Will the new Detroit Mayor Dave Bing reside in the Manoogian Mansion?
DETROIT | When Charley Ballard tells the story of Detroit’s myriad woes, he starts with 8 Mile Road. The street, located eight miles from the city center, came to worldwide fame through a namesake feature film starring rapper Eminem, a local artist whose music offered biting social commentary about his life navigating between Detroit’s white and black cultures. Mr. Ballard, a Michigan State University economist, sees the thoroughfare as a clear racial dividing line of the city’s population — and as an asphalt prologue to the long and twisted tale of how once-proud Motown became a mess of a town over the past few decades. “You can’t talk about Detroit without talking about race,” Mr. Ballard says. Mr. Ballard is a numbers guy who researches tax structures, but he says the figures that chart the fiscal downturn of the city don’t tell the full story. It is, he says, the very human elements of the city that have dragged Detroit deeper into despair. Immediately south of 8 Mile, Mr. Ballard
