It shouldn't be anyone's fucking business why someone leaves Detroit
I can't believe I have to say this
Believe it or not, it has taken me more than a year to compose this screed. Not because I was working on a novel or anything (but I was) or that this particular post took so much time because it was going to shift man’s understanding of a particular subject so greatly that it would alter everything we ever knew. No, it’s just because the subject of which I’m addressing — “leaving” Detroit — is getting so tiresome that every time it comes up, I get just as exasperated trying to write about it.
I left Detroit. Well, I didn’t leave Detroit; I think there’s power in words, and “leave” in this context carries too much weight. I moved to Brooklyn after more than 30 years in Detroit, and if you moved a 10-year-long slider over any part of my timeline in the city, I’ve either been going to school in Detroit, documenting Detroit, being employed in Detroit, paying taxes in Detroit or owning property in Detroit. This is more than bare minimum (particularly the schooling part of the timeline; more on that in a sec), as I’ve had a childhood shaped by Detroit and made conscious decisions as an adult to contribute to Detroit’s well-being. None of this time was wasted, but (presumably) since I have a lot more years left, I wanted to see what life was like living and paying taxes and being employed somewhere that’s not Detroit. I reckon many others at age 35, which is how old I was when I signed the lease for my Bed-Stuy apartment, have had similar feelings living anywhere.
Unfortunately, I moved out when a lot of people are moving out. It has been well-documented that in the last decade-plus, thousands of Detroit residents have been moving out of the city limits, going to far-flung places like Eastpointe and Southfield, and even further to St. Clair Shores. Half-joking, since the long-held tradition of upward mobility to an inner-ring suburb is both a marvel and a perplexity to its more recent observers. I’m also a member of what one might call the “creative class,” which in Detroit context is anyone who doesn’t work at a plant or sell drugs. The U.S. Census does not track how many writers, chefs and music producers leave the city every decade, but if one were to check in with the discourse on Detroit Twitter every two months, it’s safe to say it’s a sizable number.
It used to be that if a person moved from one place to another and were asked the question, “hey, person! Why did you move from that place to this place?,” then that person would give their reason and the conversation would move to another subject. As an elder millennial raised by the youngest boomers on the cusp of Gen X…oh, fuck all that, as a person, I lived in the used-to-be. My reason was that I had a lifelong interest in living in New York City, and that I had a neat alignment of my career (and finances) in a good place, my parents in a healthy place and being completely unattached, so why not? In New York City, this makes you average. In Detroit, it’s a political decision.
In Detroit, everything is a political decision now. It didn’t used to be. I think of the conversations that have come up in recent years that were nearly nonexistent a decade ago. Should I send my white child to a Black school? Is it right to patronize that business that took a chance on Detroit if the owner isn’t racist, but the manager is? Wait, how many people of color are employed at [insert whatever establishment here] anyway? (Have you noticed that so many of these conversations didn’t come up until white people started moving into the city, and why Black people like me are so confused? Boy, have I got a book you should check out…but walk with me here.) And so, there’s an extra layer to not just staying in Detroit, but also justifying — endlessly justifying — why one decides to leave.
It’s even more of a political decision when politicians build platforms around it. Mayor Mike Duggan* (you know why I put the asterisk there, I’m not footnoting it anymore) has pledged to curb the population loss that has had the city circling the drain since the 1940s. By some measures he has; DTE turn-ons or whatever are up, and Land Bank sales keep humming. But there are those pesky Census numbers which dropped in the last count, and journalists now have had to weigh which public entity’s data is more credible.
Caught in the middle of election promises and the evolving social strata of just existing in Detroit are the people who left, and there are demands to know why. Here’s my question: Should people have to answer?
This isn’t for city hall to fight
There are baseline reasons why a mayor or city manager should know why their population is falling. If people are leaving for better schools, then there should be steps taken to improve them. If people are leaving for better city services, same.
Detroit is different, though — and Detroit will always be different. The standards held to Duggan or anyone else in the mayor’s seat will not be the same those in Peoria. It is a big city, a big Black city, with lots of people who have individual reasons for staying and going.
What if the reasons why people leave Detroit are out of a mayor’s control?
