After Michael Moore claimed credit for changing the health care vote of his congressman, I was so confused I looked up the boundaries of Bart Stupak’s first Michigan district.
It does not include Flint, but does include the entire upper peninsula, as well as the northeast quadrant of the lower one. It has more land and more counties than any other and probably the lowest population density in the state.
Its boom times came with logging and mining, exploitive industries that moved on when the resources were gone, leaving environmental eyesores that time and the CCC reforested. The soil’s too thin to support farming, the summer’s too short. The region now lives on tourists, seasonal residents, retirees, the neighboring lakes and what natural resources are left.
As I looked at the map, I realized both health insurance and abortion are problems of areas with reasonable, if not now healthy, economies. In Stupak’s district, I imagine the major health crisis is simply finding a doctor.
A study done for the Michigan Medical Society in 2005 listed three counties Stupak represents as having the fewest number of physicians per 100,000 residents: Arenac, Keewenaw and Oscoda. The last two have only one physician. He also represents three counties with high ratios, but such small populations the numbers are probably misleading: Emmett had 32,741 people in 2003, Dickinson 27,186, and Marquette 64,616.
In contrast, Kalamazoo and Genesse counties, some of the hardest hit by the state’s deindustrailization, were still in the top ten best counties for physician availability. Both had grown on lumber, but Kalamazoo replaced the paper industry with a pharmaceutical company and Genesee includes Flint. The drug company was sold, and its operations slowly closed. Even the new research center in Washtenaw county’s Ann Arbor was shut as redundant. Moore has documented what happened to his home town.
The place where I grew up, bordering Kalamazoo and Ingham counties, home of Oldsmobile, was never as rich as Kalamazoo, Flint or Lansing, but had three factories making parts for automobiles, refrigerators and televisions, as well as a community hospital built in 1924. The hospital was sold to private investors in 1967, and closed in 2002, the same year the last large factory moved operations to Mexico.
The town is better off than Keewenaw and Oscoda counties. There are still hospitals in cities 30 miles away, and it still has physicians. The roads, including an interstate, are clear most of the year, unlike the far north, but most of the doctors have Indian sounding last names.
Stupak’s district does not include a single county with an abortion rate near the state’s 12.5 per 1,000 women of child bearing age. Some have numbers so low, they can’t be reported statistically.
With so few physicians, there may be areas with no abortion provider. Women have to go elsewhere, as the residents do for any kind of specialized medical service. Some abortions may be buried in the statistics for young people who leave the region every year, and others may use unlicensed practitioners or folk remedies.
Young, unmarried teenagers, however, aren’t the only ones who seek abortions. When you read oral histories of poor areas or descriptions of folk medicine, you realize that abortion has always existed, regardless of cultural values, among women who felt there was no way they could feed another person. In areas with no self-sustaining economies, perceptions of malnourishment and deprivation may differ, but the edge of subsistence is still there.
The areas with abortion rates above Michigan’s average are all ones that have seen their industrial economies threatened since I graduated from high school: Detroit with 29.2 per 1,000 women, the rest of Wayne County with 17.1, Genesse with 15.2, Kalamazoo with 15.0, Saginaw with 14.3, Ingham with 13.7, and my home county with 13.2.
The high abortion rates seem to reflect the sense of economic desperation of people who see their incomes falling or disappearing. The health reform bill doesn’t address that root problem, only the consequences.
People, like his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall, ask how Stupak could be against health care reform when there are 44,000 uninsured people in his district. That’s more people than live in many of the constituent counties. The bill doesn’t address the problem of shortages of doctors and nurses, only creates more demand on the existing ones and keeps the Medicaid reimbursements lower than those paid in more affluent areas with lower doctor-patient ratios.
Stupak’s views on abortion probably not only arise from his Roman Catholic background, but from the fact one of his sons committed suicide in 2000. Anyone who’s lost a child that way is likely to have a more emotional view of the value of children.
Moore may like to take credit for helping convince Stupak that many more of his voters and contributors supported health care reform than he may have thought, but Moore’s self congratulations don’t recognize that for Stupak, more than political calculation was involved, and the benefits to his district are not as great as they are to Flint or Saginaw.
Notes:
Michigan Department of Community Health. “Abortion Rates by County of Residence, State of Michigan, Michigan Counties and Detroit City, 1998 - 2008.”
Moore, Michael. “How the People in My District Changed Stupak's Mind and Saved Health Care Reform,” Huffington Post 22 March 2010.
Public Policy Associates, Inc. “The Future Supply and Demand for Physicians in Michigan,” 2005.
Saltonstall, Connie. Campaign website.
