Face to face with recession in a beleaguered Motor City

DETROIT -- Immediately after exiting the Edsel Ford Expressway onto Van Dyke Avenue, you come face to face with the impact of the economic recession in America's automotive capital. This was never the best of neighborhoods, even in the best of times. But these days, every other storefront is boarded up, adorned with a "for sale" sign, or has its windows busted out. Turn into an adjacent residential area, and modest homes are separated by large, overgrown spaces where foreclosed-upon houses have been torn down.

A house sits boarded up in Detroit.

Detroit has the largest foreclosure rate of any major city in America, a fact that's much more than a statistic in the neighborhoods between Van Dyke and the downtown airport. Many homes remain occupied, and it's clear that many of the owners are working hard to upkeep them. But every fourth or fifth house is boarded up, or burned from the inside, or has completely collapsed into the tall grass. And then there are the open spaces where houses used to be, and where weeds now hide whatever foundations remain. Faced with such a chronic foreclosure and abandonment problem, the city has placed an emphasis on demolition.

Certainly this is a region where there are still nice areas, where there are fabulous mansions owned by the descendants of automotive pioneers, where many of the homes still bear the ornate stonework and ornamentation that once gave Michigan's largest city such architectural significance. But in many ways this blighted east side neighborhood has come to define Detroit, a place clearly reeling from the job losses and plant closings and bankruptcy filings on the part of Chrysler and General Motors. Eighteen percent of Michigan International Speedway's fan base comes from this city. Suddenly, it's very easy to see why attendance is down at the NASCAR track 75 miles away.

According to the city, there are 67,000 foreclosed properties in Detroit, 65 percent of which remain vacant. Driving the narrow, pothole-filled roads of the east side, you see one house after another with its windows boarded up. Others have windows broken, black fingers of soot extending out from the frames. In the place that gave birth to Devil's Night -- the evening before Halloween, when arsonists once ran rampant -- fire is always an issue. Locals will tell you that some foreclosed houses burn down because squatters start fires to stay warm in the winter. Other times, vandals torch them for fun. For whatever reason, the results are obvious in the bombed-out husks that mar the landscape.

Unfortunately this a familiar sight around Detroit.

A dreary, overcast afternoon only makes the place seem more ominous. Stray cats drink from puddles. A boxer tied to a tree looks over a visitor not with menace, but with forlorn, desperate eyes. Locals will tell you that years ago, before the race riots and the white flight, that auto workers used to live here. Indeed, there are three automotive plants in neighboring Hamtramck, although one was shut down as part of General Motors' bankruptcy filing and another -- the 3 million square-foot GM Cadillac plant -- is being idled for the month of June to cut down on production. Last summer, a four-bedroom, two-story house in this neighborhood sold for $1. According to a local paper, the structure had been stripped of its siding, fence, light fixtures, copper plumbing, and even the kitchen sink.

You try not to draw too many assumptions, knowing that's impossible to take in the full scope of an entire city -- or the impact of the recession upon it -- based on one afternoon in its most affected neighborhood. You know there are nice areas like Grosse Point and Indian Village, that the local baseball and hockey franchises still fill their respective arenas, that GM's headquarters in Renaissance Center loom over a pretty lakefront. You know that hard times are nothing new to Detroit, a city that lost 20 percent of its population between 1980 and 2000.

But it's also impossible to overlook perhaps the worst-kept Interstate system in America, one saddled by rutted roadways and sagging guardrails. It's impossible not to notice all the abandoned factories and warehouses that have all their windows broken out. It's amazing to think that the sprawling old Packard manufacturing plant, which closed in 1956, still sits in ruins more than five decades later. Michigan International Speedway is closely tied with Detroit, not just in terms of attendance but also in the importance domestic car manufacturers place on winning at the 2-mile facility. But the race track, and the green, verdant Irish Hills area that surrounds it, is far removed from the Motor City in more ways than one.

Sunday, though, those worlds come together. To a certain degree, success at the speedway's ticket office hinges on fans from the Detroit area making the trek over to Brooklyn. Given the current economic environment, it's understandable why that's not happening to the extent it once did. This isn't the California of six years ago, struggling to draw a full house in a booming economy. This isn't the Darlington of a decade ago, struggling to fill a track with a relatively small grandstand capacity for one of the sport's biggest events. This is a facility up against so many factors so much bigger than itself, from the problems of a gasping domestic car industry to the results of the most severe economic downturn since the Depression. Given that stark reality, it's amazing that anyone shows up at all.

But come they will, to celebrate for a few hours the power and speed that once made Detroit great. It's only a temporary diversion, though. The automakers are still struggling, to the point where GM recently withdrew its support of NASCAR's Nationwide and Camping World Truck series. Neighborhoods like those on the city's east side still slip further into decay. And Detroit, battling long odds just like its winless pro football team, still waits for a recovery that may never come.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.