Detroit's rocky road

Detroit has seen big changes in fortunes over the years

By Jonathan Marcus in Detroit

Detroit, Michigan - the birth place of the US car industry more than 100 years ago - is feeling the effects of the economic slowdown that is gripping the US.

Modern Detroit was built on car manufacturing, so much so that it earned the nickname "Motor City".

But as factory designs evolved to require vast greenfield sites, buying habits changed and international competition grew, so the auto industry slimmed down and relocated to the suburbs and beyond, leaving abandoned factories and blighted neighbourhoods.

Columnist Jack Lessenberry has watched Detroit change over the last four decades.

Jobs were lost as the industry changed

"Sadly there are great stretches of Detroit that resemble nothing so much as Berlin in 1945," he says. "It's a city that's had enormous population shifts, enormous population transfers to the suburbs and enormous loss of population."

He says the population of the city now - 951,000 - is almost exactly half what it was in 1950.

Abandoned factories

Much of the old industrial areas are a wasteland of graffiti and broken windows.

They are what artist and local historian Lowell Boileau calls the "fabulous ruins of Detroit".

In the past it would have been the high-pitched whine of all the various machines and the rumble of the trucks, the voices of people yelling - all you hear now is the wind

Lowell Boileau, artist

The Packard motor company complex of factories and workshops used to stretch for several blocks.

Today, part of it is used for warehousing, but the roofs are caving in and the windows almost all broken.

"Inside the Packard complex, or what used to be the Packard complex, one of the things that really strikes me is the difference in the sound", Mr Boileau says.

"In the past it would have been the high-pitched whine of all the various machines and the rumble of the trucks, the voices of people yelling - all you hear now is the wind."

Own show

There cannot be many cities with a weekly television programme like Autoline Detroit.

Detroit's population has seen dramatic shifts

The show's host John McElroy believes that while many production line jobs may have gone, Detroit will remain the centre of the global auto industry for the foreseeable future.

"You have the hourly employees, the blue-collar, typically unionised workforce that has seen its ranks shrink dramatically over the last 20 years", he says.

"And there's no question that that shrinkage will continue: You just don't need so many people to build so many cars."

"But when you look at the white collar - the professional, engineering, managerial part of the industry - we've seen some reduction in the number of jobs there, largely gained through efficiencies."

He says there is unlikely to be a great change now, unless and until there are dramatic changes in the how cars are designed and engineered.

Racial tension

The dramatic changes in the car industry have had a damaging impact upon Detroit.

And the flight of white residents to the suburbs - now being copied by more affluent black families - has served, as columnist Jack Lessenberry explained, to expose one of the cities fundamental cleavages - race.

These are groups that have tremendous antipathy towards each other

Jack Lessenberry

He says that in 1950 the population of Detroit peaked at 1.85m. The white population was 1.7m. It is now 99,000.

Over the same period, he says, the black population has risen from 16% to 82%.

"A lot if these people are first, second generation transplants from the south, people not that far removed from cotton planting and share cropping, who came here to get better jobs in the factories.

"But a lot of the white Detroiters were southern whites too who came here during the Depression and for the same reasons, and so these are groups that have tremendous antipathy towards each other", he says.

"That's been at the root of many of Detroit's social problems."

Racial tensions have made it more difficult for Detroit to begin to grapple with the problems of change.

But among the city centre's abandoned buildings, new construction is at last under way.