My mother talks often about moving to a warmer region because of pre-existing health conditions that would be more bearable in a place that doesn’t drop to near-freezing temperatures every winter — or to be in a state with more robust health care options than the University of Michigan hospital. My father has already made this move, having moved to the Inland Empire a few years ago and goes to any of the numerous beaches along the Pacific anytime he pleases. Like any millennial at my age now, I am facing a possibility that I will have to be near one of them as they age further in their senior years. Had I never moved to New York, but stuck around Detroit until one of them decided they wanted to retire in, say, Florida or wherever all the boomer Blacks are going to end up in their golden years, I’d have to what? Leave Detroit.
Like Remy Patton, a fictional character in my novel-in-TV-development “Boys Come First,” I, too found myself in the real-life thirty-something circumstance of possibly following a lover to another city, which meant abruptly ceasing the career momentum I’d built in Detroit at the time for romance. And then I would’ve had to what? Leave Detroit. (That didn’t work out, though — and all I’ll say more on that is, whew.)
But when you do leave Detroit and travel as much as I have, and live in New York as much as I have, and strike up conversations with strangers in bars as much as I have, and talk to people outside of Detroit as I have, you meet the other Detroiters who left. They did leave to take care of an aging relative. They did leave to follow a partner. They left an abusive relationship. They got transferred to a new office. They wanted a different vibe. They went to school out there and liked it enough to stay. They always wanted to live there. They visited one time, and fell in love with it. They were trying to beat the allegations that got too loud for them to stay. They found someone else living there from Detroit who helped them get settled. (Isn’t that how Black people from the South got settled in Detroit? Isn’t that how immigrants from Lebanon got settled in Detroit? Aren’t things cyclical?)
These reasons are not counted in the Census. These are not talking points in the discourse. “Leaving Detroit” simply boils down to either the mayor isn’t doing enough, or that people are fed up with Detroit. A quick thought on the former: I think my former boss should put all resources into improving things for people who are staying and let the Census thing go already, and understand that we as humans are nomadic. An extended thought on the latter: If being fed up with Detroit is reason enough, shouldn’t we who are not elected officials leave it at that?
Within Detroit, that reason should be enough. It used to be enough. If you were tired of crime, you moved to where there was less crime. If you were tired of bad schools, you moved to where there were better schools. If you were white in Detroit and tired of non-whites creeping into Detroit, you fled. If you were old, you moved to Florida.
In 2023 — now that Detroit is Black — you have to justify why you left. You have to asterisk and footnote and over-explain and give the pros and cons and the compare and contrast. Why should we?
Uncool cities on pleasant peninsulas
I am writing this from an apartment in Lisbon, Portugal, where one of my closest friends is vacationing/working remotely for nearly two months while also publishing a ‘zine to commemorate a return of sorts to the capital.
After the two of us matriculated at Michigan State University in the mid-aughts, he came to Lisbon for a job after a layoff from an American newspaper and lived here for three years — three crucial twenty-something years where he made lasting friendships, developed professionally and found a bit of himself in adulthood. He is back here to reconnect with all those friends and stretch some of the skills he developed in the years since he’s been back living in the States.
When we finished at MSU is important; it was the era of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s “Cool Cities” initiative, in which the state government targeted homegrown boys like us to stick around Michigan after graduation by marketing the state’s “hip” places like Royal Oak (lol) and Kalamazoo as places to start your career and settle. There was a brain drain of educated twenty-somethings headed to Chicago and New York and Chicago and Indianapolis and Chicago and it was predicted to drain the state’s economy over time.
Granholm was half-right. The state’s economy did take a slight hit by not retaining all the smart kids that could have stuck around. But did we have to? At various points between ages 21 and 23, I stared down offers to come to San Jose, Seattle, Fort Lauderdale, Des Moines…and Chicago. Not a time goes by when I don’t ask myself “what if?” Oh, I did make the most of it in Michigan. I mean…hello. But looking at one of my best friends here, Michigan isn’t at a loss just because he’s not physically there.
