the Motor City's long road to redemption Rebuilding: Houses across the city have been left abandoned for many years. Photo: Trevor Collens Four days after the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, an eight-year-old girl was attacked by a pit bull in a quiet street on the east side. According to James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson, a retired cop who runs ad-hoc anti-crime patrols in the area, the girl lost a good chunk of her face and was driven to the hospital by her family. Later that night somebody came back and shot the dog. "We're going to have to watch them now," Jack Rabbit says. That's the sort of thing that starts a shooting war. The story illustrates much about Detroit. Nobody bothered calling an ambulance or police, much less a city dog catcher, because government services here have collapsed. Instead, neighbours rallied to solve the problem as best they could. Many have come to the grim conclusion that the only way to save what is left of a once great city is a program of demolition and destruction unprecedented in American history. And while there is great concern for the city's pensioners as a result of the bankruptcy, few Detroiters have much sympathy for other creditors. "It's like they went to the races and saw 10 horses and backed the one with its leg in a cast," one community worker tells me. Sometimes you make bad investments, it happens. Desolation: A boarded up house of the once thriving Brush Park neighborhood stands in stark contrast to the downtown Detroit skyline. When Detroit's "emergency manager" Kevin Orr announced the bankruptcy - legally akin to administration in Australia - the week before last, much of the nation was shocked. Other towns and cities in the US have been forced into the same humiliating corner over the years, but Detroit is by far the largest. Commentators in Washington, DC, and New York fretted about it as an indicator of national decline. In the midwest there are fears that Detroit might be charting a course to be followed by other rustbelt cities. But few in Detroit seemed surprised. Those fighting to rebuild the historic downtown had already factored bankruptcy into their investment plans. Those in the blighted neighbourhoods have more immediate concerns than unfunded liabilities. To understand just how far Motor City has fallen, you need a sense of how significant it once was. That can't be exaggerated. After Henry Ford invented modern mass production here, he paid his employees enough to buy his cars. For the first time blue-collar men could afford middle-class lives and the city drew workers from around the nation. And the wealth spread. Working poor, many of them black, travelled the so-called Hillbilly Highway from the Appalachians in the south and built prosperous new lives. During World War II, Detroit equipped and armed three vast armies - the allies in western Europe, the Soviet Union in the east and the Americans fighting in the Pacific. It truly was "the arsenal of democracy." In 1950, the population nudged 2 million. Then, quietly at first, the decline began. As the white middle class grew richer it moved to new suburbs beyond the city limits, in part to avoid living in mixed neighbourhoods. Many of those that hung on fled after violent race riots in 1967. Today, less than 700,000 remain. James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson, a retired police officer, began a volunteer patrol against crime in his suburb. Photo: Nick O'Malley When Japanese cars began to appear on American roads, the car companies buried their heads in the sand, losing market share as a result. Even America's cumbersome medical system conspired against them, leaving the manufacturers responsible for the health not only of their workers but for legions of retirees. It was said General Motors was a healthcare company that made cars. With the carmakers laying off workers and anyone with the means fleeing beyond the city limits, Detroit's tax base collapsed and the government could no longer provide services to those who remained in neighbourhoods that sprawled over land to contain Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco. So the flight quickened. As unions battled the auto management and the city government became mired in corruption, the downtown district collapsed and the retailers pulled out, leaving their huge stores to decay before they were finally demolished in the 1990s, their footprints sitting alongside the beautiful empty skyscrapers of the city's heyday. Detroit became a doughnut, with the wealthy living in a ring just beyond the city limits, unreachable by its hungry taxman. Inside, the remaining population was so demoralised that the city began to burn, particularly on Devil's Night on the eve of Halloween, when bored kids and insurance hustlers set light to its remains. During the mid-1980s the gutted fire department typically fought 800 