COLEMAN A. YOUNG (1918 - 1997)
As easy as ABC?
Mayor Coleman A. Young may be facing a new experience in his 15 years in office: a tough re-election campaign. A look at the mayor and the leading challengers to his bid for an unprecedented fifth term.
by Ron Williams and Morris Gleicher
orginally published 9/6/89 in the Metro TimesPublic opinion polls taken in January of this year revealed a startling new reality in Detroit politics: for the first time in 15 years, Mayor Coleman Young could be beaten. For an increasing number of voters, this time it was going to be ABC, Anybody But Coleman.
These voters had gradually come to believe that the unprecedented four-term reign of Detroit's first black mayor had, in the end, brought little improvement and massive decline. The loss of population, abandonment of housing, decline of business and industrial activity, the escalation of crime--by virtually every social and economic standard, they argued, the overall deterioration was clear.
Young, taking a page from the book Boss, about the late mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, responded to this growing vulnerability by assembling an organization equally remarkable for its flawless execution of a classic high-ground campaign strategy and its ability to strike fear into the political hearts of those who might be considering jumping ship. Young's place on the November runoff ballot is virtually assured.
Young's critics say the next four years will be critical in testing whether Detroit will enter the 21st century as a renewed, viable, livable, productive urban metropolis or a high-use river town fronting a largely abandoned wasteland. For them it may be ABC, but who?
It seems likely that either City Council President Erma Henderson, accountant Tom Barrow or Congressman John Conyers will face Young in November. Whether attracted by the smell of blood in the political waters swirling around the Manoogian Mansion, or the creeping sense of desperation in the urban air, the three major candidates, while serious and worthy challengers to the present administration, offer positions that are shockingly similar in substance.
Whether a candidate goes prowling in the microland of statistics or wandering in the philosophical netherlands, a thick, dull atmosphere of superficiality has settled over the race. One can't help but feel, after talking with these candidates, that they have allowed a number of great opportunities, and a number of critical issues, to get lost in what currently passes for the electoral process.
THEN AND NOW
Listen to Tom Barrow: "I think what you're seeing out there is that people have definitely made the psychological and intellectual break from Coleman Young. The benefit of being the first black mayor, that's through. People are demanding accountability. They're demanding quality. They're demanding change. They're looking around and they're saying, 'You just can't keep running the black thing on me.' "
"We're being eaten alive by this emperor; disdainful, vindictive, oppressive . . . " says, of all people, longtime Young political ally and family friend, John Conyers. What exactly is going on?
Conyers was there in the beginning along with Kenneth Hylton, Larry Doss, Robert Millender, Marc Stepp, John Conyers Sr., Lester Morgan, Georgia Brown, Jack Edwards and a handful of others. Young was elected with this team in 1973, a milestone for the city and its black residents.
The campaign's own plan called for the creation of task forces to help guide the new mayor. "We had the ad hoc committees, and for weeks they wouldn't name who was on the committees," Conyers remembers. "Everybody kept saying, 'Hey, where are these committees?' We were going to have a committee on business development, schools, labor, crime, health." The word came back from Millender, Young really didn't care, it was said, whether the committees happened or not.
Participants in those historic early days say that the writing was on the wall even then. Many of the campaign's participants had hoped that the new administration would have actually promoted the formation of neighborhood and community groups giving those organizations the freedom to originate their own programs that the mayor would then work on carrying out.
Over the years, the Young administration in fact discouraged grassroots efforts in the neighborhoods and housing projects, and vehemently opposed special interest groups such as citizens concerned with environmental issues. "As you know, [Young] hates neighborhoods and neighborhood organizations," Conyers said recently. "Ask MACO (Michigan Avenue Community Organization). Ask the tenants in the Brewster and Jeffries projects. Ask yourself."
The Young administration increasingly directed its efforts away from the grass roots and began wooing powerful business personalities such as Al Taubman, Max Fisher and Roger Smith instead. This strategy led to the diversion of scarce resources away from social welfare programs and into multimillion-dollar industrial and redevelopment projects such as the GM Poletown plant and downtown's Riverfront Apartments, which also received generous tax abatements.
The result, according to Young's scenario, would benefit the neighborhoods in an indirect way, a sort of trickle-down approach to community revitalization: "Neighborhoods thrive on jobs," Young said. "What can you do to build up a neighborhood if you don't provide jobs?"
The result, the way Conyers views it, has been very different: "[Young] messed us up good because of his attraction to magnum opus deals, multibillion-dollar deals. Big deals. Analyze any of them, Poletown, Chrysler-Jefferson . . . what you find is that the city was so inept that they got taken to the cleaners . . . We lost more than we gained, plus we mortgaged into the future and destroyed the neighborhoods."
