Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 12, 1994 TAG: 9403120045
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: DETROIT LENGTH: Medium
Out of steady work for nearly a year, he's hit every laundry in town looking for another job. In the meantime, he cuts grass and shovels snow, does odd jobs. Finally, he has swallowed his pride and applied for food stamps.
World leaders visiting Detroit for a jobs conference next week will find a city weary of the struggle to find and keep jobs - weary as Crawford is.
President Clinton may see Detroit as an example of a city that has bounced back, but that's not reality for many in the once-thriving Motor City. Still, there are signs of hope.
"Detroit is a working city that has embraced change, met the challenges of technology, and lives and dies by international trade," the White House said in a message to other governments of the Group of Seven industrial nations participating in the two-day conference that begins Monday.
The city was decimated by the American auto industry's decline, the legacy of the 1967 riots that accelerated flight to the suburbs and the economic malaise that hit the Rust Belt.
A turnaround in the auto industry has encouraged hopes for a renaissance.
After losing a combined $7.5 billion in 1991, each of the U.S. Big Three automakers last year made at least $2.4 billion in operating profits. Problems of Japan's automakers contributed to the success of the Big Three - but so did popular products and restructurings that in recent years have shrunk payrolls, closed factories and spurred more efficient ways of doing business.
Detroit's economic development director reports 50 or more calls a day from people who want to do business in the city.
But it's a struggle.
The city's unemployment rate last year averaged 13 percent, down from nearly 17 percent in the early 1990s, but far above the 7 percent for the entire metropolitan area, including the suburbs.
In the past two decades, nearly half of Detroit's manufacturing businesses and retail stores have abandoned the city. In the 1980s alone, 100,000 jobs disappeared. Now the city faces an $88.5 million budget deficit.
Many neighborhoods have surrendered to weeds, graffiti and gangs. Homes once filled with families are burned out, boarded up. Gunshot-shattered windows of forsaken factories protect piles of garbage and old tires. Boarded-up storefronts line desolate downtown streets.
Parents complain about the absurdity of teaching children the rewards of hard work when honest people are jobless and teen-agers can earn a quick hundred dollars dealing drugs.
"People will come to town and see a wonderful depressing tour of declining and devastated parts of the city, and you can see what the job losses mean," said Charles Hyde, Wayne State University industrial history professor.
by CNB