Jefferson Chalmers Demands A Green New Deal
By: Detroit Democratic Socialists Of America
Tags: Flooding, Socialism, Green New Deal, Detroit, Climate Change

by Mel Herrera-Baird

In my Detroit neighborhood, Jefferson Chalmers, April 2020 will be the time those of us living along Fox Creek will remember as the time the tiger dams came.

On Detroit’s East Side a series of canals come off the Detroit River, created in the early 1900s by William C. Klenk. Klenk is arguably the 1910s version of Dan Gilbert and the Ilitches. He drained a swamp and dredged Fox Creek to create the canals. With their creation, in the middle of a marshland where the Fox Tribe lived before they were massacred by the French, a couple of islands were forced into existence. Klenk and Harbor Islands are built on fill and promises of new and exclusive waterfront houses. They are just one example of capitalistic hubris in Detroit.

The islands, canals, and proximity to the Detroit River make Jefferson Chalmers one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Detroit. Urban farms and community gardens dot the neighborhood, along with art projects and gathering spaces. Grosse Pointe Park, despite its best efforts to keep Detroiters out, has a convenient shopping area just two miles away. It’s one of the seven neighborhoods listed in the city’s “Strategic Neighborhood Fund 2.0” program. The program promises a total of $35 million from some of the biggest corporations in the area. Housing prices have risen at disproportionate rates; this writer is about to have to move because her landlady wants to sell the creekside house she bought for $15k for $150k.

All this despite the fact that in 2019 strong winds and record water levels on Lake St. Clair pushed water over the unkept sea walls of Fox Creek, reclaiming both islands, most of Ashland St. and Scripps St., and half a dozen blocks adjacent to those streets in Jefferson Chalmers.

Author’s Note: I left Jefferson Chalmers in May 2020 but still work down there and can confirm it still floods. Photo by the author.

Detroit, in its typical half-assed city governance, put out thousands of sandbags and sent out a notice to all residents of the neighborhood letting us know that it would be placing “tiger dams” as a solution. These are huge orange water-filled barriers and cost some property owners thousands of dollars in damages. The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy has been churning out seawall permits with no oversight, leading to wealthier homeowners building seawalls several feet taller than their neighbors’. It does not take an engineering degree to figure out that this is not a good solution to the problem.

Most of the properties with broken or non-existent seawalls are owned by out-of-state “investors,” but some are also owned by people like Michael Kelly, who has filed thousands of evictions and was recently sued by the city for being a slumlord. Kelly received 14 properties on Ashland in the FCA deal in 2019. If Kelly’s past “investments” are any indication, it’s safe to say that some of the flooded properties are his.

The FCA deal gives Fiat-Chrysler 250 more acres to build Jeeps and slumlords more land to ignore, at the expense of Detroit residents. The city contributed $50 million to the project, while only spending $2 million on Jefferson Chalmers’ flooding problem.

The City of Detroit cannot continue to ignore this problem, which has made multiple sections of the sidewalk on Ashland inaccessible for nearly a year and destroyed several homes. It must build a consistent seawall on the Detroit side of the canal, on par with the wall on the Grosse Pointe side. A municipal project of this size will be expensive, but if Detroit can afford to give people like Kelly a tax break of $2 million then it can afford to build up a very necessary protection. The Army Corp of Engineers predicts that the issue will continue for the foreseeable future, and possibly get worse.

A local Green New Deal would include a plan for flooding, which has affected not only Jefferson Chalmers. Why has the city not introduced one?