It is the diversion of money away from people-oriented programs over the last decade that has become perhaps the most compelling symbol of what many Young critics feel has been the ultimate failure of his administration. Henderson sponsored the so-called nuisance abatement ordinance passed by City Council in 1984, which provided for homeless families in need of shelter to move into abandoned homes and receive funding to repair them.
"If the nuisance abatement ordinance had been implemented by the mayor," Henderson said, "we would not have had the abandonment of houses that we have today. We would have been putting people in housing and helping them to rehabilitate housing . . . He was more interested in property rights than people rights." Henderson described the mayor's response to the nuisance abatement initiative by council as a watershed development in her eventual decision to challenge the mayor this year.
"We're second only to Washington, D.C. in infant mortality," said Barrow. "The council allocated $400,000 for infant mortality purposes in 1987. Young didn't spend a single nickel." Henderson agrees. "What happened was that we finally got some money allocated to [fight] infant mortality and the mayor refused to spend it," she said. "We had to badger, badger, badger to try to get the $400,000 spent . . . He kept coming back to us to get it reprogrammed for something else."
"The City of Detroit," adds Barrow, "allocated $1.2 million for drug education out of seizure monies. The mayor spent a total of $361.
CRIME
Listen to Erma Henderson: "An 87-year old woman wrote me a letter and said, 'I go to bed at night and I pray that I can wake up in the morning a find myself alive because the crack house next door to me has set this house afire twice . . . ' It makes me shudder to think people are living like that in the city of Detroit."
If there is one dominant issue of this election it is crime. This highly charged, overwhelmingly complex issue has created its own urgent emotional momentum, churning from deep in the heart of the neighborhoods up to the largest remaining corporate presences in the city. It is the constant, relentless fear for one's personal safety which, in the end, is the common link that all Detroiters share, the common burden shouldered by all who remain. It is, along with the disintegration of the public school system, undoubtedly the single most destructive fact of life driving the exodus of people and business the city has experienced for decades.
From the grief and heartbreak in the eyes of the mothers of SOSAD (Save Our Sons and Daughters) to the drug-induced, faraway gaze of a mother accused of selling her teenage daughter to a crack dealer to support her addiction, the city's crime epidemic has many faces. More than any single issue in the campaign, it is a matter of life and death played out in every corner of the city. But to hear Young and his challengers address the same situation is like listening to a description of two different planets.
"Detroit is no longer the 'Murder Capital of the World,' " Young said recently, "because in recent years we have made considerable progress in our fight against crime. Additionally, according to the latest FBI statistics, for the last four years crime has been down 18 percent in Detroit, a better rate than any city of more than 1 million anywhere in the country."
"Fear of leaving our home after dark," says a Barrow position paper on crime, "is prevalent in almost 80 percent of our households. Seventy-six percent of Detroiters will not walk around their own block after dark. Police protection is viewed as almost nonexistent in the neighborhoods, and response time to citizens' calls is totally unacceptable and often embarrassing."
As the sixth largest city in the United States moves precariously close to dropping below the key 1 million population mark in the 1990 census, Conyers describes a crime-driven exodus: "You have the city divided into people who can leave and are leaving. People who can leave and are thinking of leaving. And then the rest: they aren't going anywhere unless they hit the lottery." Conyers said that long ago the term "white flight" became extinct in describing what was happening to the city. He now uses the phrase "fear flight," with black residents now fleeing in equal numbers.
The issue of crime may very well be the Achilles heel of the Young administration. No amount of campaign spending can alter the reality of the streets. Young has fought back, with limited success, charging that sensational and distorted media coverage is responsible for overstating the situation. But from ineffectual crime summits and a high-visibility crime czar appointment, to a public relations newsletter, "Coleman's Communication on Crime," and an effort on the campaign trail to attribute criticism of the police department as racially motivated, it is clear the administration has had a very difficult time developing and implementing effective responses to the crisis.
But every challenger, without exception, has failed to move beyond the most fundamental responses as well. Barrow in particular has offered disappointing insights into the roots of the problem and its national and international context. Barrow and Conyers, acknowledging the widespread fear and anger in the neighborhoods, have predictably taken the easy hit--focusing on immediate relief in the form of more effective law enforcement practices.
To Barrow, the diligent technician, solutions have centered on the restructuring and redeployment of existing law enforcement resources and a nostalgic yearning for the past. He would "make precincts and therefore precinct commanders totally accountable and responsible for crime in their areas. This will include everything from misdemeanors to serious crime." He would also decentralize, eliminate and/or reassign the men and women of various bureaus and sections back to the precinct under the direction and control of the precinct commander. This, he maintains, will result in 2,200 officers being placed back into neighborhoods and onto the streets.
