A young, rural-born friend of mine graduated from a small, top-tier, northeastern liberal-arts college last year and was attempting to figure out where to move. “My friends are trying to decide between Austin, Portland, and Detroit,” he said.
As a Detroit native, I was shocked not only that Motown was in the same consideration set as these hipster havens, but that such a privileged and naïve young person would consider moving to such a complicated and insular locale, sight unseen and without any guidance.
Fortunately for him, and for any other misguided coastal proto-colonists, dreamers, gentrifiers, and disruptors (ugh!) who are considering putting down roots in my hometown, a proper manual now exists. That book is How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, and will be published by independent press Belt on December 1.
Even more fortunate for everyone, the book is written by Aaron Foley, a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, CNN, Forbes, The Detroit Free Press, Ebony, and BuzzFeed. Foley possesses a preternatural ability to parse issues of race, class, urbanism, and pop culture in a complex and generous way that avoids tired orthodoxies and knee-jerk justifications but is always on the proper side of social justice.
The book, with its Vernor’s-liveried cover, should be required reading not only for actual or potential newcomers to the Motor City, but for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick.
“People are unfamiliar with what it’s like to move to a city like Detroit,” Foley says during our wide-ranging conversation. “It’s unlike other big cities in the country. It’s got a majority minority population. It’s not on a coast. And we’re dealing with things that people might not understand, like bankruptcy and massive amounts of poverty and unemployment.”
What are some of the biggest assumption blunders people make when arriving in town (besides saying “Dee-troit” instead of the proper “Duh-troit”)? Foley gives his top five.
1. Presuming It’s Guns or Bust: “Don’t assume that everyone owns a gun. I don’t have one. There are some people that do. But assuming that everyone is ready to shoot, ready to fight, get violent, that’s probably the number-one stereotype.”
2. Fear of Driving a Fiat: “You’re not going to get beaten half to death if you’re driving a BMW or something—except maybe if you go to a United Auto Workers local union meeting. People are proud of driving American cars, but you’re not going to get in trouble if you’re not.”
3) Be Real About Bicycling: “This idea that Detroit is like other cities where all you need is a bike and you can get from A to B pretty quickly—people underestimate how big Detroit is. It’s really hard to get across town on a bike. [Detroit is 139 square miles. Manhattan is 33.] The public transit is not such that you could go carless—not even close to that. And people are not used to seeing people on bikes here, so there’s more chance of bikers getting into collisions and stuff like that, which is unfortunate.”
4) Avoid Real-Estate Delusions: “People think they will be able to buy a house for a dollar. You can’t do that. When they sell a house for a dollar, those houses are not even habitable or able to be renovated. So, no.”
5) Don’t Think You Are Part of the Salvation Army: “The biggest mistake is this whole idea of being able to save Detroit or rescue Detroit—this idea that all you have to do is make this one app or open this one shop and everything is going to be great. One thing I see on a lot of forums online is: Why doesn’t Detroit have a Chipotle? Everything would be great if Detroit had a Chipotle. Chipotle isn’t going to fix the schools or anything. So that’s one mistake that hipsters make, forgetting that there’s decades and years of things that have to be undone before Detroit can get better. Whether it’s the racial tension or the schools or the poverty or the unemployment or the empty space, that’s not going to be fixed with a coffee shop.”
