Mayor Bing Wants Detroit EM To Listen To Residents. So Should He.

At this point, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is a chicken running around with its head cut off, having press conferences and media sit-downs just to remind people he's still the mayor even though he essentially has no control under the city's new emergency manager.

Bing inexplicably sat down with the Detroit Free Press recently with no news to report. There wasn't yet another crime task force formed (how many do we have now?), there were no initiatives to bring more residents downtown, and no news of any more hefty private-sector donations that keep the city looking like the world's biggest charity case.

Bing didn't even take this literal free press opportunity to confirm whether he would be running for mayor again. Even though he's picked up petition paperwork to possibly get his name on the ballot, he hasn't decided. Okaaaay. But nope, this was just another opportunity to say "hey, I'm still here!" — but he did weigh in on his thoughts on Detroit's state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, who is running the city's day-to-day operations now:

"I think Kevyn probably takes his lead more from Lansing than he does me at this point. I think he spends an inordinate amount of time with Lansing."

Bing estimates that he spends about two hours a week with Orr: "I don't think that's enough. I think I can give him good advice. It's up to him whether he accepts or rejects it. Kevyn's only been here 30 days, so it would behoove him, in my opinion, to spend more time with my key executives here and keep us involved in the process."

It's interesting that Bing is basically saying that Orr should spend more time in Detroit listening to Detroit concerns when Bing himself has barely done the same since he's been in office.

You could say a lot about Bing's failures in office; noted local commentator Jack Lessenberry has a thoughtful column in this week's Metro Times, writing that Bing has basically spent his last term "rearranging the deck chairs" on the Detroit Titanic. That's mainly because Bing has erroneously positioned himself as someone who could undo more than 40 years of decline and political corruption in one fell swoop.

The most overlooked issue with Bing has been this: He hasn't done the simplest thing he could have done, which is really get his hands dirty in Detroit's neighborhoods outside the central business district.

If one were to measure the amount of time Bing has spent in Detroit before he moved here from Franklin (a tony, Oakland County suburb for those new to Jalopnik Detroit), the scales would be largely tipped toward the city's municipal center and elsewhere downtown. Granted, Bing has one of the toughest jobs of any big-city mayor, but how often has he shown up to your everyday neighborhood community meeting — and not just to pay lip service?

While Bing was down at the Freep, hopefully somebody showed him another piece this week about a young couple who are renovating a 100-year-old home in a neighborhood miles from downtown. The home belonged to the husband's great-grandparents, which makes for a fantastic read about one family's Detroit history. But the killer line is this:

The house is in a neighborhood just off Woodward, between the historic Boston-Edison neighborhood and Highland Park. Chris says it has been bypassed in civic-sponsored renewal plans.

No doubt that's a swipe at the criticized Detroit Works Project, the Bing-spearheaded coalition tasked to "create a shared, achievable vision for Detroit's future." Two years ago, the Detroit Works Project released a plan targeting three areas in the city's 139 square miles for rapid-fire blight elimination, service improvement and business growth. In other words, those three areas would start to look better rather than, as community leaders have strongly suggested over the last few years, spreading the wealth across the city.

Under that plan, the rest of the city would just have to wait. And it's not like the rest of the city outside the three areas are the eerie, last-house-on-the-street neighborhoods often blown up to ridiculous proportions. These are just everyday neighborhoods where people take time to rehab houses because it belonged to their family once upon a time. They just don't fall into the neat lines our mayor has drawn.

But in the meantime in those areas, systemic issues like rapid foreclosures leading to an increase in scrapping which just creates more blight would just continue to build, and already declining city services — police, fire, public transportation — would get even worse.

So what's the message being sent? In essence, who'd want to move to a neglected neighborhood unless your great-grandfather lived there years ago? And if already stable neighborhoods slated for additional improvement have no more room for interested residents, why would those potential newcomers stay in Detroit at all?

It didn't help that the Detroit Works Plan came on the heels of another plan to "shrink" the city, reduce city services in on-edge neighborhoods and essentially force residents who weren't the last ones on their street to move into dense, unfamiliar neighborhoods, a plan Bing was forced to back away from after too many people called out its overwhelming faults.

Give Bing credit for one thing, though: He got us a Whole Foods! Fuck yeah, pricey Australian goat cheese blend!

But here he is now, trying to convince us that he was here all along when really, he wasn't. If by some catastrophe Bing is re-elected, maybe then he'll get the message that all Detroiters matter. (And maybe his social media team will start using apostrophes and punctuation.) At the moment, though, it doesn't look like Bing has a snowball's chance, so we'll just have to count on Detroit's next mayor learning from his mistakes.

Agree or disagree? Let's talk about it in the comments down below or on Twitter.