Fool's Spring

We were supposed to go to Chicago.

Chicago was the city that made sense, when you think about the demographics of my family and my education and pretty much everything else the algorithm collects. Chicago has nearly three million people. It has the Magnificent Mile and Millennium Park and five major men’s sports teams. It has 14 Fortune 500 companies within the city limits and it has the Art Institute and it has a real subway system, with interlocking track lines that operates 24/7. And, even though we needed to be there in mid-April, during Chicago’s Fool’s Spring, it made sense as a place for us to visit, both as a “destination” and as an opportunity to see certain residents we knew there, residents who were, quite frankly, of a similar demographic to us.

But I wanted to go to Detroit.

Really? That was the question everyone asked us in Detroit, especially once they found out we were from San Francisco. I get it. Whatever they’d heard about San Francisco — and they’d all heard a lot, even though it seemed to be a sci-fi version of the city involving AI and crypto and Waymos — it seemed unimaginable that anyone from there, where the future was being made, would want to come to Detroit, a city whose public narrative is stuck in the past.

No one drives an electric car in Detroit. One of the few consistent major industries here is gambling, but it’s the type of gambling that takes place in casinos with smoking sections, not on Kalshi. Teenage sport bike clubs tear through the downtown at all hours of the day and night on crotch rockets. These are teens who don’t have access to Stanford e-Entrepreneurship summer programs, but they do stream themselves, usually while they’re simultaneously popping a wheelie and splitting a lane. Diners here remain untouched by private equity; career waitresses serve up pancakes and bacon on their own time, with no sense of irony.

And the famed “Detroit Renaissance,” a series of programs designed to encourage “economic stability and development” through things like $1,000 homes and comprehensive tax breaks, is mostly visible in the form of exactly four blocks downtown where every single building has been expensively rehabbed for its San Francisco-adjacent tenants (WeWork, Rocket Money, StockX, Amazon, Ally Financial) and the services that make them feel safe (Sweetgreen, Shake Shack). The streetlights are bright around these four blocks, and “security ambassadors,” clad in heavy black vests and boots, are on constant foot patrol to keep them that way. When we set foot outside of these four Disneyland blocks, we were immediately met with silence, plywood-boarded windows, trash-strewn alleys, and aging wheatpaste posters denouncing Trump’s tariffs.

Racism, disinvestment, demolition, corporate predation and, soon, displacement — Detroit knows the drill. The locals understand their place in the economic cycle. “I used to live right here,” said Trisha, a Detroit native who picked us up from our self-guided tour of the Heidelberg Project. We’d been the only tourists exploring the artwork on foot in another one of Detroit’s silent and depopulated neighborhoods. Several other cars, all filled with white tourists, had driven through while we were there, but those tourists had all taken pictures from their car windows until they saw me looking at them with a question mark on my face. Then they floored it out of there, every single last one of them.

“It’s funny, because this whole block used to be alive with kids, riding their bikes all over the place, playing with the stuff Tyree was arranging,” said Trisha. “And he’d tell us that he meant to put things in the places they were, and he’d give us all pennies to leave his stuff alone. Straight-up copper pennies. I’ll never forget it. He spent decades building this place. I’d love to live here again, but the houses cost too much now. That’s why you don’t see any kids here anymore.”

I kept thinking about that image, of kids laughing and shouting as they rode their bikes all over their neighborhood and Tyree’s remarkable installation, blissfully unaware that they lived in a city and a state and a country that considered them to be blight. They lived in a city “in decline,” although they didn’t yet know it, and I guess the reason why I wanted to go to Detroit was out of a nagging sense that decline can happen in a city and a state and a country quickly, usually while you’re just going about your life, unaware that an algorithm or a politician has categorized you as the blight and decided your neighborhood would be better off depopulated than to have you in it. I wanted to get in touch with the reality that this moment can come quickly, especially when no one thinks it can happen to them. I wanted to see how it had happened in the place that held the future before San Francisco did, back when the future was a moving assembly line, a living wage, a middle class.

We went to Chicago after we spent a few days in Detroit. Chicago was lovely. I am trying to come up with excuses to go back to Detroit.