Showing posts with label Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cameron. Show all posts
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Packard Plant
Recently, Jason Linkins featured an article by Thomas Morton that ridiculed the standard Decadent Detroit journalist’s tour that always includes a photograph of the closed Packard plant on East Grand Boulevard. The deluxe, VIP version of the standard tourist itinerary is the one followed by Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, the one that includes a few private conversations with "real natives" that leave them experts on the state of the automotive industry.
Stale as it gets, the Packard plant does, in fact, symbolize everything that was once good about the automotive industry and much that’s bad about the city.
The building, designed in 1905 by Alfred Kahn, was the first to use reinforced concrete. His early factories were several floors high, and strong enough to support the weight of vehicle production and assembly. After the perfection of distributed electric systems, Kahn built the first modern glass and concrete, one-story plant for Dodge in Warren in 1937.
He innovated in materials, construction techniques, and design. More important, Kahn didn’t retire after making one contribution or simply cash in on his contacts with commissions for private estates, but continued to experiment with industrial architecture. However desolate, his Packard plant still stands after more than a hundred years, and until recently, it could have been renovated.
Although Packard Motor Car Company, then part of Studebaker, closed in 1956, the final destruction of the building is recent. In 1960, the compound was converted into an industrial park that degenerated into a half-vacant warren of small businesses, while the neighborhood, near an interstate, became increasingly more dangerous. Young people used it for raves and paint ball fights.
In the late 1990's, the state held title to much of the adjoining property from unpaid taxes. In 1997, Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer, or his cronies, thought they saw an opportunity to convert the land into an Empowerment Zone with tax breaks, and began foreclosure proceedings for the million plus dollars owed the city in back taxes.
The next year, the state’s Department of Community Health was asked to evaluate the hazards at the 35-acre brown field. It determined the worst problems were asbestos, lead paint, bird droppings, tires and bales of plastic waste, costly to remediate, but not serious.
While the unnamed owners were fighting for title in court, the city evicted the tenants of Motor City Industrial Park, erected a protective fence, and posted guards.
Two years ago, the state supreme court ruled the owners had paid just enough of their taxes to retain ownership. The sitting mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, removed the city’s guards, and vandals moved in with welding torches to strip out steel beams. The fire department is called several times a month, but now limits its efforts to protecting the area, because the buildings have become too dangerous.
The names of the new owners aren’t published, but are known to include Romel Casab, a bottom feeding land speculator, and are suspected to include Dominic Cristini, a convicted drug dealer. When the netherworld moves in, a site is doomed. In the years when Archer was mayor, my hometown was discovering one of its abandoned industrial sites had been systematically used for illegal chemical dumping and qualified as a superfund site.
The stand-off between rivals with different visions for creating personal wealth that negate each other and result in nothing is one enduring city trait the Packard Plant symbolizes. After 50 years, no one has even been able to tear it down as a public health nuisance, not even when Detroit was using urban development funds after the riots to reduce most of the city’s landscape to barren rubble.
However, the magazine story that prompted Morton’s outrage hasn’t been without its benefits. Earlier this month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid used it to justify giving four states special consideration in the evolving health care bill. He said "The cover of Time magazine shows a dilapidated city, dilapidated streets, the debris covering the road and windows knocked out of abandoned buildings. It looks like a ghost town" and then made sure his home state of Nevada was the one that got the Medicaid break.
Notes:
Cruz, John. "Welcome to Mt. Palmer: A look Inside Detroit’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood," posted on his cruzweb.net site.
Guthrie, Doug. "City Loses Site Fight: State Court Denies Detroit's Packard Title Bid," The Detroit News, 2 February 2007.
Linkins, Jason. "Getting The Detroit Story Right," Huffington Post, 29 September 2009.
McGraw, Bill. "Historic Auto Plant Shows Signs of Life," Detroit Free Press, 27 April 2008.
Michigan Department of Community Health. "Health Consultation, Packard Plant, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan," 23 March 1998, posted on United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website.
Shepardson, David. "Senate's Top Democrat Pushes Bill to Aid Michigan," The Detroit News, 1 October 2009.
Stale as it gets, the Packard plant does, in fact, symbolize everything that was once good about the automotive industry and much that’s bad about the city.
The building, designed in 1905 by Alfred Kahn, was the first to use reinforced concrete. His early factories were several floors high, and strong enough to support the weight of vehicle production and assembly. After the perfection of distributed electric systems, Kahn built the first modern glass and concrete, one-story plant for Dodge in Warren in 1937.
He innovated in materials, construction techniques, and design. More important, Kahn didn’t retire after making one contribution or simply cash in on his contacts with commissions for private estates, but continued to experiment with industrial architecture. However desolate, his Packard plant still stands after more than a hundred years, and until recently, it could have been renovated.
