual Detroiters,” McGee continues. “The ‘comeback’ almost didn’t happen in the first place, and when it did come about, it happened because those folks began coming to the table and working hand-in-hand with the locals who’d been dedicating themselves to improving Detroit for decades.”

To McGee, who hails from San Francisco, Detroit’s story has lessons for every American city, especially West Coast urban centers, because he’s seeing big tech divest from California. He says what’s happening out west today looks a lot like the divestment that occurred in Detroit in 1952.

“My first few years in Detroit were marked by big media corporations asking me to photograph ‘America’s best ruins,’” McGee says. “But there was a much bigger story of thriving communities working together to make the city work for them, despite mismanagement and abandonment by those in power.”

McGee references the almost 20,000 mostly Black homeowners who lost their homes from 2010 through 2015, and how the city not giving them homestead property tax exemptions was a big part of that. He also points to the 4,000 structure fires that occurred annually throughout the 2010s, plus school closures, hospital shutdowns, tenant building demolitions, and how all of the above was exacerbated by Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy filing.

McGee worries that some of the most painful chapters of Detroit’s history could now be in first-draft format on the West Coast, because when divestment and mismanagement happen at the top, and when powerbrokers don’t listen to the communities that make the wheels turn, foundations begin to collapse.

“I hope other cities study Detroit’s story,” McGee says in closing. “Because everywhere I’ve pointed my camera over the past 20 years, I’ve seen communities come together and help each other out. In Detroit, the force of their will became enough to pull the city from the ashes and rebuild it again, just like they did in 1805. This city is like an encyclopedia of people making beautiful life work while everything was being taken away. But now the age of the abandonment narrative is over. The neighborhoods team with vibrant life, perhaps more so than they ever did.”

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