The motor city's broken promise.

• Author: Bakopoulos, Dean
• Position: Detroit - Essay

A few weeks ago, I told a dear friend that my wife of seventeen years was leaving me and planning to file for divorce. After listening to the circumstances surrounding her decision, he offered a long pause, then said: "You make a lot of promises in life, and the ones you don't keep become the ones that define you."

It struck me, in that emotionally raw moment, as profoundly true, and I've been pondering that sentiment for weeks, for reasons unrelated to politics or current events. However, a few mornings ago, as I scanned the headlines of the Detroit Free Press online (something I've done every morning since moving away from Michigan), I read of citizens in Detroit having their water shut off as the city's unelected emergency manager imposes belt-tightening on the city's poorest residents, reducing the water department's debt by cutting off people who fall behind on their bills. I thought of what my friend said--the promises you don't keep become the ones that define you.

Perhaps the same holds true for a nation. The triumphs of a country--militarily, economically, even athletically--grab the headlines. But it's a nation's broken promises, the contract it makes with its citizens and fails to keep, that define it.

And perhaps no other place makes this more apparent than Detroit--which, one year after filing for bankruptcy, continues to struggle for survival in a nation that remains the richest on Earth.

We've broken a promise.

"What promise?" you might ask. "There are no promises in capitalism. We never made Detroit any promises."

Or did we?

My family came to Detroit as immigrants. My Ukrainian grandparents and their young daughter, my mother, arrived as penniless war refugees who eventually entered the maw of Detroit's auto plants. My grandfather landed a union job at Ford Rouge; my grandmother worked in a smaller tool and die shop. Within five years, through toil and sweat and a kind of frugality that seems almost unimaginable to many Americans today, they owned a house (paid for with cash) on Mansfield Street, drove two paid-off cars, and had a savings account. Middle-class security achieved, they went on to send a daughter to college and graduate school at Wayne State University in the heart of the city. They were able to save for a comfortable retirement, give money to their church, and even help me and my sister each put a down payment on our first homes years later.

My grandparents remained in their modest house the rest of their lives, even as break-ins became a...