Once an Industrial Mecca, Detroit Fights Back Against Crime and Decay : Cities: Those who could afford to fled the troubled schools and soaring murder rate. But citizen action and a new Canadian trade pact could give the town new life.

At least a third of this city’s population has left since 1960 and a third of those who remain are on welfare.

There is bad news everywhere. The per-capita homicide rate is among the nation’s highest, 60 per 100,000 people in 1989. In the last decade, it has had the biggest population loss of all the nation’s top 15 cities.

A federal grand jury is probing the police force’s use of a secret fund; the debt-haunted school system’s students test below the national average.

Adding insult to injury, the Motor City and its suburbs lost 43% of their auto dealers in the last 11 years, down from 51 to 29.

Some experts say that Detroit, a 70% black island surrounded by mostly white suburbs, now faces the flight of middle-class blacks.

That defection is partly blamed for preliminary 1990 census figures showing the city’s population to be about 30,000 people below 1 million, costing Detroit money, prestige and a congressional seat.

There has been a steady decline from a population of 1.67 million in 1960 to 1.51 million in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1980.

The city, considered the country’s sixth-largest until last year, would drop to ninth if the contested 1990 count stands.

Detroit is the quintessential big, industrial Northeast and Midwest city, says Mark Neithercut of the Michigan Metropolitan Information Center.

“It is clearly in decline,” he says. “The same thing is happening in Baltimore. But it’s greater here.”

Wilbur Rich, a political scientist at Detroit’s Wayne State University and the author of a biography on five-term Mayor Coleman Young, says the flight is a double tragedy.

“Why Detroit? It had so much going for it,” Rich says. “It was one of the few places where a black could make a decent wage, buy a house that wasn’t attached. Living in Detroit meant success.

“We don’t attract people anymore. People get on a bus now to leave.”

Not all Detroiters are packing up. Some, perhaps personified by the 4-ton outstretched bronze fist of boxer Joe Louis that graces the median along Jefferson Avenue downtown, are fighting back.

“I think Detroit has reached its lowest number of population. It’ll start to come back,” says Paul Hubbard, president of New Detroit Inc., an advocacy and community-action group founded after riots in 1967 left 43 dead.

Detroit has what suburbs need, workers, a water system and recent tony, waterfront housing developments. They are luring people back, which may in turn draw back businesses, he says.

The new U.S.-Canadian free-trade pact could make Detroit the Midwest’s major port, he says, “if we take advantage of it. We’re headed in the right direction.”

New Detroit is pushing free trade, which could be its biggest success, Hubbard says. To date, major triumphs include breaking up gangs that sprang up in the 1970s and nurturing more than 100 citizens groups that fix up neighborhoods or drive out the drug dealers who lurk in Detroit’s thousands of abandoned houses.

There has been a resurgence of community groups rebuilding neighborhoods in the last three years, says David Dasher of the nonprofit Michigan Avenue Community Organization, founded in 1975 to battle blight. It renovated and resold 22 homes in the last three years, trying for a 10% profit to plow into the next project.

His group’s West Side neighborhood “is holding its own, which is no small accomplishment. As long as people care, there’s a chance.”

Mayor Young thinks the most pressing need is jobs, to counter Detroit’s high unemployment rate. Hubbard and Rich believe a better school system is essential.

“We’re putting more emphasis on preschool to break that welfare cycle,” Hubbard says. “That’s what the school system has to do. I don’t think they understood that until recently.”

The 262-school, 172,000-student system was so indebted that the state considered taking over last year to balance its budget. Bond issues, approved by voters last fall, eased that, while making city residents’ total tax bill the highest of any Michigan city, says Calvin Cupidore of the state Department of Education.

Before the referendum passed, comedian Jay Leno, on national television, poked fun at the system’s $1 million how-to-be-more-frugal study. Until 1988, school board members were driven to meetings by chauffeurs.

It is not just money. An April attendance report showed that only 21 schools had 90%-94% attendance each day. A dress code took effect this fall, a measure to curb violence such as the shooting of an Osborn High School student over his $135 jacket, and the slaying of a Kettering High School student who was stripped of his coat and $70 sneakers.

Mayoral spokesman Bob Berg says racism is part of the city’s trouble. “The city’s about 70% black; the suburbs are white,” he says.

“There are people who brag about not coming downtown in years. They say it’s not racial. But it is.”

Detroit’s black population soared from 28.9% to 63.1% between 1960 and 1980, census data show. Detroit’s 1980 black population was the largest among the nation’s 10 major cities.

The racial divide between Detroit and its suburbs is deepening, as it is in Chicago, Baltimore and Gary, Ind., according to the University of Michigan’s 38th Detroit Area Study, its most recent.

“The social segregation is astonishing,” says Steven Rosenstone of the Ann Arbor school’s Center for Political Studies. Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties are 92.2% white, compared to 75.1% black in Detroit. Detroit’s 20.6% unemployment includes people who have given up looking for jobs. A third of Detroiters surveyed lacked access to a car in good condition, meaning “blacks cannot get out to the better paying jobs.”

“I think things are going to get worse before it gets better,” Rosenstone says.

What Detroit needs is jobs, says Berg, explaining Mayor Young’s sometimes controversial strategies--knocking down a neighborhood for a Chrysler Corp. plant, plans to demolish another neighborhood to expand the airport and to exploit the free-trade pact, encouraging more riverfront development such as the downtown Renaissance Center complex.

Detroit is lifting itself from the doldrums of population decay, auto industry slumps and a bad image, say Hubbard and Berg.

During last October’s Devil’s Night, about 30,000 residents from an array of community groups patrolled the streets to dampen the annual arson spree.

The Detroit Civic Center hosted 14% more business in 1989 over 1988, an increase to 8.4 million visitors. A survey of 24 major metropolitan areas by the national accounting firm Grant Thornton found Detroit’s economy advanced in the 1989 fourth quarter to its highest in five years.

The racial controversy over a white woman heading the council of a mostly black city ended with Maryann Mahaffey’s election last fall to council president.

The Detroit Pistons, who play their home games 30 miles north of downtown, won their second straight NBA championship.

Ten years from now, Detroit “will be more of an information and service industry for manufacturing. We’ll be more of a convention industry,” Hubbard says, stressing the need to shift from the cyclic auto industry that has dominated and determined much of Detroit’s past.

The city might just make it over the 1-million mark in the census count, Neithercut says.

Berg says there are easily 30,000 Detroiters missed by the count.

“I think all this is going to turn around. I think the movement to the suburbs will collapse. You can’t have a rotten core in the doughnut,” Rich says. “The same economic forces working on the city will work on them.

“People in the suburbs will realize they don’t want those overpriced homes and they’ll reclaim the city,” Rich says, pointing to the so-called “gentrification” of Washington, D.C.

“Detroit is not going to be the Bangladesh of the Midwest.”