fires over three days around Devil's Night. Bob Gregory is proud of the work his Downtown Detroit Partnership has done. By the time Orr declared bankruptcy the city was $18.5 billion in debt. More than $3 billion of that is the unfunded pensions of the city's retired police and firemen, who are now fighting a court battle to save their life savings. Last Wednesday, outside the courthouse, Detroit Fire Department captain Robert Tucker told me how one of his friends was visited in hospital by top brass after a wall collapsed on him. They reminded him how expensive injuries were to the department. In the shattered north-east of Detroit, John James, the founder of a volunteer group called Motor City Blight Busters, bounds up to a pit full of volunteers smashing the basement floor of a newly demolished home and bellows at them, "Show me you love me, and I know you do, and move the concrete into the trailer." A human chain of volunteers forms before us. People seem used to following James' orders and he seems used to issuing them. He speaks loud and fast and describes himself as half-Lebanese, half-Italian and all stubborn. Nearby, another group is tending vegetable gardens and 100 metres or so in the distance - perhaps 10 vacant lots away - former inmates are building berms to form a protective rim around what will soon be another of Detroit's urban farms. After the land is cleared, Blight Busters will turn it over to Kofi Royal, a 65-year-old former New Yorker who runs another group, the Fertile Ground Collective. The collective maintains the farms using volunteers to grow fruit and vegetables to be given away to neighbours that no longer have local shops or reliable public transport. The farms also discourage illegal dumping by construction companies, car thieves and occasionally gangsters - Detroit's murder rate is now 10 times that of New York's. Just as Jack Rabbit got sick of waiting for the city to provide adequate policing, Blight Busters - and hundreds of other volunteer groups - tired of waiting for the government to clean up the wreckage of the city, so they do it themselves. Now the government accepts their help, too. James drives me to a nearby site, where more volunteers are demolishing 500 abandoned homes. Usable material is recycled, and the weeds and scrub are chipped and mulched, some of it for the farms. Driving south towards the city centre from the Blight Busters headquarters, you pass kilometres of boarded-up or burnt out shopfronts and weedy vacant blocks. Even the beer-and-shot joints and pawnbrokers are shuttered. One of the few prosperous looking buildings houses the Greater Grace Temple, a Pentecostal church with more than 6000 parishioners led by Bishop Charles H. Ellis III. Members of Ellis' flock provide pro-bono mental health, legal and financial counselling services as well as childcare and small business classes to their fellow parishioners and the broader community. "There was a time when we prayed for people in need but now we have to do more," Ellis says. Of the gulf between the Eight Mile Road that marks the northern boundary between the city and the wealthy outer suburbs, he says that "in Detroit you can travel two blocks and it seems you have passed from a third-world country into paradise." Further on down the road you come into midtown and downtown and it seems another of those invisible borders is growing. A former wasteland at the intersection of five major roads in the heart of the city centre has been rebuilt by the city council and a coalition of business and community groups headed by the Downtown Detroit Partnership. Known as Campus Martius, it is now a thriving mixed-use park with a restaurant and bandstand, and in winter an ice rink. Using Campus Martius as a focus point, the Detroit Partnership, funded by its business community members, began rejuvenating neighbouring blocks. It took over garbage collection, street cleaning, street lighting and graffiti removal and it hired private security guards to patrol. As he takes me on a walking tour of the city centre, past pop-up stores in the formerly vacant street fronts, the partnership's chief operating officer Bob Gregory is visibly proud of the work. When I step on a discarded cup, the former auto exec winces and you get the sense that someone will soon get a phone call about it. But the real turning point for downtown Detroit came three years ago when one of the city's most successful sons, the billionaire Dan Gilbert, began a quixotic campaign to rebuild the place virtually single-handed. Gilbert made his fortune as a founder of Quicken Loans, the online mortgage broker. In 2010, he moved the company's headquarters and its 5000 staff into a building overlooking Campus Martius. Then he went on an eye-bleeding spending spree. Today the outfit's holding company Rock Ventures owns or controls 35 buildings in downtown, amounting to more than 650,321 square metres of