Detroit, a dying American city

I was reading one of the many message boards I either surf or post to and found a link to this story : Detroit, the city where the sirens never sleep. It paints a pretty sad and stark portrait of a dying city whose industrial past has been left behind in the march toward the future. Sadly, Detroit is much to blame for its own problems. For too many years, the CEO's of The Big Three automakers have acted like ostriches with their heads in the sand. They've relied on big trucks and SUV's for their profit and now that oil prices are back on the rise again after coming down dramatically from summer's high of $4+ a gallon, they're going to have to figure out how to create cars that Americans want to buy. Cars that can adequately compete with foreign automakers, in other words. I've driven foreign cars all of my life because I am not impressed with American cars. In 2007 when I went car shopping for my first new car, I found American models wanting. They all felt like cheap little tin boxes instead of a good solid car that I was looking for. Eventually, I settled on a brand new 2007 Hyundai Accent hatchback and I adore it. It feels sturdy and well made and came with a warranty I could not pass up - 10 years or 100,000 powertrain warranty and a 5 year, 60,000 mile bumper to bumper warranty. That, to me, said that this automaker is willing to stand behind the quality of their product, and that impressed me. Could I find that on any other car? Nope, especially on the American cars. That spoke volumes to this nervous consumer. I wanted the most bang for my buck. I figured, look, if I'm going to go into some $10,000 in debt, I want it to be worth it. I can tell you right off the bat that I have no regrets about buying my car and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Now, if Detroit made cars that I felt so good about buying, I'd gladly "buy American". But so far, they haven't, so they're victims of their own ineptitude buy relying too heavily on big vehicles for profit. Sure, Americans love BIG, and the bigger, the better, but this recession we're in has no doubt had a sobering affect on all of us. I know I've pulled back my spending and am doing lots more cooking in at home. (And it's had positive results - I've begun to lose some weight that I wanted to shed this winter!) I'm trying my best to keep my car in optimum shape to maximize its fuel efficiency. I'm sure that most Americans are learning the meaning of frugality in these tough times, and that may be a good thing after years of rampant, uncontrolled greed, runaway shopping and buying stuff willy-nilly and maxing out of credit cards and such. Sadly, the cost has largely been borne by the middle class, which is practically non-existent anymore thanks to a host of things including the Reagan years of union busting, even though it was the unions that built the middle class.

Youngstown is another city that has suffered much the same fate as Detroit. Both of these are one horse towns, built on one industry that, when it collapsed, sent these cities into a spiral of decay. All one has to do is to drive along US Route 422 to see the rusting hulks and skeletons of former steel industry might as you drive into Youngstown. It's a city that has yet to reinvent itself post-steel. Like Detroit and other decaying cities, it's also suffered from years of political corruption among its city, state and federal officials, and this certainly hasn't helped their situation, but it seems like lately, at least Youngstown is poised for a possible turnaround down the road. The NBC affiliate that I can get in on my television is Channel 21 out of Youngstown and so I watch a lot of their local news, and they have this thing called "Youngstown 2010" that seems to point Youngstown in a new direction for the future. Granted, this is something that they should have been working on years ago, but at least they're starting things now to fix a decaying old industrial city that needs to move forward from its old industrial past. Detroit could benefit from the same kind of vision. Old industrial cities around the country need to do this. Our age of heavy manufacturing is clearly over. Those jobs have been permanently shipped off shore, overseas, to places like China, and politicians have been bluntly telling people not to expect those jobs to come back, because they won't. But if the Obama administration gets it right, the new "green economy" will provide new jobs for the future that can't be outsourced or shipped overseas. We can, as a country, return to our former glory, but it's going to take leadership and vision to do so. Dying and decaying cities like Detroit and Youngstown could become the new centers of "green collar" jobs if leaders are willing to make it happen. I'm hopeful that these dying centers of former industrial might will rebound from their slumps to lead the way to the future. Ohio and Michigan in particular were built on the might of the American auto industry, and they can rebuild on a new model of building the cars we want that are both energy efficient and are well made vehicles that can compete in the global marketplace with the foreign automakers. Time will tell. And we can always hope.