Mapping a future together?
The state’s new political maps may help ease a problem long plaguing southeast residents: regionalism
Why can’t Southeast Michiganders have nice things? Michigan’s roads rank at some of the lowest in the country as do its schools. The state’s child poverty rates remain high, and the prospect of building a serious regional high-speed public transit system is currently dead in the water.
Some of the explanation for this at least is straightforward and well documented: Michiganders don’t like to share. Local residents have isolated themselves based on race and class, creating different political groupings and political preferences. This cycle perpetuates itself, creating a separatism that seemingly runs on autopilot. In order to stop the cycle, overt action is needed to disrupt Southeast Michigan’s anti-regionalism. Interestingly, such change may have been set in place.
Michigan’s citizen’s redistricting commission created new Congressional, county and state legislative district lines that mesh cities and counties in ways that historically don’t like to mix. These newly shared political boundaries will likely necessitate the sharing of political values and projects.
Instead of interpreting Michigan as isolated cities and even neighborhoods, the new political maps have some politicians openly reinterpreting the region as just that — one, integrated space with broadly shared needs. Dave Woodward, a Democrat and the chair of the Oakland County Board of Commissioners recently told Stephen Henderson on WDET’s Detroit Today that jobs, healthcare and education should all be viewed from a perspective inclusive of both Detroit and its tri-county suburbs.
“I think the new lines lend itself to an opportunity to approach these problems with a regional lens, which is absolutely critical,” he said.
An urban crisis — that also affected its suburbs
Racial hierarchy is active in all parts of the country, but it’s particularly acute in Michigan’s southeastern parts. As scholar Thomas Sugrue writes of late 20th century Detroit in his much-heralded Origins of an Urban Crisis, “In previous periods of American history, poverty and unemployment were endemic, but poor people did not experience the same degree of segregation and isolation as exists today. And in the past, most poor people were active, if irregular, participants in the labor market.”
While technically outlawed, norms of segregation and anti-Blackness still mark each ZIP Code in and around Detroit. In Southeast Michigan, neighborhood, school, and employment segregation — once legal and now subconscious and cyclical — have remain lived experiences, marking the isolationism that persists to this day. In other words, the early politics of the 20th century created the lived realities and political priorities of the 21st.
Now some neighborhoods in Detroit and its suburbs are worlds apart. In total, about 43% of Detroit kids live in poverty. Of the surrounding counties of Macomb, Washtenaw and Oakland, Macomb’s child poverty rate is the highest at 14%. (Detroit resides in Wayne County, which has a child poverty rate of 32%.)
In addition to the devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised poor, the consequences have meant that land and the people that reside on it has been pulling itself apart in a region that is looser, less connected, and more economically divergent than 100 years prior. Those spaces create obvious differences — differences between culture, opportunity, and political necessity.
New political maps offer opportunities for new coalitions
About 100 years since Southeast Michigan sowed the seeds of its urban crisis and the pulling apart of its suburbs, where does it sit now? What are its voting patterns? After much alteration, the region is mostly Democratic. As the most educated Americans coalesce around progressive candidates, Washtenaw County votes for the most left the party has to offer (as appears to be the trend in Oakland County). Detroit itself has remained a Democratic stronghold, but Macomb has thoroughly flipped, its northern region particularly becoming more Trumpian.
While we still don’t know exactly what Michigan’s new political maps will do to the region’s politics, they ignite an opportunity to unite Michiganders across geographical and political boundaries in ways that seldom occur. Such is the site of dozens of state legislative races, and a handful of Congressional races.
As examples, Michigan’s 10th state House district unites poorer parts of Detroit and very wealthy neighborhoods in Grosse Pointe. Its 8th state House district connects Detroit with Highland Park, Hazel Park and Madison Heights. Similar trends exist in Michigan’s state Senate. Political maps now snake deep into city and suburban boundaries, creating new political coalitions that previously ignored each other because they could. Now, Michigan’s Congressional maps unite Detroit and the surrounding areas like we’ve never seen before.
To be sure, the new political maps may not be a net positive. Many Black Detroiters legitimately fear not having a Black representative in Congress for the first time in more than 70 years. What’s more, it’s no inevitability that new political coalitions will coalesce. Instead, certain groups may try to dominate over others, urging their own priorities to the disregard of those of their southern neighborhoods. Such has been the history of Detroit.
The difference today, however, is party politics. The nationalization of party politics has created a broader coalition on the left, where folks of significantly different ethnic, class, racial and religious backgrounds are being united under the same banner, as journalist Ezra Klein explains in “Why We’re Polarized.” Even while acknowledging Trumpian outliers, this has been the trend of Detroit and Metro Detroiters’ politics. Although there’s no telling how long this coalition will last, it looks stable for at least a few election cycles.
What’s more, while specific neighborhood needs are different, there are regional issues that could unite broad swaths of Southeast Michigan. State data shows that the region is in need of improved education, better healthcare outcomes, resources for childcare, access to knowledge sector jobs and good public transit. In these instances, it’s not the issues itself that are different, it’s the degree to which they are needed.
There’s no telling how Michigan’s regional politics will play out. History doesn’t demonstrate a great playbook. But new eras and different political rules incentivize different behavior. Only one day from the primary election, new maps could create different political futures for years to come.
