Titanic's dance band

Detroit has too little money, grinding poverty, a population appallingly ill-equipped for survival, a huge city budget deficit, a failed school system and many other enormous problems.

Nor is there any sign that anything is likely to get significantly better anytime soon. It is impossible to dispute anything I've just said, regardless of your politics. Everybody knows these things.

Those are the realities that should be the starting point for any conversation about the city. And every serious conversation should have one purpose: How do we fix this?

What higher purpose could any of us have?

Think about it. Michigan's greatest city has been mostly reduced to what amounts to a huge, rotting ghetto. That's not meant to be inflammatory or as an insult; it is hard, cold reality.

Real unemployment is, according to Mayor Dave Bing, more than 40 percent, when you count those discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force. What's worse is that hundreds of thousands of them are, probably, totally unemployable.

The National Adult Literacy Survey estimates 47 percent of Detroiters are functionally illiterate. What kind of jobs can they get, now that auto plants are no longer mass employers of the unskilled?

There are tens of thousands of dilapidated buildings that need to be torn down, except there is no money to do so.

That much is certain. But what nobody agrees on is exactly how the city, once one of the nation's most dynamic and vibrant, got in this shape — or who is to blame. Today's current leadership and population are nearly all black, and to a great extent — whether they openly say so or not — most blame the white establishment.

"They came here, made their money, dumped their pollution into the earth, and then took their money and jobs to the suburbs," one very bitter mayoral appointee told me, years ago.

The night Coleman Young was first elected mayor, way back in 1973, he reflected bitterly that he knew he'd won "because the white people didn't want the damn thing anymore. They were getting the hell out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some black sucker like me." Older whites in the suburbs, those who grew up in Detroit and then indeed "got the hell out," saw it differently.

They felt most blacks lacked much work ethic, that they trashed the neighborhoods they moved into, failing to take care of their property even when they had the money.

There's some truth in both those stereotypes, and we've been engaging in sterile arguments about them for decades now. If we want, we can continue to do so, till the last business closes and the last refugee streams out of the ruins.

Or we can do something about it. The fact is that Detroit can no longer make it on its own. David Rusk explained and illuminated this back in 1993, in a brilliant little book called Cities Without Suburbs.

The bottom line is this: "Elastic cities flourish. Inelastic cities decline." Elastic cities are those, like Los Angeles, that can annex territory and incorporate suburbs within the city limits.

> Email Jack Lessenberry