Coverage of declining cities is too often simplistic and lacking historical context

There are plenty of American cities similarly in decline—economically, demographically, infrastructurally—or suffering from its aftereffects. They span the country, from Camden, NJ, to Flint, MI, to Stockton, CA. Atlantic City is the latest to be put on “deathwatch”—The Washington Post declared as much last July—as a spate of casino closures has drawn swarms of out-of-town reporters (including me).

None of their stories can be easily fitted into the media’s need for unambiguous winners and losers that Fournier described. As in Detroit, hope and despair stand shoulder to shoulder in these cities. What’s more, few newsrooms have the mandate—to say nothing of the resources—to really understand what went wrong in the first place, to excavate how local circumstances interacted with larger political and socioeconomic forces over the course of decades.

More important, this tale of decline is not a story that Americans want to hear, or have ever really encountered before. America doesn’t decline; it rises toward its destiny. But increasingly, this story is one we can’t afford to ignore. More than 80 percent of the US population now lives in urban areas. Healthy cities are engines of economic growth, innovation, and creativity. The media have marveled at the downfall of places like Detroit, but whether these declining cities will ever regain the vitality that we once associated with them remains an open question.

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“Population loss, poverty, isolation—all these things are happening simultaneously,” said Stephen Henderson, editorial-page editor of the Detroit Free Press, whose columns on Detroit were awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Poverty is fundamentally different in shrinking cities like Detroit than it is in New York or Washington, he added. “It’s hard to understand how big the city is and how that wreaks havoc on economic opportunity, especially for poor people. It’s really difficult to just pop in and grasp that complexity.”

Recent coverage has showcased Detroit’s “booming bike industry” and a luxury watch company, among other vibrant, if relatively small, businesses. Motown was described as a “culinary oasis” and “the Bar City of the Year.” Such monolithic descriptions of Detroit are similar to reporters’ characterization of Brooklyn, where the artisanal doings in a handful of neighborhoods in a borough of 2.6 million people drive the media’s narrative. “When you go to Slows Bar BQ”—a popular spot in the Corktown neighborhood—“and then make Pollyanna statements about how Detroit is a food oasis, that’s almost as unhelpful as all those jokes for all those years,” said Michael Jackman, managing editor of the Detroit weekly Metro Times. “It’s like a pat on the head for being a plucky little city.”

The way stories spread online only accentuates this black-white treatment, as social media generally reward extremes. My own Guardian feature on Detroit, in which I profiled an urban planner grappling with whether to move elsewhere, was eventually titled, “The death of a great American city: Why does anybody live in Detroit?” I was proud of the piece’s depth; I was also proud that it garnered nearly 700 comments and 10,000 social shares. While that exposure wouldn’t have been possible without a sensational headline, I can’t say what readers took away—the headline or my reporting.