The End of Detroit

Author: Micheline Maynard
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0385511523
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
An in-depth, hard-hitting account of the mistakes, miscalculations and myopia that have doomed America’s automobile industry. In the 1990s, Detroit’s Big Three automobile companies were riding high. The introduction of the minivan and the SUV had revitalized the industry, and it was widely believed that Detroit had miraculously overcome the threat of foreign imports and regained its ascendant position. As Micheline Maynard makes brilliantly clear in THE END OF DETROIT, however, the traditional American car industry was, in fact, headed for disaster. Maynard argues that by focusing on high-profit trucks and SUVs, the Big Three missed a golden opportunity to win back the American car-buyer. Foreign companies like Toyota and Honda solidified their dominance in family and economy cars, gained market share in high-margin luxury cars, and, in an ironic twist, soon stormed in with their own sophisticatedly engineered and marketed SUVs, pickups and minivans. Detroit, suffering from a “good enough” syndrome and wedded to ineffective marketing gimmicks like rebates and zero-percent financing, failed to give consumers what they really wanted—reliability, the latest technology and good design at a reasonable cost. Drawing on a wide range of interviews with industry leaders, including Toyota’s Fujio Cho, Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn, Chrysler’s Dieter Zetsche, BMW’s Helmut Panke, and GM’s Robert Lutz, as well as car designers, engineers, test drivers and owners, Maynard presents a stark picture of the culture of arrogance and insularity that led American car manufacturers astray. Maynard predicts that, by the end of the decade, one of the American car makers will no longer exist in its present form.

The Sack of Detroit

Author: Kenneth Whyte
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525521674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
"Vigorous, provocative... The Sack of Detroit is compelling, bold and stylishly written." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal A provocative, revelatory history of the epic rise—and unnecessary fall—of the U.S. automotive industry, uncovering the vivid story of innovation, politics, and business that led to a sudden, seismic shift in American priorities that is still felt today, from the acclaimed author of Hoover In the 1950s, America enjoyed massive growth and affluence, and no companies contributed more to its success than automakers. They were the biggest and best businesses in the world, their leadership revered, their methods imitated, and their brands synonymous with the nation's aspirations. But by the end of the 1960s, Detroit's profits had evaporated and its famed executives had become symbols of greed, arrogance, and incompetence. And no company suffered this reversal more than General Motors, which found itself the main target of a Senate hearing on auto safety that publicly humiliated its leadership and shattered its reputation. In The Sack of Detroit, Kenneth Whyte recounts the epic rise and unnecessary fall of America's most important industry. At the center of his absorbing narrative are the titans of the automotive world but also the crusaders of safety, including Ralph Nader and a group of senators including Bobby Kennedy. Their collision left Detroit in a ditch, launched a new era of consumer advocacy and government regulation, and contributed significantly to the decline of American enterprise. This is a vivid story of politics, business, and a sudden, seismic shift in American priorities that is still felt today.

Detroit Hustle

Author: Amy Haimerl
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 076245735X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Journalist Amy Haimerl and her husband had been priced out of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Seeing this as a great opportunity to start over again, they decide to cash in their savings and buy an abandoned house for 35,000 in Detroit, the largest city in the United States to declare bankruptcy. As she and her husband restore the 1914 Georgian Revival, a stately brick house with no plumbing, no heat, and no electricity, Amy finds a community of Detroiters who, like herself, aren't afraid of a little hard work or things that are a little rough around the edges. Filled with amusing and touching anecdotes about navigating a real-estate market that is rife with scams, finding a contractor who is a lover of C.S. Lewis and willing to quote him liberally, and neighbors who either get teary-eyed at the sight of newcomers or urge Amy and her husband to get out while they can, Amy writes evocatively about the charms and challenges of finding her footing in a city whose future is in question. Detroit Hustle is a memoir that is both a meditation on what it takes to make a house a home, and a love letter to a much-derided city.

Detroit

Author: Charlie LeDuff
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
An explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff “One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan—it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's.” —The Wall Street Journal “Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that’s destroying itself–and breaking his heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.” —Kirkus Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass-production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark, and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Detroit: An American Autopsy is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer.

The Last Days of Detroit

Author: Mark Binelli
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 184792168X
Category : Detroit (Mich.)
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
* It was 'the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow'. But the Fifties witnessed one of the greatest economic slides of the last century, as Detroit, formerly a beacon of the capitalist dream, degenerated into the urban wilderness it is today, where trees grow from the rooftops of derelict buildings and wild pheasants roam the long-empty parking lots. * By the end of the nineteenth century Detroit was thriving. 1913 saw the arrival of Henry Ford and the Model T plant, mass-producing cars and transforming the area into the Silicon Valley of its day. By the mid-1950s General Motors had become the single biggest employer on earth, and Detroit the fourth largest city in America. * But by the time Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in 1960 - creating Detroit's other great assembly line - the cracks were already beginning to show- big industry was looking elsewhere for cheaper sites, cheaper labour and better tax breaks; urban planning was in meltdown; corruption was rife; racial tensions were running high. * The 1967 riots - at the time the worst in US history - left 43 dead, more than 7,000 arrested and 3,000 buildings destroyed. Detroit, a former beacon of the capitalist dream, had degenerated into an urban wilderness where unemployment ran at 50%. With more guns in the city than people, the murder rate was the highest in America - three times that of New York. * Mark Binelli returned to live in his native Detroit after a break of many years. He tells the story of the boom and the bust - and of the new society to be found emerging from the debris- Detroit with its urban farms and vibrant arts scene - Detroit as a laboratory for the post-industrial, post-recession world. Here's what an iconic rust-belt city now looks like and how it might transform and regenerate itself in the twenty-first century.

Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back

Author: Nathan Bomey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
What happens when an iconic American city goes broke? At exactly 4:06 p.m. on July 18, 2013, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy. It was the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history—the Motor City had finally hit rock bottom. But what led to that fateful day, and how did the city survive the perilous months that followed? In Detroit Resurrected, Nathan Bomey delivers the inside story of the fight to save Detroit against impossible odds. Bomey, who covered the bankruptcy for the Detroit Free Press, provides a gripping account of the tremendous clash between lawyers, judges, bankers, union leaders, politicians, philanthropists, and the people of Detroit themselves. The battle to rescue this iconic city pulled together those who believed in its future—despite their differences. Help came in the form of Republican governor Rick Snyder, a technocrat who famously called himself “one tough nerd”; emergency manager Kevyn Orr, a sharp-shooting lawyer and “yellow-dog Democrat”; and judges Steven Rhodes and Gerald Rosen, the key architects of the grand bargain that would give the city a second chance at life. Detroit had a long way to go. Facing a legacy of broken promises, the city had to seek unprecedented sacrifices from retirees and union leaders, who fought for their pensions and benefits. It had to confront the consequences of years of municipal corruption while warding off Wall Street bond insurers who demanded their money back. And it had to consider liquidating the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose world-class collection became an object of desire for the city’s numerous creditors. In a tight, suspenseful narrative, Detroit Resurrected reveals the tricky path to rescuing the city from $18 billion in debt and giving new hope to its citizens. Based on hundreds of exclusive interviews, insider sources, and thousands of records, Detroit Resurrected gives a sweeping account of financial ruin, backroom intrigue, and political rebirth in the struggle to reinvent one of America’s iconic cities.

Detroit City Is the Place to Be

Author: Mark Binelli
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250039231
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
"The fall and maybe rise of Detroit, America's most epic urban failure, from local native and Rolling Stone reporter Mark BinelliOnce America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists--all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"--its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie--he tracks the signs of blight repurposed, from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller, from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning--what might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century"--

Detroit

Author: David Lee Poremba
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439610142
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
As the roaring twenties came to an end and a new decade dawned, the United States found itself locked in the grips of the Great Depression. The City of Detroit was no exception as industry laid off workers and bread lines formed across the city. Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy led the country in supporting state and federal welfare programs to help people through the economic crisis. By the middle of the 1930s, Detroit began picking itself up out of the economic mud and was soon flexing its industrial muscle as manufacturing, led by the auto industry, put the Motor City back into shape. As the decade ended and war approached, the city was ready to take its place on the world stage. The country reeled from the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor and had to shift its industrial might from civilian use to the war effort. Nowhere was that more evident than in Detroit. Its huge manufacturing capabilities, when turned to the making of the implements of war, earned the city a new nickname. The Motor City became to the Arsenal of Democracy and began to evolve once more. The influx of workers from the Deep South to the war industry added yet another facet to the city's society and culture. As the Second World War came to a close and production re-tooled for the return to civilian life, an economic boom swept through Detroit. The city celebrated its 25oth birthday in 1951, prompting an outpouring of funds to build with. Major additions were made to the Art Institute, the Detroit Historical Museum, and the riverfront.

A $500 House in Detroit

Author: Drew Philp
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147679801X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.

The Detroit Electric Scheme

Author: D. E. Johnson
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 142994028X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Will Anderson is a drunk, heartbroken over the breakup with his fiancée, Elizabeth. He's barely kept his job at his father's company---Detroit Electric, 1910's leading electric automobile manufacturer. Late one night, Elizabeth's new fiancé and Will's one-time friend, John Cooper, asks Will to meet him at the car factory. He finds Cooper dead, crushed in a huge hydraulic roof press. Surprised by the police, Will panics and runs, leaving behind his cap and automobile, and buries his blood-spattered clothing in a garbage can. What follows is a fast-paced, detail-filled ride through early-1900s Detroit, involving murder, blackmail, organized crime, the development of a wonderful friendship, and the inside story on early electric automobiles. Through it all, Will learns that clearing himself of the crime he was framed for is only the beginning. To survive, and for his loved ones to survive, he must also become a man. The Detroit Electric Scheme is populated with fascinating characters, both real and fictional, from a then-flourishing Detroit: The Dodge brothers and Edsel Ford come to life, interacting with denizens of the sordid underbelly of the Motor City, such as Vito Adamo, Detroit's first Mob boss, and Big Boy, the bouncer at a saloon so notorious the newspapers called it "The Bucket of Blood." This expertly plotted debut delivers with great research, wonderfully flawed yet likable characters, and a shattering climax.