Thinking about Detroit

I just discovered the blog Sweet Juniper, and a powerful photo essay about Detroit, via Obsidian Wings.

Perhaps the foremost thought I had in reading this article was about what will happen next to this neighbourhood, and others like it.

Many people (at least on the Toronto Star’s somewhat regrettable comments pages) have responded to the request of the big North American auto makers for government help to get through the current recession (depression? slowdown?) with variants of “let them fail, they’re not producing what people want”, “it’s all the fault of the unions and their greed”, and so on. I like to think that I’ve avoided the union-bashing response, but I know I’ve had the occasional Schadenfreude moment at the thought that big, gas-guzzling, noisy cars might someday stop running.

I certainly don’t think that an open-ended handout to the auto industry is an appropriate response, but at the same time, I don’t want to see Oshawa or London or Windsor look like Detroit, as depicted in the photos of an abandoned school. These cities may need to change – they do need to change – but as a society, Ontario and Canada as a whole need to ensure that change happens in a controlled way.

Between the Jeffrey Sachs book reviewed in my previous post, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading and thinking about creative destruction, and I think that the upshot is, to get the creativity out of the destruction you need resilience. (Jared Diamond makes a similar point in Collapse, by looking at societies that didn’t have that kind of in-built resilience needed to cope with massive change.)

Resilience, in the case of the auto industry workers, means having some kind of alternative employment to fall back on, employment that will allow them to live and save much as they did working for GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but building things that people in our society need – for some that might be work on infrastructure projects (like more rail!), or solar panels, or wind farms; for others, vast numbers of buses and subways.

I am positive that allowing the big automakers to fail without a robust policy to ensure that their workers do not lose their livelihoods will be the kind of catastrophe that society – or at least a subset of Canadian society – does not recover from. The loss of one hundred thousand jobs, the addition of one hundred thousand people to a tight labour market, and the effects of sudden poverty on every institution that has to serve those workers will be considerable.

I don’t have any personal experience with auto workers, or with poverty. But I do work in financial services, and I’ve seen what people are expected to live on according to the welfare people or Employment Insurance, and it isn’t very much. It certainly isn’t enough to expect people to start up new businesses – particularly if credit is unavailable – and if there isn’t enough of that money now, what will things look like if thousands and thousands more people need it?

In parts of Ontario, it could start to look like the desolation evident in Jim’s Detroit photos. Any action we take needs to consider how best to avoid that outcome.

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