Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Let's do it. I'm Dana Denha and you're watching FYI. Time and the impact it has on people, places, and things is evident throughout our lives. But what happens when a once thriving city is abandoned by the masses, left forgotten, except for the few loyal that stayed? Ruro is 20 years in the making and spotlights the history of the city of Detroit and watches it emerge from the ashes like a phoenix to become a destination in Michigan. Joining me is Stephen McGee, the filmmaker behind RGO. Welcome to the show, Stephen. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Tell me a little bit about yourself. I was looking you up. You're you were like a war trained photojournalist.

Yeah, you know, I traveled the world uh often to Africa and Southeast Asia working for humanitarian groups and postconlict societies. So, war training is maybe a little bit of an overstatement, but it was really just getting down to the the deepest level of the human experience and trying to do something about it. um with anything that I had and for me that was a camera. So all those years working around the world uh prepared me in a unique way for Detroit when I moved here in 2005. So when you you grew up in California, did you have like film making training or anything or you just sort of picked up a camera and started going?

You know, California is the golden state. It's amazing place. I didn't uh really have um you know really too many adversities and so I I I started traveling the world and uh when my older brother was teaching English in Cambodia and so it was kind of a little bit of a process like that where I was like you know I think I want to be a photographer and I think I want to do video and so it was really just having this this desire to connect with humans and then the camera was kind of the tool to do that. So, you know, it was it was a lot of work for 200 to 2005 learning film and video, but um because of the time in history where it wasn't really used by newspapers. Um when I learned and I started becoming known, uh the Detroit Free Press hired me to start their divid video department. So, I moved from California to Detroit, sight unseen. Um during a time it was not popular to do that. But bringing those skills here, I started noticing, you know, that it wasn't about the abandonment, even though that was very visual. That the story here was really about the people. And that was often overlooked.

When I was looking at, you know, 2005, I'm like, that was when I was at Wayne State. And like, you know, the city did seem like it was transforming a little bit at the time, but I think now it's just like a completely different place from that that city that I knew.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean 2005 now looking back I I notice and have through a lot of uh work with the historical society here and just looking at how money moves 2005 to 2009 was really just the end of that disinvestment ball rolling down the hill. You know it just had come down to a creep. Uh and you know if I had been here a couple years later I don't think I would have had this story because really living in that moment when people would step back and be like wait why are you moving to Detroit? you know, that to me made me step forward and um lifted up an opportunity to really get to know the people. But it was really the people of Detroit that invited me into their narratives um as this outsider, especially a white outsider in a black city. Just looking at this opportunity to tell me more about uh the narratives that they cared about um that were often overlooked by the mainstream media um which I often worked for. And so there was this kind of dual lens. I was working in some of the biggest moments inside of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Detroit Free Press and at the same time biking block to block looking for these, you know, very human moments. Um, and I kept on getting invited into those moments and 20 years of that. That's the amalgamation of that work is this hour and 47 minutes.

How do you stick with something for two decades? That's the craziest part. Um, what's that movie? Um, A Boy's Life or whatever, I believe with Timothy. There's a couple there's a couple uh decade long projects. 20 years to me um is a lot of uh it's a million successes surrounded by a million more moments of doubt, you know, and I feel like faith has been a big part of my life. And so living inside of uh what eventually looks like a calling, you know, that's that is day by day negotiating with yourself. What are you doing here? Why are you um pursuing this? It's a negotiation of purpose and of uh of uh you know of the goal, you know, what does success look like and and um what's next in front of you and how can I serve that the biggest and most important uh you know with everything I got and I you know so my lens shifted through those 20 years. I think that's kind of one element about it. It wasn't just like I'm going to set out on this trajectory. It was working for the Free Press which allowed me some access to the Super Bowl in 2006. It was uh you know going on the streets uh which brought me into even the home that I'm sitting in now. It was working for nonprofit groups and foundations like Kresge which was a big you know 2000 to 2000 or 2010 to 2015 we did 145 films for them. So getting to know the artists of Detroit was working for the billionaires like Dan and Jan Gilbert and um you know and so each one of these things kind of shifted the lens a little bit to allow for uh for you know a great photographer named Brienne White kind of called me she's like you're kind of like the Forest Gump of Detroit's history and you know I don't want to fight that. I really, you know, it's nothing I could have planned. Um, yeah, I couldn't have planned walking down the street with the with the Red Wings when they won um, you know, the NHL. Uh, oh man, now I can't even

remember Stanley Cup. Thank you, honey. You know, Stanley Cup down Woodward. Uh, you know, and at the same time was on on Woodward just off the street with President Obama when he was just a senator. So I mean like each one of these things was um became this huge thing called resurggo now which is Latin for I rise again and uh you know and for the past seven years I've been in charge of documenting Michigan Central Station and so you know that idea of a building come back online um you know is a metaphor for the what's happening across the city.

