Suzette Hackney is an editorial writer and columnist for The Blade in Toledo. She was a Detroit-based journalist for 17 years. Follow her on Twitter: @suzyscribe.

On a sunny Tuesday earlier this month, I watched from the picture window of one of Detroit’s new and hip West Village eateries as children whizzed by on scooters, smiling couples walked their designer dogs and tattooed millennials chatted among themselves while smoking both electronic and tobacco-laced cigarettes.

The corner of Agnes and Parker streets is a vibrant microcosm of Detroit’s so-called urban pioneer movement. And inside the restaurant named Craft Work, the long high-top tables and bar stools were nearly filled to capacity with folks sipping on specialty cocktails and noshing on warm chickpeas and fish tacos. The whole scene was a far cry from when I lived in the adjoining apartment building in the early 2000s, when darkened gas lights helped obscure the vacant store fronts of the former retail strip. There were no pop-ups to attract people, and the limited foot traffic was mostly from those who lived in my building or the one across the street, and were walking to or from the secured parking lots.


But this is the new Detroit.

I’m not writing this letter from afar; I live 45 minutes south of the city in Toledo, Ohio. Detroit is where I lived, worked and played until two years ago, when I left the city to accept a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. I was a newspaper reporter in Detroit from 1996 to 2012. I worked for both dailies, but spent most of my career at the Detroit Free Press covering City Hall, crime, neighborhoods and the run-up to the appointment of the city’s emergency manager, who in July 2013 filed bankruptcy on behalf of Detroit and last week handed back management of the city to the mayor and city council.

I still own a home in an inner-ring suburb, less than a mile from the city proper. My network of friends remains in Detroit, and in many ways I still consider the Motor City my home base. But I must admit that leaving Detroit has given me a chance to step back and observe with a journalistic eye the city’s transformation, a luxury often not possible when I was reporting on murders and the city's budget crisis every day.

Every time I return to the city, the landscape has changed: Where once was a vandalized shell of a building, there’s a new coffee shop here or a high-end clothing boutique there. Whole Foods opened in Midtown last year, the first national food retailer to invest in the city in years. The market is boosting local businesses by carrying Detroit-made products on its shelves. And the upscale Shinola hawks its thousand-dollar watches, leather goods and bicycles in a renovated century-old automobile warehouse near Wayne State University. A new hockey arena, entertainment district and streetcar system are coming online. Most of this development is occurring in downtown, Midtown and Corktown—areas that have seen significant progress in the last decade—and trickling into neighborhoods such as West Village, located on one edge of the city’s central business district. There’s a palpable energy; Detroit’s decades of urban decay are finally giving way to reinvestment and revitalization.

Still a question looms: Is there room for low income residents to benefit from the dazzling reinvention of their city?

Newlyweds Michael and Tia Hilson are long-time Detroiters, living in the low-income MarketPlace Court apartments near Eastern Market. Michael is 29, has a 5-year old daughter and works as a manager for various musical acts from metro Detroit and elsewhere. He questions why millions of dollars are being spent on a streetcar system instead of investing in education and job training for future generations.

“They could take this money and put it in [Detroit Public Schools],” he said. This development “is for the white folks and tourists. It ain’t for us.”

Tia Hilson, 25, chimed in, as she and her husband fed neighborhood kids grilled hotdogs from their patio Saturday afternoon. She said she hasn’t seen any of the benefits that others say have bloomed from bankruptcy.

“We pay, we pay, we pay and we are tired of paying,” she said of the improved services they haven’t experienced. “When’s the real change going to come?”

Detroit is now a place where, in its most bustling parts, the faces are often young and white. Eighty-three percent of Detroit’s 688,701 residents are African American, according to the latest Census figures—the city has been majority black for more than three decades—but you’d be hard pressed to believe those numbers because, well, the black population seems less visible now. National media outlets have been criticized for parachuting into the city, and only showing white Detroit. But if we are painfully honest with ourselves, the growing majority of startups, businesses and restaurants attracting such broad attention, are mostly white owned. Dispatches from Detroit as the latest urban comeback story don’t often include scenes from deep inside the city’s distressed neighborhoods. Such ruin porn, as it’s called, would defeat the purpose.

The fact that the Motor City is in the throes of a landmark bankruptcy, the largest municipal Chapter 9 filing in American history, only adds to the turnaround narrative. Bankruptcy proceedings, now being heard in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, have been billed as the high-stakes future of the city. The plan of adjustment would allow the city to shed $7 billion of its debt, while investing $1.4 billion over 10 years to improve city services. This month, Detroit reached an agreement with one of its biggest creditors—Syncora Guarantee Inc., a New York-based bond insurer that had served as one of the main roadblocks in its restructuring plan. It’s an overwhelmingly positive sign that proceedings are on the right track, and the city could emerge from bankruptcy as soon as next month.

“Bankruptcy, I believe, was a necessary tool that had to be utilized to upright our financial situation,” Detroit City Councilman James Tate told me. “When you are drowning in debt, there’s no way to provide the services our citizens deserve at a satisfactory level.”

Under the plan, city operations are expected to be streamlined and functional. And residential services will be hit with an infusion of cash that will pay for working street lights, upgrades and repairs to parks, buses that run on time and demolition of thousands of abandoned houses and buildings. These are huge and necessary meliorations to some of the city’s most vexing problems. The prospect—however real or imagined—is a city that is open for new business.

I’m excited about this new Detroit, but I am also deeply troubled. I am concerned that there is not more of a conversation about Detroit’s poor, black and under-educated residents. I’m worried about the widening gap of segregation by income. I’m fearful that in our desire to see one of the world’s iconic cities remake itself into an attractive hub for the tech savvy, the artistic and the upwardly mobile, we’re losing perspective of the need for sustainable jobs and an affordable quality of life for the majority of those who don’t live in downtown or Midtown and will never have more than a tangential connection to those areas.