Although Packard Motor Car Company, then part of Studebaker, closed in 1956, the final destruction of the building is recent. In 1960, the compound was converted into an industrial park that degenerated into a half-vacant warren of small businesses, while the neighborhood, near an interstate, became increasingly more dangerous. Young people used it for raves and paint ball fights.
In the late 1990's, the state held title to much of the adjoining property from unpaid taxes. In 1997, Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer, or his cronies, thought they saw an opportunity to convert the land into an Empowerment Zone with tax breaks, and began foreclosure proceedings for the million plus dollars owed the city in back taxes.
The next year, the state’s Department of Community Health was asked to evaluate the hazards at the 35-acre brown field. It determined the worst problems were asbestos, lead paint, bird droppings, tires and bales of plastic waste, costly to remediate, but not serious.
While the unnamed owners were fighting for title in court, the city evicted the tenants of Motor City Industrial Park, erected a protective fence, and posted guards.
Two years ago, the state supreme court ruled the owners had paid just enough of their taxes to retain ownership. The sitting mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, removed the city’s guards, and vandals moved in with welding torches to strip out steel beams. The fire department is called several times a month, but now limits its efforts to protecting the area, because the buildings have become too dangerous.
The names of the new owners aren’t published, but are known to include Romel Casab, a bottom feeding land speculator, and are suspected to include Dominic Cristini, a convicted drug dealer. When the netherworld moves in, a site is doomed. In the years when Archer was mayor, my hometown was discovering one of its abandoned industrial sites had been systematically used for illegal chemical dumping and qualified as a superfund site.
The stand-off between rivals with different visions for creating personal wealth that negate each other and result in nothing is one enduring city trait the Packard Plant symbolizes. After 50 years, no one has even been able to tear it down as a public health nuisance, not even when Detroit was using urban development funds after the riots to reduce most of the city’s landscape to barren rubble.
However, the magazine story that prompted Morton’s outrage hasn’t been without its benefits. Earlier this month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid used it to justify giving four states special consideration in the evolving health care bill. He said "The cover of Time magazine shows a dilapidated city, dilapidated streets, the debris covering the road and windows knocked out of abandoned buildings. It looks like a ghost town" and then made sure his home state of Nevada was the one that got the Medicaid break.
Notes:
Cruz, John. "Welcome to Mt. Palmer: A look Inside Detroit’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood," posted on his cruzweb.net site.
Guthrie, Doug. "City Loses Site Fight: State Court Denies Detroit's Packard Title Bid," The Detroit News, 2 February 2007.
Linkins, Jason. "Getting The Detroit Story Right," Huffington Post, 29 September 2009.
McGraw, Bill. "Historic Auto Plant Shows Signs of Life," Detroit Free Press, 27 April 2008.
Michigan Department of Community Health. "Health Consultation, Packard Plant, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan," 23 March 1998, posted on United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website.
Shepardson, David. "Senate's Top Democrat Pushes Bill to Aid Michigan," The Detroit News, 1 October 2009.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Plantations
The biggest contribution Barbados made to South Carolina is the slave-based plantation economy, and all the social and legal controls that flowed from it.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Detroit City vs City of Detroit
This past summer Martha Reeves, then on the Detroit city council, showed her ignorance of her constituency when she complained that Jay Leno shouldn’t be putting on a benefit performance for Detroit auto workers in Auburn Hills. Everyone knows the city and the automotive industry aren’t the same. They just happen to share the same name.
In the early days, manufacturing was crowded along the Detroit River and the rail tracks that paralleled it near the narrows where traffic could cross into Canada. But, Henry Ford, a farm boy from Greenfield Township, never worked in the city’s industrial core. His first plant was on Mack Avenue, his second on Piquette, and his third in Highland Park, just beyond the city.
Ford soon began buying farm land to the west of Detroit, where he built his estate and his biggest factory complex on the River Rouge. For a while his son, Edsel, lived in Indian Village, but by 1921 he’d moved northeast of the city to Lake Saint Claire in Macomb County.
The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, came from western Michigan. They began building engines for Ford at a plant in Hamtramack, before they left to form their own company. When they died in 1920, the company was taken over by New York investors, who later reorganized it as Chrysler. Until 1992, the company headquarters was in Highland Park.
To this day, neither Highland Park nor Hamtramack is politically part of Detroit, even though both have long been surrounded by the city.
General Motors was never even close to Detroit. William Durant was a successful carriage builder in Flint, who took over management of David Buick’s company. When he had trouble with General Motors’ bankers, he organized Chevrolet in the same city. Michael Moore is absolutely correct to use Flint, not Detroit, as the symbol for the decline of GM.
Despite the centrifugal movement of the major automotive companies away from Detroit, the city was long the center for small companies and suppliers. Starting near the river, Richard Wright says the Commercial Company built cars on Franklin, while Hudson Motor, Hupmobile and Ransome Olds all began on Jefferson.