Yeah that's interesting. My dad actually um retired recently from he had a a produce company and he was right down the street from the central station. So we sort of watched it too from a distance. But yeah,

that's great. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's becoming I I think there these calling cards, these bridges that are being formed uh within Detroit to the suburbs. Um whereas it was only the sports teams for a while. And respectfully, I understand there's a lot of different layers and stories that happened in the city that gave people this understanding of of it being a dangerous place. Um, and those walls are breaking down every day. And I think that's really an important part. And so, you know, for everyone who stood up for the city for the past 20 years or 60 years, this film is a tool for them to kind of send out to their friends being like, "Look, I told you like this is this is something you should go see or, you know, you you don't need to be as scared as you used to be." uh you know or even more so how do we lift up the citizens that like you said that haven't left and so you know I'm noticing every single screening that we're doing they're all test screenings I'm editing in between each screening um so in in an arbor you know at at the Michigan theater I had 750 people show up that was insane and and with that and with this type of film it it creates a lot of emotions that people uh want to talk about afterwards and so some Q&As's are two hours some are three cars and it's like a real life uh you know look into the human psychology.

It's interesting to think about 20 years of footage. Is it all your footage? Are people that you're meeting along the way providing you with things? And then what is postp production like? Have you been editing for two decades?

It's all my footage. 98% of it. You know, there's a lot of shots of me um na navigating this narrative arc, which became kind of a narrative arc inside the film, is me trying to figure out how to tell a 20-year story. Um the view this way is all of hard drives, you know, hard drives on the walls, you know, it just I could hold up hard drives for days. And um the post-production was uh nothing short of a miracle. Um you know, I feel like I'm not an organized man. I've misplaced a chopstick while eating sushi. Like I don't understand even how how do you lose one chopstick? And so I mean like losing a clip on a hard drive is a lot harder than uh than it should be. But I feel like you know it was it's this like discernment and this like uh boiling down this condensing of um greater uh moments that that connect to all of us. you know, because this film could be very close to inside baseball. It could be very like, oh yeah, Detroit, you know, um and at which point I lose the international audience and I'm not trying to, you know, at this point I wasn't trying to make a film that was like uh just everything I wanted um to lift up in the city. It was really how do I actually invite people from the farthest reaches of the Detroit experience into this narrative? Um, and you just got to get down to the human moments. And so it is a groundup history. It is, you know, it is a uh it is a work in progress. Um, that has to finish soon. And it's it's uh it's every part of my life,

I would imagine. Why don't we watch the trailer for RGO? Detroit is the comeback story of this century. I think it's time we show this film to the world. Detroit, the city of champions. This is Detroit, Michigan. When I explain Detroit, this is thing that you have to wear on your back.

But this is not just showing a film. You see, I I think the same disinvestment and decentralization that hit Detroit and the rust belt is happening in other areas of the country. I don't think anyone knew just how remarkably challenging and devastating things were. World's lens stopped at those challenges and so much strength was missed. Rurgo, it's the beginning of the horizon. We bought a house. Was it $1? This is our view. People who worked in these plants and these cars that built these engines. So that's why this city makes that sound.

And so when I seen the world slinging mud at, it was like, yo, we create the narrative, not the outside world. Wherever there's destruction, our experiences here, there's always rebirth. It's really the fate of the entire United States. I don't think Detroit's come back. I I feel like we're further ahead. I honestly don't think it ever left.

We're back with Steven. We just watched the trailer for it. You know, a lot of what you talk about this film is about the people in it. Talk about some of the people that we'll meet in this film and why it is such a personal story and why that sort of makes you feel the feels.