He had a different experience than me growing up, actually living in East Lansing and walking from the high school graduation stage across Grand River to attend MSU. If the Detroit standard of working in the automotive industry stands as our foremost career option after growing up there, then his path would have led him to either a lifetime at MSU or to state politics. (See also: Fellow Ingham County native Gretchen Whitmer.) But the Lansing area is not made for graphic designers. Neither is Royal Oak or Kalamazoo. New York and Chicago are, though; he lives now in the former. The thing is, we are still Michiganders regardless where in the world we are.
At a dinner with friends with Lisbon, we both talked at length — him more than me — about feeling deeply after back-to-back tragedies at our alma mater, the Larry Nassar scandal and the campus mass shooting. How this thing just doesn’t happen where we went to school and how alumni everywhere are constantly in community. How we still visit home as often as we can, and how yeah the coast of Portugal is nice but did you know that the state of Michigan has more coastline than most places in the world?
Just because we leave, we don’t leave behind. We carry Michigan everywhere we go; for him, it was into top-masthead gigs at Women’s Wear Daily and Rolling Stone, two magazines that are simply not published in mid-Michigan. People already know — if you don’t know, now you know — I take Detroit everywhere; I mean, I’ve been in Brownsville (IYKYK) with the Olde English D fitted on. Could that be enough? It used to be. My friend leaving his hometown doesn’t carry near as much weight as me leaving mine.
You’re still not more Detroit than me, though
It used to be that even if you weren’t physically in Detroit, you could still talk about it.
When I give talks about Detroit, I reference often that Diana Ross, who hadn’t even reached the height of her divadom at the time, mentioned keeping her California-raised kids grounded was by making sure they spent summers with relatives in Detroit. (We see now that this down-to-earth approach is manifested in the fact that none of her children have succumbed to the typical ills that befall celebrity children; say what you want about Diana, but when’s the last time you heard anything crazy about Tracee?) There is not a point in history where you can say Ross, or any other major Motown star, has denounced Detroit. There are several points where you can catch all of them speaking highly of the city that made them.
Black Detroiters have always had pride in where they come from. And up until recently — there’s that word again — it’s never been questioned.
I couldn’t have felt more proud to be a Detroiter than when I was invited to attend a “Detroit night” staging of Dominique Morrisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” in which the entire audience was Detroit expats living in NYC and the Tri-state, and Detroiters visiting NYC for the week. I saw old friends, caught up with my old boss and met new ones. (I also remembered how many people I assumed lived in Detroit actually didn’t; how did I not know Herb Boyd, who I’d crossed paths with a few times in the city, wasn’t, like, chilling in Rosedale Park somewhere?) Cass Tech was mentioned in the script’s dialogue, and half the audience roared. The applause was extra loud when the play’s co-star Chante Adams, a Cass Tech alumna, took her bows.
Moments like those mean nothing to the white Detroiter who moved to Detroit in 2010 and think they can claim a level of Detroit-ness that I can’t anymore. I’ve said over and over that no one person is more Detroit than the next, and perhaps my thoughts on that contributed to why a certain set of white transplants think that way. But let me be clear on this though, that I’m not going to argue my Detroit credentials to Detroiters-come-lately regardless of what my drivers’ license says.
See the thing is, I can talk about Detroit because I know Detroit. My thing has always been that there are too many people talking about Detroit that don’t even know Woodward is the dividing line. There were always too many white entrepreneurs on panels telling us poor Black folks what we need when they’d only been living in Detroit (in Corktown) for a year. There were always too many grants handed to white artists documenting the ruins their grandparents left when they fled. And even now, there were always too many white journalists learning Detroit on the job while inadvertently crowding out the Black natives who could never get a shot.
At the time when I began to write about the above, I did not foresee myself in the position of having to one day defend Detroit from a distance, much less living outside of it. Defending my Detroitness from a distance is also something I never saw coming. Even with ambassadors like not just Morrisseau, but also Jemele Hill and Sam Richardson and Big Sean, it’s tricky territory to navigate. I shouldn’t have to, but I find myself having to. I was in a back-and-forth with Michael Radtke, a Sterling Heights City Councilman who said I had “hit it big” (I didn’t, I just get jobs and write books like everyone else in NYC) and insinuated I shouldn’t have an opinion on Detroit because I’m not there, and I was like wait — why the fuck am I Twitter-fingering with a city councilmember from one of the most mid, least exciting cities in the metro? They’re not even full-time councilmembers in Sterling Whites! I used to work with full-time councilmembers!
