For some Detroit services, call the DIY Department
DETROIT — Detroit may be broke but it will soon have a first-rate motor pool, featuring 23 new ambulances and a fleet of 100 new police cars. Some city parks also are getting tender loving care. New fruit trees and shrubs have been planted, and mowing crews are beginning to make the rounds to keep the green spaces tidy.
One of the surprising things about Detroit’s descent toward insolvency — so dire that a state-appointed emergency manager recently arrived to take over — is that public services haven’t collapsed as completely as some might have expected. But that’s not because city departments are functioning as usual. They’re not. Instead, a growing collection of volunteers, some affluent, some just average guys riding their Toros, are trying to pick up some services that local government can’t provide.
Detroiters step up
Detroit’s Department of DIY is either the most heartwarming or humiliating reflection of its distress, but the volunteers insist it shows their refusal to give up on the place where they live.
“When the system fails us, you have to become the system,” said Mitch Logan, a 48-year-old film producer who is part of a self-dubbed “Mower Gang” that mows neighborhood parks after they’ve finished their own yards.
Tom Nardone of suburban Birmingham, owner of an Internet novelty business, started the Mower Gang. Through word-of-mouth, his website and Facebook, the group has grown to more than 20 regulars who take care of eight or nine parks where the weeds were too high for children to play. He hopes to keep expanding. On the other side of town in Brightmoor, a few members of the Rosedale Park Baptist Church gave up waiting for the city to demolish vacant houses in the neighborhood, where dozens of streets already have more empty lots than families. They bought plywood and boarded up about 20 of the houses and began mowing yards.
Now, “they won’t become a place where our children can get raped and robbed,” said Roy Harlin, who works at the church.
City deteriorating
Detroit’s problems have been a national spectacle for the last several years, the result of the region’s long economic slump and of past mismanagement that squandered city resources. By the time emergency manager Kevyn Orr took over city finances in March, local government was $327 million in the red and had gone through rounds of layoffs and cuts.
Bus service has been reduced or discontinued on about three dozen routes, leaving thousands of daily riders to find other ways around town. Libraries and recreation centers began closing extra days for employee furloughs and trash trucks were delayed because of breakdowns.
Police manpower now numbers 2,600 officers, down from 4,000 a decade ago.
The city’s parks were in danger of becoming a particular eyesore. Until donors stepped in, the city planned to close almost half of them.
“It’s a disgrace to the nation, a disgrace to the state,” said Harriet Cammock, a writer who moved to the suburbs because of the deterioration.
Katherine McFate, chief executive of the Washington-based Center for Effective Government, said she understands the need but that Detroit should be wary of letting donors go too far.