Referring to criminals as "urban terrorists," Conyers would do essentially the same thing: "effectively redeploying the police from the bureaucracy to the street. My administration's goal is to have a three-minute response time, from the time an officer receives the assignment."
Conyers embraces a limited gun-control measure: banning the sale and possession of all assault, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, while rigorously enforcing all restrictions on the purchase of handguns, and working with adjoining municipalities to adopt the same policies. "Handgun use in self-defense during criminal acts represents less than one-quarter of 1 percent of all handgun shootings," he said.
Only Henderson, with her grounding in social work, has begun, in any meaningful way, to move beyond calls for redeployment and new, improved law enforcement formulae. It is Henderson who has most effectively articulated an alternative to the boot-camp concept the Young administration is pursuing and that is already in use in other areas of the country.
"We have a human rights department, we have a neighborhood services department, but I think there ought to be a human services department so that we know in-depth the kind of situation we have in the city of Detroit, so we can begin to look for and identify incorrigible children, the basis for their incorrigibility . . . We ought to be able to access these children in a youth academy setting . . . youth academies could be installed around the city in some of those lovely old vacant buildings, that could be renovated, for the purpose of picking these children up off the street, getting them out of the way and seeing to it that we evaluate what their needs are.
"It's a total social service program involved around an individual child. Reaching to the core of that child and trying to rehabilitate their thinking, trying to get into their minds and help them want to do something differently with their lives . . . ."
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Listen to John Conyers: "Until we get to economic development, you will never end the crime problem, because kids out here selling dope are as good a businessman as any that are operating legally."
The future health of Detroit will be determined by a deceptively simple measure: jobs. From a vibrant, dynamic economic base, virtually every other social ill haunting the city will find the genesis of a solution: crime, drugs, educational opportunities, teenage violence, broken families, the homeless, infant mortality rates, unemployment, high taxes and housing deterioration. In no other area has the Young administration expended more effort, and come away with more conflicting and controversial results.
The '90s will be the decade of the entrepreneur, which immediately establishes the nature of the problem for Detroit: the city offers young dreamers one of the worst business climates in the country for a start-up. One of the few official efforts by the City of Detroit and State of Michigan to nurture high-tech start-ups, the Metropolitan Center for High Technology in Detroit, has received mixed reviews. According to Young, "It hasn't been as wildly successful as we had hoped, but it has been very successful." According to Barrow, "It has been a flop."
Any way you slice it, it comes out basically the same: 85 percent of American businesses employ 20 people or less. The vast majority of new jobs created every year in this country have been the result of small business growth. The Young administration says it has granted 233 currently existing tax abatements, both industrial and commercial, which have resulted in the retention of 21,000 jobs and the creation of 9,000 new jobs.
"We have gained more jobs from small business than we have from big business," says Young. "I recognize that we can't have a future in this city unless we encourage small business that is largely high tech." Young believes, however, that people follow jobs and that big projects will eventually create a vibrant downtown. Salaries from those jobs will then be taken back to the neighborhoods, revitalizing commercial strips and improving the housing stock. As a result, the vast majority of available money has been committed to a relatively small number of high-profile, big-ticket projects. "Small business follows big business," says Young.
Conyers says that thinking is backward. "What he doesn't understand is that this is not where business starts. He forgot principle number one: you start with the small businesses. That's what is wrong with downtown."
Not surprisingly, Barrow has the most detailed and thoughtful series of proposals of the three challengers regarding the needs of entrepreneurs. "That's where you're going to see me standing head and shoulders," he says, "because I'm a small-business guy myself."
"I know what it takes to make a small business survive. I know what's tough in the first six months, eight months of the year. The most likely time for businesses to go out of business. We'll have incubators. We'll have green phones [to cut through red tape], which will facilitate small business being able to start . . . our CEDD (Community and Economic Development Department) focus will be changed toward business retention and new businesses development. We'll create a small business section.
Henderson has put forward an impressive series of position statements which address the problem of unequal development within the city. "Downtown development must be used to stimulate neighborhood economic development. We must consider a special capital fund for small-business development in neighborhoods; such a fund would be supported from new developments.
"Boston is a major city that comes to mind. Through the League of Cities, I have had the opportunity to see linked development programs harmonizing the development of a prosperous downtown with safe, beautiful neighborhoods."
Barrow's plan for tax credits is an aggressive one: "Essentially everything that's been built in Detroit has had to have sufficient tax abatement. What that's telling us, the signal it's sending, business people are telling you that it costs too much to build here.
