The Sunday Times
Nov. 3, 2024
Danny Fortson
A mini-digger belched exhaust fumes as it pushed a pile of tyres around a concrete yard piled 20ft high with dismembered strips of rubber. “I never thought I’d be doing this job,” said Ethan Dunn, a lawyer turned founder of BSG Tire Recycling in east Detroit.
Dunn’s journey to this humdrum yard started a few years ago when someone dumped a pile of old tyres across the street from his house — not an uncommon occurrence in a city that has become synonymous with American urban decay. The episode sent the 44-year-old father of three down a rabbit hole of what might be done about the waste, and he eventually started a company.
“It’s not been without its challenges,” he said. But, Dunn added, he was part of something much bigger: the resurrection of Detroit. “We’re on the way up. We could not have gone any lower.”
Michigan’s biggest city, home of America’s auto industry, filed for bankruptcy in 2013, punctuating a decades-long decline during which its population collapsed as plants shut or relocated overseas. Donald Trump warned last month that the “whole country will end up being like Detroit” if his “globalist” opponent, Kamala Harris, wins the White House.
For her part, Harris barnstormed through the state last week, holding multiple rallies where she highlighted Trump’s denigration of the Motor City and his promises to immediately scrap incentives that have spurred investments in semiconductor and electric-car battery plants in the state. “His plan will cause inflation and lead to a recession by the middle of next year,” she said. “It is time to turn the page.”
This is the last of The Sunday Times’ four-part series on the swing states that will decide America’s election on Tuesday. All but seven of America’s 50 states have, in effect, been decided; they are firmly behind either Trump or Harris, and thus, so are their corresponding electoral college votes.
To win the White House, the presidential candidates need a simple majority — 270 — of the total 538 college votes. Of the swing states still in play — Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona — Michigan has the second-most votes up for grabs, at 15, after Pennsylvania’s 19. At the time of writing, Harris held the slightest of leads in the state — 0.9% — according to a poll analysis from FiveThirtyEight.
The totemic issue in Michigan is the present and future of the auto industry. The state is home to the headquarters of GM and Ford, hosts 12 vehicle plants and employs more than 1.1 million auto workers. No fewer than 26 carmakers have also sited their engineering and research centres in the state.
Nonetheless, Michigan’s primacy has waned as the world’s largest manufacturing industry — automobiles — has globalised. The state has lost more than half a million auto jobs since 1990 and nowhere is that contraction more evident than in Detroit, whose population has collapsed from a peak of 1.8 million in the late 1950s to about 660,000 now.
The result is a city that appears to exist in multiple eras at once, with pockets of vitality amid acres of deprivation. Its wide-open boulevards, built in the boom times, are barely troubled by traffic. Neighbourhoods of abandoned homes with sagging roofs and broken windows abound. Dunn’s company, BSG, sits on a corner surrounded by boarded-up warehouses. “I used to call this Zombieland. It used to be a lot worse — not a place you’d want to go after dark. It’s much better than it was.”
Indeed, the tide, he said, is turning, if slowly. Dunn pointed to the breweries, nightclubs and small businesses that are reviving long-dead buildings in the area. When the census bureau revealed this spring that, in 2023, the city’s population actually grew by 1,852 people — 0.3% — mayor Mike Duggan declared it a “day of celebration”. It was the first time the city had grown in 66 years.
At the heart of this election campaign — and Detroit’s tenuous revival — is the electric vehicle (EV) revolution. GM chief executive Mary Barra has famously put America’s biggest automaker on a path to eliminating petrol cars entirely by 2035. At a tech conference in San Francisco last week, about 2,400 miles away from Detroit, she mused: “I never thought the propulsion of a vehicle would become a political issue.”
Indeed, for both presidential candidates, the auto industry neatly encapsulates their differing visions. Trump has promised to “terminate” Joe Biden’s incentives for battery-electric cars — including a $7,500 (£5,800) tax credit for American-made EVs — and subsidies for domestic factories. The shift away from petrol, he argues, is a job-killer that foists onto Americans a high-priced product that most don’t want. One campaign ad airing in Michigan warns: “Attention auto workers: Kamala Harris wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy, but true.”
Harris has made no such pledge. She has, however, supported the president’s signature green tech agenda, embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). They have pitched the package of incentives, which has unleashed a wave of new US manufacturing plants, as a job creator that will ensure America’s car giants stay competitive.
The dirty secret, said Elaine Buckberg, GM’s former economist and now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, is that whoever wins matters “vastly less than what people are saying” — not least because even Trump, despite his rhetoric, is unlikely to kill the IRA.
“There are billions of dollars of investments going into EV manufacturing and batteries, and these projects are disproportionately in red and purple states [Republican and swing states] like Texas, Ohio, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee,” she explained. “Republican members of Congress are saying, ‘Look, this is producing job growth.’ Do you really think they want to vote to repeal those incentives in the plants where their districts are benefiting?”
And then there’s the Elon Musk factor. Trump’s rhetoric has softened slightly in recent weeks as Musk, head of the nation’s largest EV maker, Tesla, has become one of his biggest donors and most public corporate cheerleader.
Perhaps more vexing is the rise of China, which, until quite recently, didn’t have an auto industry that was competitive on the world stage. Now its top manufacturers — such as the EV-maker BYD, which last year produced three million vehicles — are expanding aggressively overseas. Last week, amid its struggles with the intense competition from China, Volkswagen unveiled plans to shut at least three German plants and axe tens of thousands of jobs.
Both presidential candidates are shaping up to try to shield America’s EV industry from the onslaught: Harris is expected to continue Biden’s 100 per cent import tax in a bid to protect American jobs, and Trump has vowed to slap his own tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Glenn Stevens, a Michigan native who has worked in the car industry for 36 years, runs MichAuto, the state trade association. He said that the tariffs were a “short-term wall to buy some time” but won’t protect Michigan’s car industry for ever. “This electrification transition, and the fact China now has an auto industry that they didn’t have not that long ago — these are major inflection points that we’re going to have to navigate, no matter who the president is,” he said. “I have been in this industry a long time now, and it has never been this dynamic, ever.”
Like Dunn, however, he is hopeful. The transformation of Michigan Central Station is symbolic of the new era that Detroit is entering. For decades, the station served as the gateway for workers looking for a good job at an auto plant — a posting that was seen as a ticket to the middle class — but after closing in the 1980s, it fell into disrepair, covered in graffiti, flooded by bad pipes, its windows broken.
In May, Bill Ford, scion of the auto dynasty, reopened the station, a 111-year-old Beaux Arts building that Stevens said had become “the symbol of Detroit’s decay”. After a $1 billion rehabilitation, the building, along with an adjacent one that was also restored, has been converted into an incubator for more than 100 mobility and clean energy start-ups.
The hope is that projects like this will give people, especially young people, a reason to come to this city — to this state that holds the future of the country in its hands. “For so long, everyone left Detroit,” said Dunn. “We’ve hit this point where now we’re accelerating.”