Reliance Automobile Company was on East Fort Street and Packard on East Grand Boulevard at Mount Eliot. Lozier was near Ford on Mack Avenue. The Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Company and Wayne Automobile Company were both on Piquette.
In the other direction, along Michigan Avenue and the New York Central tracks that go west to Chicago, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was on Michigan while both C. H. Blomstrom Motor Car Company and Cadillac Assembly were at Michigan and Clark Street.
As the automotive industry spread away from the city, it became a social network of designers and engineers, customers and suppliers who loved the mechanics of cars and the manufacturing process. After World War II, Ford middle managers may have moved to Dearborn Heights while GM executives may have gravitated toward Bloomfield Hills and engineers followed the Tech Center to Warren, north of Detroit in Macomb County, but they all were aware of one another.
That’s why today, when dealers can’t sell cars, it’s not just the city of Detroit that’s suffering, but every node in the network. The last large employer in my hometown, a hundred miles away, made parts for Visteon until the troubled Ford supplier canceled the contract and moved production to Mexico in 2002. The last small employer in Cameron made automotive fasteners. The process was fully automated, but it still was forced to move its operations to China a few years back to keep its contracts.
For lack of something better, it’s the cultural web of individuals, institutions and communities that people mean when they use Detroit as the label for the automotive industry, not the 138.8 square miles of urban real estate then represented by Reeves.
Notes: Reeves was not re-elected in August, partly because of this remark.
Wright, Richard A. "Once Teeming with Auto Plants, Detroit Now Home to Only a Few Nameplates," The Detroit News, 16 January 2000.
In the early days, manufacturing was crowded along the Detroit River and the rail tracks that paralleled it near the narrows where traffic could cross into Canada. But, Henry Ford, a farm boy from Greenfield Township, never worked in the city’s industrial core. His first plant was on Mack Avenue, his second on Piquette, and his third in Highland Park, just beyond the city.
Ford soon began buying farm land to the west of Detroit, where he built his estate and his biggest factory complex on the River Rouge. For a while his son, Edsel, lived in Indian Village, but by 1921 he’d moved northeast of the city to Lake Saint Claire in Macomb County.
The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, came from western Michigan. They began building engines for Ford at a plant in Hamtramack, before they left to form their own company. When they died in 1920, the company was taken over by New York investors, who later reorganized it as Chrysler. Until 1992, the company headquarters was in Highland Park.
To this day, neither Highland Park nor Hamtramack is politically part of Detroit, even though both have long been surrounded by the city.
General Motors was never even close to Detroit. William Durant was a successful carriage builder in Flint, who took over management of David Buick’s company. When he had trouble with General Motors’ bankers, he organized Chevrolet in the same city. Michael Moore is absolutely correct to use Flint, not Detroit, as the symbol for the decline of GM.
Despite the centrifugal movement of the major automotive companies away from Detroit, the city was long the center for small companies and suppliers. Starting near the river, Richard Wright says the Commercial Company built cars on Franklin, while Hudson Motor, Hupmobile and Ransome Olds all began on Jefferson.
Reliance Automobile Company was on East Fort Street and Packard on East Grand Boulevard at Mount Eliot. Lozier was near Ford on Mack Avenue. The Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Company and Wayne Automobile Company were both on Piquette.
In the other direction, along Michigan Avenue and the New York Central tracks that go west to Chicago, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was on Michigan while both C. H. Blomstrom Motor Car Company and Cadillac Assembly were at Michigan and Clark Street.
As the automotive industry spread away from the city, it became a social network of designers and engineers, customers and suppliers who loved the mechanics of cars and the manufacturing process. After World War II, Ford middle managers may have moved to Dearborn Heights while GM executives may have gravitated toward Bloomfield Hills and engineers followed the Tech Center to Warren, north of Detroit in Macomb County, but they all were aware of one another.
That’s why today, when dealers can’t sell cars, it’s not just the city of Detroit that’s suffering, but every node in the network. The last large employer in my hometown, a hundred miles away, made parts for Visteon until the troubled Ford supplier canceled the contract and moved production to Mexico in 2002. The last small employer in Cameron made automotive fasteners. The process was fully automated, but it still was forced to move its operations to China a few years back to keep its contracts.
For lack of something better, it’s the cultural web of individuals, institutions and communities that people mean when they use Detroit as the label for the automotive industry, not the 138.8 square miles of urban real estate then represented by Reeves.
Notes: Reeves was not re-elected in August, partly because of this remark.
Wright, Richard A. "Once Teeming with Auto Plants, Detroit Now Home to Only a Few Nameplates," The Detroit News, 16 January 2000.
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