"If you're outside of Detroit and you want to come to Detroit to expand, and you're willing to invest $50,000 in capital, invest in terms of buying a building or opening up a business, I'm going to give you an automatic, 12-year, 50 percent property tax credit. What does it cost me? Nothing. Why? Because I don't have you now anyhow. What do I get? I get 50 percent of your taxes for the next 12 years. I get growth and investment . . . Businesses that exist in Detroit. I'd offer you the same thing, if you want to expand.
"We're not going to have a revenue shortfall, because what happens is the less you tax capital, the more people are willing to invest. Once there is investment, it drives up value. Once value is driven up, more revenue comes in. That's why you see, across the board in all the surrounding communities, massive growth and development."
Pursuit of the many opportunities contained within the terms of the recently passed Canada/U.S. Free Trade Agreement is an enormously important component of future economic development planning for the city of Detroit. But while Young was a vocal, aggressive proponent of casino gambling when that issue was brought before the voters and rejected, he has remained virtually silent on the issue of the Free Trade Agreement. According to University of Michigan economists, as many as 55,000 new jobs could be created in Southeastern Michigan if the region can successfully position itself as the primary center for trade between the two countries.
Conyers and Henderson have shown little understanding of the significance of the agreement. Barrow has consistently mentioned it as an alternative to casino gambling, suggesting that the Port of Detroit play a key role as a transportation hub. But it is Young, however quietly he has gone about it, who has most fully grasped the potential of the agreement for the city.
"I consider that to be probably the most positive endeavor in the economic development field in which we can be engaged," said Young. "I want the city of Detroit to be the major city along that border, together with Windsor, for the exchange of goods between the two nations.
"We got $5 million appropriated from the state--I was instrumental in getting that money--for an international commercial authority in the old Michigan Central Depot. We're setting up major trucking, a major container port down where the Boblo boats come in, and rail--it's multimodal transport exchange that will enable us to handle all this traffic."
Young said that the Detroit Port Authority will be moved to Delray, and that the Detroit and Windsor Port Authorities are exploring together the possibility of acquiring the former Conrail railroad tunnel located near the Ambassador Bridge.
Young said, "We would like to attract major international banks and international law firms, etc., to Detroit, and many of them are interested in doing that."
THE CAMPAIGNS
Political campaigns are a complex composite of candidate appeal, the record, issues, organization, media attention, endorsements and money. Because each election has its own unique set of circumstances, sweeping generalities about the importance of any one of these campaign ingredients are often misleading.
Money, for example, is necessary but not ordinarily the determining factor. Even a million dollars spent against Conyers in his last several elections would probably not have beaten him. Jerry Cavanagh had no record, little money and mixed media support when he beat Mayor Miriani in 1961. Richard Austin lost in 1969 despite his record, his ability and the necessary financing.
In this election, money and organization have played unusually important roles. The Young juggernaut, with unlimited finances and the strongest organization, appears unbeatable. A week before the election, it appears almost certain that Young will be one of the two finalists.
The campaigns of challengers Henderson and Conyers have been seriously hampered by the continuing and relentless co-opting of contributors by Young. Compounding that problem are their organizational weaknesses: both hired and soon fired their key political consultant (Sam Riddle and Sam Riddle); both have suffered from staff inadequacies, late research, poor scheduling and ineffective community outreach.
Barrow, on the other hand, has had five years to build and polish a tightly disciplined staff and a highly refined computer system with sophisticated demographic data for fundraising, mailings and votes. His successful "tryout run" in the casino gambling campaign proved his effectiveness. On the other hand, problems surrounding his disclosure of New Center Hospital funds usage and his inability to arouse enthusiasm and excitement in lower-income areas have not helped his campaign.
All three challengers have described in some depth what they have called a palpable climate of fear in the political process. According to Henderson, "It's amazing how many people in this city are scared to death to be caught doing anything other than supporting the mayor. That atmosphere of fear is a signal to me of the very dangerous times we live in. I think it's peculiar to live under that kind of fear and have it not challenged by anybody."
Henderson, Barrow and Conyers all detailed similar incidents where potential contributors attempted to give them cash so that there would be no record of the transaction to show up later on election reports. Small contractors doing business with the city, city employees and others in some way deriving income from the city, have all expressed fear of retaliation for openly supporting someone other than the mayor.
The key question facing Young in this primary election appears to be not only victory, but by what margin. More and more, voters have rejected the mayor's positions--on casino gambling, the Proposal N council amendment, his choices for the school board. If the mayor wins the primary election with more than 40-45 percent of the total vote the finale is almost a given. If less, his opponent will have a fighting change.
At the time this was published, Morris Gleicher was a member of the Board of Directors of the Metro Times and a longtime political consultant. Ron Williams was editor and publisher of the Metro Times.