Benton Harbor Blues

Next week I leave Southwest Michigan due to unemployment. I'm living in St. Joseph a nearly all white, wealthy and touristy town of about 10,000 with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. As a reporter I covered neighboring Benton Harbor, a poor, nearly all black town of 10,000 with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan. And I confess to some hypocrisy for not moving to the town I was covering for fear of blight and crime.

While St. Joseph has been able to prosper and capitalize on its location, Benton Harbor has struggled with one of the highest crime and poverty rates in Michigan for a community its size. In April, the state financially took it over after decades of money mismanagement and incompetence by city officials. Now the state-appointed financial manager who doesn't answer to local residents is drastically cutting the limited city services provided including closing the fire department and cutting police officers and other city workers. The short-term savings will be offset in the long term by the cost of foreclosures and welfare and unemployment benefits to those laid off.

There's plenty of blame to go around locally. Corrupt and incompetent local officials protecting their turf - the city has had about 18 city managers in 22 years - many apathetic citizens who don't vote or turn out to city council meetings to grandstand during public comments to city commissioners. And a sometimes racist us against them mentality in which all outsiders are seen as carpetbaggers, the black ones labeled Uncle Toms.

But there are many decent people, some of whom I got to meet in my seven months covering Benton Harbor. Like Dr. Charles Tynes, a physician who treats poor people in the community and disdains the nation's for-profit medical care system. Commissioner Duane L. Seats II, an outspoken new city commissioner who usually backs up his criticism with facts. Police Chief Roger Lange who visited Newark, N.J. on his own dime to see how the city's community policing could be incorporated in Benton Harbor and is trying to make his officers more compassionate in their dealings with residents. The young music promoter who organized an Easter Egg hunt in a local park and the woman trying to build a community garden.

Benton Harbor is unusual in the level of problems for a small community, but it is not unique and there will be many more Benton Harbors in the coming years as the nation's massive redistribution of wealth to the superrich takes its toll on the rest of us. More government services we counted on will be eliminated or privatized.

Things used to be different. Like many other Midwestern communities, Benton Harbor once had a solid manufacturing base.

Whirlpool Corp., the $17 billion per year company whose headquarters are based in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, sent most of the manufacturing jobs to Mexico in the 1980s and later to China. While closing its last manufacturing plant in Benton Harbor this year, it announced to much fanfare that it was building a new corporate headquarters in Benton Harbor, an $85 million investment. The deal included $12.7 million in state tax breaks and about $3.8 million in local tax breaks, according to The Herald-Palladium, my old employer. The newspaper that fired me because they said I was "overly aggressive" in covering Benton Harbor politics and Whirlpool.

The Whirlpool deal was a classic case of a corporation maximizing its profits by forcing a state that has been one of the hardest hit by the recession and a destitute city to provide tax breaks or risk the corporation leaving town. Whirlpool also got millions in state tax breaks to build the Harbor Shores Golf Course which will be a destination sight for the superrich who can afford the $150 per day greens fees and the $200,000 second homes in the Harbor Shores Development by the course.

These are the kind of folks who weren't hurt much by the Great Recession that they caused thanks to taxpayer bailouts. And maybe Benton Harbor residents who a generation ago might have gotten a decent factory job at Whirlpool can land a job as a caddy or parking attendant or housekeeper if a hotel opens up for the tourists who come in to see the PGA Tour Senior Open at the golf course in a couple of years.

The people of Benton Harbor deserve better. And so do the rest of us.