Connor Coyne

NOTE: I am a member of the Flint Diaspora. I care about my hometown and continue to follow news there. These are the opinions and observations of a former resident.

This is the closest thing to positive press I’ve ever seen Flint get from the New York Times. Which is ironic, because the situation prompting such a drastic response is almost relentlessly bleak.

The picture today, however, is somewhat different.

Shrinking any city is a complicated process, with few examples of implementation and accommodated by few tested processes. Everyone, homeowners, businesses, municipal government, and civic institutions, is taking a risk. And yet, as Karina Pallagst so eloquently argues in the article, “some cities just don’t have a choice.” The idea of shrinking Flint confronts a drastic problem with a solution that is both ambitious and rigorous in scope.

Shrinking a city is also a test of leadership. It will be politically unpopular among residents dislocated, and also within more stable areas forced to quickly recalibrate their balance of services and residents. It will require delicate negotiation and collaboration between unions, city workers, residents, and government. Not least of all, the initial expenditure will be massive. Even after clearing away as much red-tape as possible, the process of razing and deregulating square miles of a dense city will take a lot of money. Taxpayers will have to be patient with officials as savings slowly accrue over time.

I’ve often argued that a lack of municipal coordination was one of Flint’s biggest disadvantages. Unlike the withdrawal of GM, it is undoubtedly the largest factor that residents have a power to directly change. The city’s decline in the last fifty years was inevitable, but with government and local institutions providing a united front, a lot of the tragedy of that time could have been averted. Instead, we’ve seen infighting, corruption, and a rhetoric that has racially divided the city at precisely the time when citizens needed to come together.

In 2002, after the recall of Mayor Woodrow Stanley, I noticed that Darnell Earley (formerly the City Administrator) seemed to do a better than competent job of reconciling the many difficulties of his office. He certainly excelled the Stanley, Rutherford, and Williamson administrations of recent history. Now there would appear to be a similar pragmatism coming from acting mayor Michael Brown. What is it about Flint that the best leaders are those who don’t actively want the job? Is it a lack of political ambitions, or an immunity against reprisals?

At any rate, given the power vested in the Land Bank, the recent cohesion of the business community, and meaningful investments by higher education in the city, Flint’s leadership may have finally come of age.

If so, it isn’t a moment too soon… in fact, it’s a few decades too late.

But the New York Times article conveys both the gravity of the problem and the potential for innovation, even progress, to spring from definite misfortunes.

“Here’s the part I find odd. Now, the government didn’t ask any of those Wall Street C.E.O.s to quit. Isn’t that kind of a double standard? I mean, if you build Cadillacs, you’re screwed. But if your chauffeur drives a Cadillac, you’re O.K. Whew!”
- Jay Leno

Two or three days ago, I forget what it was, the news was packed dense with details on the travails of Chrysler and GM, and most of this focused on the ouster of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner. The Danziger cartoon above encapsulates some of the ironies of the current situation; a career-long affiliation and decade plus executive tenor coupled with an inability to move product. In fact, this is a constant theme in the books I’ve been reading on the American auto industry: the inability of the executive financial class to reconcile public demand with a speculative market. For a half-century their strategy has favored the latter, and so their decline in actual market share was foreseen and, once started, ongoing.

What I’ve noticed in the Free Press and among many Michigan politicians (and, surprisingly, late night talk show hosts who usually like to castigate Detroit and the Big Three) is the increasing tendency to contrast the disparity between the treatment of Detroit and that of the New York financial firms. After all, who has been ousted there? There’s no question that, at least where the corporate class is concerned, bankers have retained more autonomy and have received less scrutiny than manufacturers, despite the fact that the mistakes made in the financial sector have been by far the worse.

But the ideas and contradictions embodied in the Leno quote are where things really start to get interesting. It prefers conflation by industry over separation by class, which runs somewhat counter to reality. It’s actually a pretty funny joke, but not quite correct when we get down to things. Those who “build Cadillacs,” that is, the autoworkers and management, are likely to be subject to forced contract renegotiations in the upcoming weeks and months — in bankruptsy court if not out of it — and this is where the force of contrast is a source of dark humor. But then Leno also assumed this slight applies to Wagoner personally: “Now, the government didn’t ask any of those Wall Street C.E.O.s to quit.” The former GM CEO isn’t hurting these days. He received something of a $20 million severance package, so in the words of our president he’s “doing fine,” he’ll “still be affluent.” To put it a little differently, in the Danziger cartoon, our sympathies ought to be with the bedraggled dealer who has worked hard to push his unwanted vehicles, not with a hapless and besuited Wagoner.

I don’t share the sympathy of the press for GM’s former CEO; he had a decade worth of chances, and while he tried harder than some of his predecessors, he didn’t try hard enough. The disparity in the government’s response is telling, and has more to do with politics than with our economic health. This week is important as the G20 summit will determine whether we will continue to push our economies through aggressive spending (per the US) or whether we will instead pursue aggressive international financial regulation (per the EU). The fact that this is only posed as an either/or proposition shows how unequal governing forces have been to the economic crisis so far. The fact is, we need both.

In the U.S. where we are enacting broad spending programs and will need to enact more, there is no injustice or impropriety in the government’s demands on Chrysler and GM. However, we need to see more oversight of the financial sector, and when it comes, it should be in terms as strong as and stronger than the chastisement the auto industry has received this week.

At Street Prophets today: Here.

And Flint, Michigan has just had another seismic day.

Andy Heller writes some insightful comments on the resignation.

Here’s my take on his position:

Just a few observations from a 11-year ex-pat.

1.

“Michael Brown, appointed as city administrator last week by Williamson, becomes mayor in the short term. He’s a steady, peacemaker type who will bring what order he can to City Hall.”

Darnell Earley was far and away the best mayor I’ve ever seen preside over Flint. Chicago has a reputation for nasty politics, but Flint’s scene seems comparable if not worse. The trick is in what you said above… Brown doesn’t want the job. The same was true for Darnell Earley. A mayor who “doesn’t want the job” is freed from his political ambitions to pursue an aggressive agenda for the city of Flint. A city as troubled as Flint doesn’t have any room for personal ambitions and vanities. Which is why I’m optimistic about Brown, and hope he’ll maybe reconsider.

2.

While I agree, it’s a bad idea to endorse anyone before we’ve seen the full ticket, things have changed a lot since Dayne Walling lost. He was running on a platform of coalition progress and innovative troubleshooting which has (and many people observed this at the time) had a lot in common with Obama’s strategy. Flint’s choice of Don Williamson was a — understandable perhaps — fearful and skeptical choice. It was a choice that argued that entrenchment and hunkering down will slow a city’s deterioration, and that this is preferable to the risk of trying a new direction. Given Flint’s history with experimentation — AutoWorld, the Don’s own Windmill Place, even Job Corps — this stance should not be a total surprise. Of course other “experiments” (the cultural center, community schooling, the magnet program) have been successes. So it’s a mixed bag.

Whoever takes the reins of Flint now is going to have to 1) be willing to take risks, and 2) to recognize the right risks. In the past, the city has gotten one or the other, but not both.

Best of luck to all of you. I’ll be watching.

Chicago Reader: Outrageless: Is Chicago more complacent than other big cities?

I wonder how Detroit stacks in this equation. I understand the situation in Flint and New York.