Growing up in Flint

My hometown seems to find its way into the Old Gray Lady with enough regularity these days that one would think they'd opened a Flint Bureau in the Northbank Center.

The most recent bit of frontline reporting from the post-rust Rust Belt was brought to my attention the other day by a friend: Amid Blight and Scavenging, ‘Old G.M.’ Plants Linger. While this particular article does not have a lot to say about the City of Flint itself (the "Flint Experience," if you will), it's clear that when the Times needed a town where they could find the legacy of the Bad Old Days that our "New GM" has left behind with the tacit approval of the Obama Administration, Wall Street, the Media, the auto-buying public, the Vatican, etc., the only place was Flint, Michigan.

I suppose it's something to our credit that we've become synonymous with the decay of American industrialism in a way that even Detroit can't match. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.

In the course of discussing this article, my friend actually asked me "what was it like growing up there?" As if Flint in the 1980s were Prague behind the Iron Curtain. But it was a question that got me thinking.

By the time I was old enough to actually be conscious of the world around me, it would have been the late 1980s. At that point, what I remember most were the times my Dad was laid off, oftentimes for months at a time. I should point out that this was still when "laid off" had not yet become a euphemism for "fired," there was always the expectation that he would be called back. These layoffs were never really a financial problem for us, thanks to whatever combination of UAW layoff benefits and/or unemployment benefits that my Dad received. In fact, I quite enjoyed them because, well, my Dad was home all the time! Why wouldn't I? He seemed to like them quite a lot as well.

I was never really aware that the place we lived was the hellhole everyone else thought it was. When Roger & Me came out in 1989 it made us not only a poster child for corporate disinvestment but a laughingstock too. Remember, for a very long time Flint had something like Battered Woman Syndrome going on with GM. They put us out of work, they hollowed-out our society and made us poor, and they didn't care, and we wanted them back! We must have made the mistake! We'll be better for you, General! You'll see! We'll even build a theme park tribute to your products! This struck the outside world, unsurprisingly, as a little pathetic.

I became acutely sensitive to the external derision and the internal inferiority complex, as we all did. We all responded to this in different ways. Some of us became staunch defenders, others piled on. By the late '90s I was firmly in the former camp, probably because I went to a semi-snooty private school where most of the student body didn't live in the city and spent a lot of time making fun of it. It was, after all, my home.

It wasn't until I went to Washington, DC for my off-campus study during my junior year of college that I really realized how far from the ideal Flint was as a place to live. Sure, I'd known that there was crime, and that there was poverty, but I'd never realized the extent to which the decay had robbed Flint of its best assets, the things that make what we today call "quality of place." The downtown was not a place you went. Unless you had some business at UofM-Flint or with the courts or government, there was no reason to. And you certainly didn't stay when you were done.

I developed a certain affinity for big box retail strips and malls. Through most of my teens, nothing was more soothing to me than a drive out to Borders on Miller Road. To this day I have a hard time finding a better way to pass a cold winter Sunday than a trip to a major chain bookstore. I'm resoved to indulge this wherever possible, though, because they won't exist in another ten years. But that's another long post, isn't it?

When I visited places like Ann Arbor, I regarded their downtowns as snazzy outdoor malls, not what they were: the organic outgrowth of a lot of people without cars living close together. My main reaction was, for a long time, "Yeah, this is great, but where do I park?!?"

And then, as I said, I went to DC and my eyes were opened. Here I didn't need a car, and I learned how liberating it was to not have to worry about parking or traffic or running out of gas, and how delightful it was to be on foot.

And so now Flint (or rather a core group of dedicated citizens of Flint) is working hard to remake Flint's quality of place. I am immensely gratified by this. The road ahead is long and winding, but it's now, for the first time, the right road.