Can Detroit's Comeback Benefit Everyone?

Leaving Detroit in 2013 offered "a chance to step back and observe with a journalistic eye the city’s transformation," explains Hackney—"a luxury often not possible when I was reporting on murders and the city's budget crisis every day."

That perspective leaves Hackney wondering about a looming question: "Is there room for low income residents to benefit from the dazzling reinvention of their city?"

After citing some of the data that shows the city's impoverished population and acknowledging the city's ongoing bankruptcy concerns, Hackney goes on to identify how Detroit's comeback came to be story of privilege:

National media outlets have been criticized for parachuting into the city, and only showing white Detroit. But if we are painfully honest with ourselves, the growing majority of startups, businesses and restaurants attracting such broad attention, are mostly white owned. Dispatches from Detroit as the latest urban comeback story don’t often include scenes from deep inside the city’s distressed neighborhoods. Such ruin porn, as it’s called, would defeat the purpose.

And:

But it’s a tough sell to convince editors, or even bankruptcy attorneys, that tales from the ’hood—the down and out African-American hood—are important to a restructuring plan or vital to honest coverage, particularly when the stories coming out of Detroit for years were all about crime and blight, political corruption, a failing auto industry, racial disharmony, a failing school system, poverty and just straight-up hopelessness. There’s a woeful-Detroit fatigue, and understandably so. We’re tired of the bad news. We want to see Detroit’s revival, and live to talk about it.