MorningSide

My name is Matthew Green. I am from the eastside of Detroit. When I say I know the inner city. I mean that I know the inner city! I am 24 years old. I am old enough to have a mature mind-state about things, but young enough to connect with the youth.

I'm Scotty Boman. I was born and raised in Detroit and have been a resident of the MorningSide community in the 48224 for 15 years.  As a child, I lived just across the street from what is now MorningSide on East Outer Drive, and I attended church and Boy Scout meetings at what was then Christ United Methodist Church. I remember viewing feature films at the Alger. I have fond memories of building model boats and cars at the Cannon Recreation Center that was adjoining Finney High School.  East English Village Academy is now there.

I grew up in Detroit during the ‘80s, a period of recession and white flight. As industry left, our community went from being a stable middle-class neighborhood to one that was falling apart at the seams. Cultural centers disappeared and money for education and other city services evaporated.

Long before the city of Detroit rebranded itself, a tight-knit neighborhood on the far east side decided to make a name for itself. The community formerly known as NEAR (Neighborhood East Area Residents) wanted a name that could state their wishes, dreams, hopes and struggles aloud.

Over three generations, grandmother Patricia Robinson, mother Tamiko Clark, and daughter DaTrice Clark have lived on the same street in MorningSide. Their family story doubles as a history lesson in the neighborhood.

There are a few basic steps journalists take when reporting. Pick a newsworthy topic. Track down the facts. And then talk to people out in the community what they think about it.

But what if you flipped that script?

This year, Michigan Radio is trying something new.

Instead of sending a reporter in to tell stories about MorningSide, we’re inviting the MorningSide community to tell their own stories.

From family histories to local happenings, we want to highlight narratives that feel true and honest to the people who experience the neighborhood every day.

What happens when community members lead the conversation about their community?

MorningSide 48224, a community-led podcast, will endeavor to find out. Instead of unearthing city stories from a distance, Imani Mixon, a Detroit-based and embraced journalist who grew up in MorningSide, will be embedded in the community working closely with residents to produce their own stories about their own experiences.

When traveling out of state, people from Michigan often are asked, “Hey, how’s Detroit doing?”

The largest municipal bankruptcy and the subsequent stories about Detroit’s revival have captured the curiosity of the rest of the nation and the world.

Detroit’s successes in its business districts, downtown and Midtown, get most of the attention. Every billionaire’s acquisition, every refurbished building, every taxpayer assisted development have contributed to the conclusion that Detroit is America’s “Comeback City.”

Racial divisions are a major contributor to the decline of Detroit. White flight started after World War II and continued. There was a late spike in flight from the city after 2000. That’s when City of Detroit employees no longer had to live in the city. That’s led to lost wealth, lost tax revenue, and blighted neighborhoods.

Even when Detroit was majority white, racial lines were strictly drawn.

“You can’t underestimate the intensity of that segregation in housing and the role that it played in dividing metropolitan Detroit by race,” said Thomas Sugrue.

Detroit has the highest auto insurance costs in the nation. Depending on the survey, it costs somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand dollars a year.

Detroit residents will soon vote for mayor, city council, and other offices. What do they want for the future of the city? The MorningSide neighborhood reflects the rest of the city well. So, how well do the priorities of the residents align with the candidates vying to represent them on city council?

Actually, they align surprisingly well. We talked with a dozen residents of MorningSide. One of their top concerns was abandoned houses.

Detroit might not be ready for the wave of baby boomers who are aging. The oldest baby boomers are now 71. The youngest are 53. Right now in Detroit, many seniors rely on informal networks of neighbors, family, or friends.

In Detroit, 41 percent of people over 60 live alone according to a report by Data Driven Detroit based on 2010 Census data.

That’s the case with Ida Brown, 87, who lives in a house in the MorningSide neighborhood of Detroit.

Although she has lived there three years, she really hasn’t gotten to know her neighbors.

Across Detroit, neighborhoods are trying to figure out what they can do to remake their community. One neighborhood is pinning hopes on something it still has that most of Detroit’s other neighborhoods lost years ago.

There used to be dozens of movie theaters scattered across Detroit’s neighborhoods. Nearly all of them have been closed and demolished. There are a handful left. One of them is the Alger Theater  in the MorningSide neighborhood on Detroit’s east side.

Paul Phillips is a board member of the MorningSide Community Organization. He says the Alger was once central to the area, a gathering place that helped keep the business district along East Warren Avenue buzzing.

One of the big issues in Detroit is blight. People walking away from their properties or foreclosures are the base of the problem. After that, it’s people stealing things out of the empty house.

Some neighborhoods have been devastated by abandoned homes and the scrappers who strip them. The MorningSide neighborhood on Detroit’s east side hasn’t hit the level of devastation, but it’s been hit pretty hard.

Detroit still has a reputation for being a high-crime city. However, like the rest of the nation, Detroit’s violent crime rate has been steadily declining since the late 1980s.

Detroit’s reputation as a high crime city has not gone away, but its crime rate is down substantially. It’s been falling since the 1980s. But there are areas of the city that are not as safe as others.

Detroit Neighborhood Police Officer (NPO) DeAndre Gaines at the Department’s Fifth Precinct picked me up for a ride-along in his patrol car. We headed to the MorningSide neighborhood on the city’s east side.

Update: 5/24/2017 The business, Hammer Time True Value Hardware, closed shortly after the interview with owner Bill Kamman. That leaves another substantial gap in the business district on E. Warren Avenue in the MorningSide neighborhood.

There are small business districts throughout Detroit that are barely hanging on. They were once thriving. But population loss and the loss of wealth in the neighborhoods have created hard times for neighborhood businesses. The question is: what to do with them now?

Detroit might be one of the largest socio-economic laboratories in the world. Billionaires are rehabbing iconic downtown buildings. The federal government is funding demolition of tens of thousands of abandoned houses. And private foundations are testing out all kinds of projects to see what might spark neighborhood revival.

Many Detroit neighborhoods need help. A lot of blocks are little more than a couple of occupied homes, a few abandoned houses, some burned out structures, and overgrown vacant lots.

Between 1970 and 2010 Detroit lost more than 228 thousand occupied housing units according to a recent report by the Urban Institute. 

Downtown Detroit is in a revival, but neighborhoods across the city are still declining. One of the reasons is the onslaught of tax foreclosures.  Those foreclosure mean more vacant houses. Soon the homes are stripped by scrappers, and the destruction can affect the whole block.

Ulysses Jones drove me around his neighborhood, MorningSide, on Detroit’s east side. He’s with a community organization also called MorningSide.