Yeah. So, every 3 years I feel like Detroit lived 10 to 20 years of another city and each one of those kind of segments I learn uh more about the city through the people who open their lives to me. So, specifically for the Kresge Foundation, I did 145 films with my wife um between 2010 and 2015. Some of those artists are in those are in this film. One of them is Martian Music. Martial Music is an incredible uh writer um and her dad was the first um person to ever record Artha Franklin and he lost his record shop when the 375 uh was made downtown during the Highway Act. And so getting to know her personal story over the past 70 years um you know she the way that she invited me into her story is is really really a strength of the film is is seeing you know people being invited from the outside like that. So got Martian music got Rose Spit who has a shoe store and he's an incredible DJ. He talks about Big Sean. So we get to know Big Sean. We get to know um a little bit about Jack White. We get to know about Kid Rock. uh we get to know about um man I mean Salie who's a Anosabic uh cultural influencer dancer hip hop artist um he tells us about the early days of why wean which is uh you know this region was called before the settlers came in so I mean it really is like every 3 minutes in this film you're learning you know two or three new people um it's kind of like a yearbook in a lot of ways I even got Michael Bolton in there but I I mean like literally it's just it's it's back to back. Some people want it more digestible which I don't think it's going to be. Um you know but some people have come like to three or four screenings because they're like I just want to like I want to study this more. And so um you know it's it is about the people of Detroit and uh I'm only just scratching the surface with this with

this two hours.

So they're basically like the narrators of the documentary. um you know as I as I'm on this journey to try and understand how to tell a city story they're like c they're like little um guides not little guides they're very much guides to me you know and I think that um all of the effort that was used to tell the stories of the disinvestment you know need to be countered with times of showing the people that navigated um what it was like to live here you know because it's easy for the world to say Detroit was hard to live in. Everyone there is struggling. But it's harder to say, "Oh, that's not actually true. There were people who had incredible lives here." Um, living in some of the most beautiful homes ever made in the United States, but nationally and naturally, we want to just associate that with struggle. And so people in my film are really bringing up kind of like actually when everybody left, we just had an entire neighborhood that never got disinvested in, you know, and and even how people got to those neighborhoods is talked about. So I'm really kind of not letting any stone unsettled and it's bringing up a lot of a lot of feelings. So each screening, you know, I'm I'm hearing more and more um that this crazy project is working. grown men are crying in their 70s and 80s. They're um the people that have lived here forever, you know, are telling me um thank you. And it's not the congratulations I'm looking for. It's just saying like this is a massive undertaking and um all of those moments of doubt. Uh hopefully that this is actually working.

Yeah. You know, when you grow up in Michigan, both of my parents grew up in Detroit and then left. And I wonder if they would see this and feel like why did our families leave? Why didn't we say I don't I I've never it's never been clear to me like exactly that reasoning why two separate families. My dad's an Arab American. My grandma and papa were from Belgium and so they were all immigrants. They didn't know each other but everyone left, you know, and it was like they came to the suburbs.

Well, I think even ArabAmerican there's a there's a segment in the film I haven't made yet which I'm still trying to navigate. Um, but this idea of the communities that never left also although you said your parents left, but at the same time there was a strong ArabAmerican community that never left. And I respect both sides, right? I respect people who had to leave and find life elsewhere. And I also respect the people who stayed. And you know, there was an Irish community that never left, a Calaldian community that never never left, a uh you know, I could go down the list, especially Latinos, um Latin Americans, uh in Southwest Detroit. And so, yeah, I feel like in this film, you're going to learn you're going to learn about the government policies that enabled um certain people to be able to move, you know, and I think that there's it it's easy to kind of um I I bring up a lot of the uh the word usage in the 50s to the 70s of of you know, that end up marginalizing large communities. um these like swath like uh best idea of the year awards, you know, like let's build highways because people need to move and you're like, "Yeah, that's a great idea."

But it's like who are you going to build those highways on and who are displaced?

And I think that kind of idea is actually very current. You know, we look at even the bridge, the Gordy Hal Bridge killed an entire community. And so this even an idea of eminent domain is not far away from from a lot of people's minds still, you know, and that's affecting every single city. A fact that I haven't put in my film yet that I want to is that 210 cities across the US lost their black financial districts. And if you look at who's marginalized, who's in jail, who's uh you know the makeup of this of of who needs welfare, who has there was entire generation of of specifically black Americans who lost their what they called first northern wage, you know, this idea of like creating their own life, extremely hardworking 1920s to 1960s and in an afternoon it was all gone, you know, and so

I can say that this happened in Ann Arbor. there was a black business district that is no longer that. I mean, they refer to it as like a historic thing and they're trying to do things to sort of make up for it now, but it happened here

and I I definitely am not a a professional like I don't all I know is what people have told me and I've looked into it as much as I can. There's a incredible um Instagram account called Segregation by Design which goes into this a lot of just how the freeways broke everything up. So he's the main like way I'm actually learning about a lot of this uh work and of course people like martial music um as as you know historical living historical books um and so it's it's not I'm a middle child so I want everyone to talk so I'm not saying like oh you guys did that and actually martial music's like there's not two million white people uh there aren't two million racist white people who moved away from Detroit who was all just this kind of flow through policy which felt very natural to a lot of people which I feel like has a lot of grace in it and in this moment in history I think grace is one of the most important elements we can have uh not just to wash over you know previous problems but to really say like okay that was history it could actually be repeating itself um and how do we move forward

you know you mentioned in the trailer that this film sort of works as a road map for other places to make that comeback can you talk about that a little deeper.