office space, and its downtown workforce has grown to nearly 10,000. Typically, when Rock Ventures takes over a building, it restores and modernises, creating a mix of ground-floor retail and upper-floor office and retail space, a mix studiously in line with new world standards for successful urban renewal. As the group expands, so do the residential demands of its employees, thousands of whom now rent space in the renovated buildings. Many of Gilbert's buildings, formerly deserted for decades, are now full. Other companies have followed suit and on the back of the investment, Rock Ventures and the Partnership have now raised hundreds of millions to build a light-rail line to connect the once-abandoned riverfront and downtown districts along the spine of the city to the regional rail system a little more than five kilometres away. Along its route, new development is filling in vacant land and major retailers are set to return upon completion in 2015. Rock Ventures' president and chief executive Matt Cullen explains the project is unique in the US, not because it is private enterprise building public infrastructure, but because it's philanthropy. Nearly all the money for development and 10 years of operational costs has been donated. Despite this, Cullen is quick to emphasise that Gilbert and Rock Ventures plan to "do good and do well." The group is essentially in the high-tech business, he says, and to recruit and retain smart young staff it wants to provide them with a vibrant environment. Besides, he says, Gilbert believes that if Detroit was a stock it would be undervalued. With cheerful admiration Fred Kent calls Gilbert "a passionate nut," but he fully agrees downtown Detroit has extraordinary potential. Kent is founder of the New York-based non-profit Project for Public Spaces, which has worked on urban renewals around the world, including on the acclaimed rebuilding of New York City's Times Square, as well as in Detroit. He says downtown Detroit and its wonderful abandoned buildings are the bones of a great city. In a sense, the place has benefited from the severity and length of decline because many of the towers built in the 1920s and '30s have not been wrecked by poor redevelopment later in the century. The revitalisation being led by Gilbert and the Partnership is successful for all the reasons he fears for Sydney's Barangaroo, Kent says - it is "light and fast" and it is being driven by the people who will use it rather than a large bureaucracy. The author and adman Toby Barlow moved from New York to run the Ford account for the city's biggest ad agency and now can't imagine leaving. There are not other cities that are looking up, everywhere else people are just managing civilisation down. He has opened a design shop and is now backing a Writers in Residence program in which the successful applicants will be given the deeds to the residence. Over the road from the new Westin Hotel downtown is a pub called The Bathtub, which has ground-floor doors knocked into a neighbouring demonstration vegetable garden. Upstairs in the recently reclaimed building on Wednesday night, 50 people or so gathered to hear rap at an open mic night in a city that gave the world the Motown studios, Iggy Pop, Eminem and D12. Watching the dancing and cheering, you could believe for a while that anything was possible here. But the community leaders Fairfax spoke to warned against casual optimism. The downtown resurgence is focused on 2.5 kilometres in a city of 363.5 square kilometres, and while business groups can help restart the city, they are waiting for a renewed government to step in and take over much of the work. Cullen, Ellis and even the master gardener Kofi Royal agree sadly that the only way the city can survive when it comes out of bankruptcy will be to bulldoze what remains of most neighbourhoods, including the homes of the heroic families who somehow managed to maintain islands of order in the wastelands, the people Jack Rabbit calls the Detroit resistance. Only then can the sewers be filled in and the streetlights and power lines torn down, the empty schools and community centres demolished and the roads ploughed under in order to free the city government of the impossible maintenance costs. It will be de-engineering on a scale never before seen in the US, Cullen says. If it is carried out, what the city decides to do with the new open space will define it for the next century. There are 80,000 abandoned homes in Detroit and John James reminds me as he drives me among them that many represent a family tragedy, a lost job, a busted mortgage, a divorce. In recent years a cottage publishing industry in photography books illustrating Detroit's beautiful, terrible decay has sprung up. In the foreword of one of the better examples of the genre, by Julia Reyes Taubman, the writer and proud Detroiter Elmore Leonard likens the whole sprawling city to a crime scene.