So whenever I talk about ruin porn, I’m always asked why any of this matters. What does it matter if there’s a hundred or a million pictures of “dead” Detroit? They’re just pictures! They’re pretty!
Only, they’re not just pictures. As discussed here, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can often draw the wrong conclusions about what a picture is really showing.
And when thousands and thousands of pictures and books and movies and websites and videos are made that showcase ugly old abandoned Detroit (or any post-industrial city), that means thousands and thousands of people are going to be drawing the wrong conclusion about that city. Eventually, a *narrative* is created about that city. In the case of Detroit, the narrative that ruin porn supports is that Detroit is dying. That it is being abandoned. That it’s a ghost town. That it’s not just dying–it’s dead.
And that narrative has consequences.
VIDEO: A person from Highland Park (a hamlet within Detroit proper) records the local energy company removing a streetlight from the street.
Recently, the Highland Park community got a shock. The local energy company was going up and down the streets removing the streetlights. It turns out that the city owed the energy company money. And this action of removing all the streetlights except the ones at the intersections would put the city back in the black.
This didn’t make national press. And with the exception of a few local progressive newspapers, it didn’t make local news either.
And yet, there are consequences for the community members.
From the Michigan Citizen:
Many residents, however, are concerned that the removal of residential streetlights has left them vulnerable at night.
“She doesn’t feel safe,” said the caretaker of 90-year-old Highland Park resident Jessie Calhoun, who lives in the middle of her block where the streetlight has been removed. “She’s a little afraid.”
From Calhoun’s front porch, her caretaker says the senior resident only travels to church, but is especially concerned when daylight savings end and it gets darker outside earlier.
…
Kennedy says residents were told the lights would be cut off and would only be provided at the intersections.
She says some residents and block clubs are coming together to purchase additional lights, but “it’s going to be expensive,” she said.
Calhoun, who’s on a fixed income, is concerned she won’t be able to afford that option.
“We’re hoping when winter comes and the leaves fall from the trees there will be more light, because now the trees block a lot of light,” Kennedy told the Michigan Citizen.
Some residents, she says, have gaslights in front of their homes. Others will have to keep their porch lights on.
“The only choice she has,” says Calhoun’s care-taker, “is to leave her porch light on and take an expense herself.”
So not only do senior women like Jessie Calhoun have to worry about their actual physical safety as a result of the removals–but they also have to pick up the cost of supplying their own lights. But if you situate Ms. Calhoun within the context of Michigan–you see that seniors were just required by the government to pay taxes on their pensions. And that amount of time you’re allowed to be on welfare got limited to 48 months. And the first group of welfare recipients will be kicked off in October. Oh, and unemployment in the Detroit area fluctuates anywhere between 20 and 50% depending on what area you’re in.
So there’s little chance that Ms. Calhoun will be able to get a job. Especially in light of her age and the fact that she needs a caretaker. But her income, which is undoubtably fixed as most seniors income is, is steadily being eaten into. Meaning that the meager income seniors already have is suddenly even smaller.
And yet nobody knows about these light removals. And worse yet, if people did know (who are outside of a social justice type sphere), they wouldn’t care.
Because Detroit is a dying city. It’s an abandoned city. There’s nothing there but crime and abandoned houses. If people don’t like it–they can leave just like everybody else did. Except how do you sell your house when there’s no streetlights on the street? Or when people know that your city is so scary, so awful, so dead, that you couldn’t pay them to take your house?
When you think that something is dead, and your neighbors tell you it’s dead, and your family tell you, and you read newspapers that tell you, and you go to a coffee house and find books that tell you and you watch movies and they tell you and you surf blogs in England and France and Norway and they all say the same thing…That city is dead.
Do you continue to invest in it? Do you feel a sense of outrage for it when it is hurt? Do you think it can be hurt? Do you advocate for justice with it? Or do you just shake your head at the sad inevitability of death?
Ruin porn as a narrative helps to justify the withdrawal of resources from people who are least able to successfully manage that withdrawal. And then it blames them for not managing it better.
Ruin porn has consequences. The most immediate ones are for people like Ms. Calhoun, who now has even more worry to bear in an already over-worried city.