Yeah. So, I'm from the West Coast and I believe the West Coast uh has um breadcrumb narratives uh that reflect what happened in Detroit and the rust belt in the 1950s and60s with the disinvestment and depopulation of our area because the United States began this process of not making things. And so we made cars still, we made appliances still, but the amount of the elements inside of those products started drastically changing to purchasing them from overseas cheaper labor. Now that sounds initially like a good idea, but because it happened over 40 years and it happened to like 10 of our largest industries, there was just a lot of work that changed hands from the rust belt and the textile belt to um overseas. And because of that, the top 10 cities in the rust belt and the textile belt, you know, in the 1950s, if you would have said you were about to become abandoned in the next 40 years, no one would have believed you because the amount of wealth made our country number one. That's repeating itself on the West Coast in the tech belt. Nobody calls it the tech belt. It's just something I'm saying. But from Seattle down to Los Angeles, the major cities over there are going through a depopulation and a disinvestment cycle because they were one industry cities. Even though they call themselves diverse cities, it's really still based on tech. You can have one of the largest economies in the world and if your tech industry leaves, the amount of money you lose in house, the amount of money you lose in taxes, the amount of money you lose in, um, you know, all the the supplying industries, um, you just can't stay afloat. And so what I'm seeing in San Francisco right now, which would be the closest thing to the impact that Detroit has um is that

you don't need to be in Silicon Valley anymore to be uh a major competitor in the tech industry. And so if you don't, what does that mean for your city? You know, there's going to be people fighting for the state for sure. They're like, "Call is the best place to live. I live there. I know." It could be very, very true. But at the same time, those people don't know their neighbors. And so, if you can't fight for your neighborhood, how are you going to fight for your state? And in Detroit, I've noticed Detroit's a network of neighbors. It's really I can go to any block and see beautiful life there um next to abandoned homes that are most likely owned by outsiders uh who would just want to flip it on the next round of investments. And so as Detroit becomes, you know, more and more um soughta, you know, the round of investments are insane. I mean, we're talking billions of dollars. We're talking about the World Economic Forum potentially moving from Davos to Detroit, which is insane. I mean, you have TED saying the same thing. You have Sundance saying the same thing. You have, you know, and those are the conversations we're in. The ones that people don't know about are even larger. And so as a city that was seemingly 50 years behind everyone, I believe is now 15 to 20 ahead of everyone. In a nutshell, Detroit's gone through what a lot of cities on the West Coast are about to, you know, and I feel like that's really a scary place to be be. And so when people are like, you know, is Hollywood the next Detroit or San Francisco the next Detroit? I want to flip that phrase and say there's strength in being the next Detroit, but you got to have these conversations like we do have here.

Well, I want to mention one thing. I love how you mentioned the neighborly thing, which is so true and it's such a Midwest thing. I had a a friend that was our neighbor that was from San San Diego and he's like this is the first time I've ever known my neighbors like when he came here to Michigan. So, it's interesting to think about someone that's lived here their whole life to like not feel that neighborly thing which is such a part it's like ingrained in all of us here. Yeah. And it really is important. It really does like solidify something for you. But we are almost out of time. So I want you to tell people why they should come see it.

Right now it's more important than ever to have a unified region and conversations that happen after Michigan Central. I'm sorry. You know, RGO is bringing in conversations in the Q&A that I think can grow our region. And as the country and the world looks to invest in our region, Ruro is an opportunity for people to go from zero to fully embedded into our into our city's narrative, into our state's narrative, and to see kind of why we're a very exciting place. Beyond that, there's a lot of healing that needs to happen. So, I'm kind of seeing all of that take shape in an hour and 47 minute film called Rerggo. I recommend people going to the detroitfilm.com to look for the next screening dates. Um, and also connect with me if you want to send an email. There's a little link there. And also, I have merch if you want to uh if you want to support the film. We got RIGO hats and sweatshirts and um you know, every part counts because you know, this is every part of my family right now is this effort.

Well, and the merch is actually really cool. I think it looks nice. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being on the show and talking about this is wonderful conversation. Yeah, absolutely. For more on this and other programs, visit aggov.org. org/ctn. Visit youtube.com/ctnarbor to see all that we have to offer. And remember to like, subscribe, and ring that notification. Thanks for watching and tune in next time to FYI.