Detroit's losses
Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost almost a million of its former 1.85 million people. About three-quarters of those one million people were white – a number that includes my parents, my five brothers and sisters, and me. One white dude Detroit didn’t lose, until this past Thursday, was my cousin, Colin Hubbell. When even his brothers were leaving, for other cities, for the suburbs, Colin stayed in Detroit, working in city government when the city seemed its most hopeless, and when he could have been making real money elsewhere. It would have seemed a little daft or do-goodish for Colin to stay in the city, working his sisyphean jobs for government pay – he was an enormously smart and charismatic guy – if we could have imagined him doing anything else. When he finally left government, it was to work in one redevelopment company and then found another. (If this makes you think “profits” or “connections,” remember that this was Detroit. Think “faith.” You couldn’t sell the homes Colin did without also selling the idea of Detroit and its future.) He did urban policy his whole adult life, with his bare hands.
I think we all wanted to love Detroit as much as Colin did. One thing I’m looking forward to when I go back for his funeral on Wednesday is seeing with my own eyes how much Detroit loved him back. A few tributes that have popped up among Detroit bloggers – and this one from the Detroit Free Press – give a little idea.
The Detroit News has a couple of articles as well:
News: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008808220440
Obit: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008808230328
— Matt · Aug 25, 07:00 PM · #
He sounds like a gifted, wonderful person who will be greatly missed.
— Joules · Aug 25, 08:15 PM · #
Went to Colin’s visitation tonight. It was packed. The governor and her husband stayed for an hour. His wife and children were remarkably poised and peaceful and warm, and his mother and brothers were the same.
A gentleman was there whom the family didn’t even know who insisted that Colin got him started in business. He now has 96 employees but before he started someone told him the guy to talk to about doing business in Detroit was Colin. So that’s what he did…
We all swapped stories of the Colin we knew and loved; of his humor and his dreams, but also of his incredible physical strength and stamina. I remember him biking the 50 or so miles out to Chelsea to visit but until this evening I never thought about the 50 miles he biked back to Motown those evenings. His brother remembered one summer when Colin was working with inner city kids out at Camp Brighton, located way northwest of the city. One sweltering day that year Colin showed up at home all tired and sweat-caked. When asked where he’d run from, Colin non-chalantly said “Camp Brighton.” His brother didn’t think much of it at the time but recently Google-Mapped the likely route. It was 35 miles.
He was an incredible man. He was so active and so positive and so strong and so alive that he had us thinking that he’d just keep fighting until he won. But he wasn’t combative by nature, he was a fighter only because fighting is part of living. And living is what Colin did best.
He will be sorely missed but he will be fondly remembered: as a great family man, a visionary, a doer of important things. As a lover of mankind and a lover of life. R.I.P.
— mud · Aug 26, 03:40 AM · #
One of my personal heroes, Sreeni, works for the mayor of Detroit. I left the city when I was 18 and came to New York, never to return. Sreeni stayed and has tried to make a differnece in the city, tried to get it back to respectability.
Thank Budda for people like Colin and Sreeni for trying to make a differnce.
Alex Zola – The Zola Syste,
— Alex Zola · Aug 29, 08:45 PM · #