In Flint, you can’t drink the water. In Detroit, you can’t turn on the water.
Thousands of Detroiters have had their tap water cut by the city for late bills in what the United Nations considers a humanitarian crime. At the same time as water won’t flow from the tap, hundreds – if not thousands – of the city’s fire hydrants no longer function.
Arsonists know this. They also know barely any of the of fires set each year get investigated. How many fires are we talking here? Motor City Muckraker recently tallied the total.
10,000 fires in just three years. That’s how fast Detroit is burning. Like so many stories of collapse in Michigan, you have to ask: how the fuck did it get this bad?
Since the riots in the early 1940’s and late 1960’s, fire has been a common tool of the discontented, the outraged, the hopeless, and the pyromaniacs of Detroit. Devil’s Night (on the eve of Halloween each year) became a legendary evening of arson for the city, with one single night in the 80’s claiming hundreds of buildings.
Today, 4th of July has replaced Devil’s Night as the new date of mass conflagration. Last summer on July 4th the Detroit Fire Department responded to over sixty calls in 24 hours.
But Detroit’s history with infernos goes back even further. Like most 19th century cities, it burned down in such epic fashion that an image of a burning Detroit now appears on the city’s official flag with the words Resurget Cineribus, Latin for “It will rise from the ashes“.
I doubt those city founders could have fathomed how tragically ironic those words would ring in the year 2016. While downtown and Mid-Town are rapidly gentrifying, the rest of the city continues to depopulate.
90,000 vacant buildings litter Detroit’s urban landscape, many of them still connected to sewer, water, and electric utilities that drain scarce resources in an already struggling city. At best, only about a thousand can be demolished each year.
It’s been hypothesized this is why massive cuts in funding to DFD made under the Bing administration in 2012 have not been restored: those in charge are using one of Detroit’s biggest problems to solve another.
Some fire fighters have even speculated that contracts demolishers bid for are further capitalized on by arson. The Detroit Building Authority developed strict environmental standards for how demolitions must be done to prevent pollution from entering air, soil, and water. Various building materials must be carefully handled and disposed of separately.
It’s costlier, but it’s ecologically responsible.
But if a building gets torched, the entire site is considered contaminated. Most of what’s left is simply hauled to a landfill. A company who’s already secured a contract could conceivably save themselves large sums of cash if the structure is burned instead. This theory is speculative, but it’s something I’ve heard Detroit fire fighters claim routinely takes place.
With so few arsons ever investigated, such a crime would be almost impossible to convict.
It’s certainly reasonable to make such intelligent speculation when you’re on the front lines of a lethal force that’s devouring the city and ending lives. Things have gotten so hard for Detroit’s fire fighters that locals started crowd-sourcing for them, using money from street art and other donations to help fill in the funding gaps.
Of course, Mayor Duggan didn’t like the kind of negative attention that brought his office, so naturally the city sent police after at least one artist involved in making DetroitHydrants.com graphics, even though he was never caught tagging them to signs and walls around the city.
This isn’t the first time Duggan has reacted hostilely to criticism that his administration is ignoring a crisis. Last year the mayor labeled a highly detailed arson report compiled by urban data firm Loveland Technologies “unbelievably inaccurate“. This condemnation shocked many, considering Loveland’s solid reputation for exhaustively well researched publications.
Perhaps most damning in the report: the fact that most fires set in Detroit were not in abandoned buildings as many had believed. The majority of Detroit’s fires were in functional, occupied structures, and the majority of these fires made those buildings permanently uninhabitable.
Like George Bush’s twisted ‘War on Terror’ doctrine, instead of destroying vacant buildings, Detroit’s arson crisis just creates more of them. Detroit’s biggest problem is making its other problem worse, not better.
What infuriates me and many others is that there is no shortage of money to redevelop the central city. The mayor and council championed spending half a billion dollars on a new hockey arena while the rest of the city limps through a Walking Dead hellscape.
The people of Detroit are tolerant and supportive of one another, but they do not tolerate injustice. Sooner or later, those in power enriching their billionaire friends while the city burns are going to be held accountable.
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All images copyright Rebel Metropolis.
Burn – The Detroit firefighter film – December 2011 Promo
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