You’re becoming New York, and not in a good way
Remember that joke about Newer Detroiters arguing with New Detroiters? That same applies to New York City on a more macro-level, with recent transplants arguing with pre-pandemic transplants arguing with the oldest wave of transplants. I was gladly exempt from the former and willingly sit out the latter.
Still, let’s dwell on that though. New Detroiters are often a single circle in the Venn diagram of White Detroiters who moved to the city around 2010, give or take five years. They are the ones who wear Detroit T-shirts in the city limits, the ones who reference their great-grandmother raising five kids in a house off Gratiot back in 1915 or whatever, the ones who insist they’re doing it right unlike their friends still in the suburbs — and the ones that now, in 2023, have been here more than a decade, have voted in multiple elections, likely own property and pay taxes, and filled out the last Census.
And it makes them annoying as fuck.
Sure, they check off the boxes of being a Detroiter. Their drivers’ license and car insurance costs say as much. But somehow, it gave them — you, if you’re reading this — a weird sort of carte blanche to lord over who’s Detroit and who’s not Detroit that didn’t quite exist when I was writing about this five years ago. Ten years ago. Ever.
I mentioned race and Black Detroit a few times throughout, and that’s intentional. Because when I look at who’s the most judgmental about “leaving” Detroit, it’s the no-longer New Detroiters. The white ones who still have too much to say.
Oh, no one’s saying that you can’t raise your voice at city council meetings or open businesses on Michigan Ave or send your white kids to Black schools — nobody has said any of this. But those experiences are still unlike mine or thousands of Detroiters, expat or resident, because we’ve done all that and more.
The reason I might get annoyed with someone like Bridge Detroit’s Detroit reporter Malachi Barrett referring to DDOT routes as their numeric names and not their street names is because it used to be the street names. Well, it wasn’t used to be, it is. I know this because I rode that raggedy Dexter bus up and down to Renaissance every day, a Detroit Public School. Ask how many journalists covering Detroit right now to name all the magnets besides Cass without googling it first.
I went to DPS, rode DDOT buses, danced at VFW parties, listened to JLB. I got my learner’s permit to drive at Mackenzie High School after having to learn how to successfully merge onto the Lodge. I can’t jit but I can try. I wore a fake Coogi throughout 9th grade that no one knew was fake. I remember when the 105.9 DJs were beefing with the JLB DJs and someone said someone’s minor daughter was ugly live on the air. I thought the Aaliyah crash was a bad dream because I fell asleep watching whatever NBC had on the night before and woke up in a haze to WDIV’s morning anchor team announcing it. I have a Santa Bear from Hudson’s. I remember when charter schools were opening and DPS having a radio campaign to keep parents away from them. (It didn’t work.) Emery King came to our elementary school and we treated him like a celebrity. A crackhead stole my mother’s snowblower in the summer and hit our garage again to get our lawnmower in the winter, and then offered to cut our grass with said lawnmower that following spring, but it was fine because his mother stayed over on the next block and we knew she was tired.
I did all this and then watched the city through bankruptcy, found my favorite table at Honest John’s and accepted the fact that Movement was no longer free.
I could go on sounding like a jessica Care moore poem, but I’m sorry — none of these new folks who are renovating in Jefferson-Chalmers at the moment can tell me what I can and can’t do as a Detroiter. I’ve got enough Detroit in me to last a lifetime-plus, and that’s valid everywhere.
So if you ask why I left, I’ll gladly tell you why. And you should just leave it at that. But also, keep it that way with everyone else. You don’t have the authority to measure other people’s choices just because they don’t align with yours.
Hi! Sorry I’ve been inactive on Substack for like two years, but it’s still here…and free! Any questions, comment below or drop a line to aaronkfoley[at]gmail[dot]com.
In retrospect, I sincerely doubt living in Kalamazoo from after I graduated college until I turned 31 had a beneficial effect on my career. There's a decent chance I'd be earning a much higher salary now if I'd left when most of my friends did. Oh well. 😅
“Movement was no longer free.”
I still slip and call it DEMF sometimes.