To be fair, Detroiters have for decades complained that the central business district received all the attention and investment from politicians and developers, while those living in the neighborhoods were forced to fend for themselves. Kim Trent, a community activist who works at an Ann Arbor think tank called Michigan Future, and is a member of the Board of Governors for Wayne State University, reminded me of this as we discussed the city’s future. Still, there are differences.

Billionaire Dan Gilbert, a name that’s becoming as synonymous with Detroit commerce as Henry Ford’s was back in the day, has purchased 60 buildings in downtown Detroit. He’s creating an incubator of innovation, anchored by Quicken Loans, his online mortgage company. Gilbert has hired his own security force to ensure that his employees are shielded from violent crime and his properties protected from graffiti and vandalism. And instead of waiting on state funding, Gilbert is financing a $1.25 million road construction project that will help improve access and traffic flow to the downtown area and to Greektown Casino-Hotel, which he owns.

“It’s not an illusion that these parts of the city are getting more resources,” Trent said of downtown and Midtown. “The question becomes, Is it the chicken or the egg? Are these places now getting more attention because the racial makeup has changed, or are the racially-diverse residents commanding more attention?”

I’m not trying to race bait, though I’m certain I will be accused of doing so. I wouldn’t dream of Kanye West-ing myself into a “they don’t care about black people” blanket statement about Detroit’s power structure. And I’m happy to see vibrant pockets of Detroit that are attractive to white people. The city needs people to invest in it, and live there, irrespective of race. The color I am speaking of is the one we all want to have in our pockets. Detroit’s median household income is $24,820, with nearly 60 percent of its children living below the poverty level. By comparison, neighboring Oakland County’s median income is $67,202 and Macomb County’s is $52,851. Detroit’s unemployment rate stubbornly outpaces the country’s largest cities at 17 percent. I’ve watched as the poorest of the poor have been forced to grocery shop at the corner party store for cheap vittles or nearly electrocute themselves because they were trying to tap into a power line to heat their unfurnished and uninsulated shack of a home. But it’s a tough sell to convince editors, or even bankruptcy attorneys, that tales from the ’hood—the down and out African-American hood—are important to a restructuring plan or vital to honest coverage, particularly when the stories coming out of Detroit for years were all about crime and blight, political corruption, a failing auto industry, racial disharmony, a failing school system, poverty and just straight-up hopelessness. There’s a woeful-Detroit fatigue, and understandably so. We’re tired of the bad news. We want to see Detroit’s revival, and live to talk about it.

“Detroit is making progress, but I think the question is ‘progress for who?’ and ‘who is being left behind?’” Michael Whitty, a retired University of Detroit Mercy professor of management and labor relations, and a city researcher for the past 40-plus years, told me. “The positives from the city filing bankruptcy won’t reach the most disadvantaged stratum of Detroit. They won’t even get the most entry-level jobs.”

The people Professor Whitty speaks of are the underclass of Detroit—the human reality of decades of devastation—and they happen to mostly be black. What makes Detroit so complex is its history. In the 1950s, the city peaked at nearly 2 million residents. The auto industry created a temporary level playing field where the uneducated could get a factory job and live a middle-class lifestyle. Yet people with the means began fleeing to the suburbs for better schools and less crime, and a riot in 1967 drove out even more. The exodus of manufacturing jobs left behind a caste system, similar to other industrial regions. Metropolitan Detroit became and remains the nation’s most segregated—a black and poor city surrounded by white and more affluent suburbs. Now there’s a new ring of white affluence in the city, creating almost a reverse Oreo, with black Detroit as the filling.

What’s left in many parts of Detroit’s 139 square miles is widespread neighborhood abandonment. Construction of the M-1 Rail, a streetcar line that will run from downtown to the New Center, means little to those stuck in these neighborhoods, a lost generation with no hope in sight. Some of them chose to be there—they’ve embraced a life of crime, or dropped out of school, or decided that smoking weed is more important than keeping a job, or had too many babies at too young of an age. Personal responsibility will always be a driving factor in personal destiny. But not everyone gets a foundational fair shake. Private donors and nonprofits have only committed to doing so much. They have deep pockets, but have not signed on to pay for the massive overhaul the city’s school system needs. Legislators in the state capitol of Lansing aren’t going to pay for it. The city doesn’t have the tax base—at least not yet—to pay for it. If these entrepreneurs and business owners really want to find employees in a city where 47 percent of residents are illiterate, it takes job programs that offer training tailored to local industries.

There, too, is a need for a social and cultural shift among residents, yet I don’t see anyone stepping up to help push Detroiters out of their comfort zones of despair. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is an operations guy. I have little doubt he will ensure that the trash is picked up and that dilapidated houses are demolished; he’s already making inroads in those areas. Fifty new buses are coming, thanks to Duggan lobbying for a $25.9 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant. His administration is also forcing people living in decent areas to fix up their homes or risk losing them. But I’m not certain the urgent message is being carried into most of the neighborhoods: Get on this train of resurgence right now or be left behind.

Is that a job for someone or some entity? I think so. I want somebody or something to reach back for them. I’m frustrated and angry—both at residents for not working to be better, and at a city that let so many of them down. I don’t know what the long view is for Detroit, but I don’t see substantive policies that will do anything other than make Detroit a nicer place to live in poverty for most residents. Urban pioneering alone will not change Detroit, and I can’t shake my feelings of unease. For so long, even as I helped expose all the problems of the city, I wished and prayed for a better Detroit. I just always hoped it would be a better place for all.