Back in the D: Two Different Neighborhoods and Hope

Since I have come back from the Peace Corps I have not actually gone into the city of Detroit.

If you live in Southeast Michigan you hear about Detroit all the time. The city is all over the local and national news mostly for negative things. Detroit has one of the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, and crime in the nation. The city has been featured in various movies and television programs, most which portray Detroit in a negative way.

I am not from Detroit in any shape or form. I was born in the suburbs and grew up in the suburbs. My parents, through intelligent planning and investing, moved my family up from low-income suburbs to an upper class, exclusive suburb. I consistently went to good schools and had many opportunities to succeed.

My mother worked in the city much of my childhood and I often went with her to work. I have a few memories of Detroit back then. I remember a lot of abandoned lots, seeing a prostitute in front of her building one day, and her regularly giving money to a homeless man which started an argument between her and my father. I don’t remember many good things about the city from that time. We mostly stayed in the building where she worked and the only times I remember seeing the area around involved going to nearby Wayne State libraries.

When I went to college at the University of Michigan, I met my ex-boyfriend and spent a lot of time in the area where he grew up. Soon after I joined a teaching group focusing on urban and high-needs teaching and ended up doing all of my field experience in that same neighborhood. This area of Southwest Detroit, known as Mexicantown, is primarily made up of Latino immigrants. The area is unique in that it is one of the only areas of Detroit that has experienced a rise in population in the last twenty years. It is also one of the only areas that does economically all right and constantly has new housing and businesses opening.

Mexicantown completely changed my previous beliefs about the city of Detroit. The community showed me that Detroit has a lot of promise and that wonderful people are working constantly to bring Detroit back to its previous glory. Last Friday I had the chance to go back into the city, but to a completely different neighborhood than I am used to.

I visited Cody High School in the northwestern corner of the city (it’s really next to Redford). The teacher that I student taught with in Detroit at Western International High School has been transferred to Cody’s Detroit Institute of Technology (See this article in the Detroit News for more information on the districts shake up: http://detnews.com/article/20100902/SCHOOLS/9020407/DPS-teachers-union-sues-over-new-hires). This teacher is also working with the project I manage as an “attending teacher.”

Cody is drastically different from Western. The student body at Cody is 99% Black, compared to Western’s 55% Hispanic, 35% Black, and 8% White. The poverty in the school also seems to be worse than Western. The rate of free or reduced school lunches is 84% versus Western’s 76%. While Southwest Detroit is also poor and has it’s share of problems, you didn’t see the same cycle of poverty there. It seems like to me that in Southwest Detroit there is more of a feeling of social mobility. Many of the people I know in the area have moved out and have been able to stay above the poverty line. In the area where Cody is located, there seems to be less of a sense of the ability to move up in the world.

The two neighborhoods are also architecturally different. Cody’s student body is traditional from the nearby neighborhoods of Brightmoor, Rosedale, and Old Redford, but became a magnet school with open enrollment recently. Auto industry workers traditionally inhabited this area and most of the houses seem to be built in the 1900s-1940s. These are the one-story cookie cutter houses built to house workers and their families. Southwest Detroit includes the West Vernor-Junction Historic District, which dates back a little further to the late nineteenth century. The houses in Southwest Detroit are typically two story larger homes that have often been cut into separate units. Residents in Southwest Detroit seem to focus more on the outside of their homes and you often see remodeling and brick work done on the front facades of buildings.

My experience at Cody was great. Although the school was having some problems with the metal detectors, I got to see the students on the first day of wearing their ROTC uniforms. I watched some of our “Teaching Interns” work with the students in groups on a secondary source on Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, while one of the boys told another boy that he looked like a giant pickle (I had to restrain myself from laughing at this one). The administration and many of the teachers are working very hard to get the small school going. Everything that I have seen so far shows that this school has hope.

When I was going back to my car to drive to Ann Arbor for my 1 PM weekly project meeting, I realized, there was an SUV parked behind me. I was confused for a second, because I knew I had parked legally in the parking lot in a spot. Apparently this person had decided to box both my car and another car in to our spots so that they could get a space.

I went to the school’s office and told the secretary, who made an announcement over the P.A. for the person to move. I walked outside and waited another 30 minutes as no one showed up. Then I walked in again, another announcement (we had to make four announcements over a period of 90 minutes). In the end the security had to threaten to the tow the SUV out before the person came out and moved it. I missed seeing the person move the car, but after looking at the contents of the car I am pretty sure it was a staff member (probably a teacher). I subsequently arrived late for my meeting.

Needless to say, I was pissed. The most frustrating part I guess was that someone, a teacher most likely, was so idiotic to park behind someone and inconvenience them. And what was I thinking the whole time? Only in Detroit. This type of situation would most likely only happen to me on my visit to an urban school.

As much as I want to believe that Detroit can change and that neighborhoods like Southwest and Cody’s neighborhoods can improve, it’s hard to believe it when you cannot even get people to park in legal spots at a high school.