How the world sees Detroit

And finally, this from the Financial Times, "The city never fails to deliver colorful copy: the urban decay, the $1 houses that still go unsold, the tragicomic city politics. Jerry Herron, a writer and scholar at Detroit's Wayne State University, likens journalists' morbid delight at Detroit to that of Victorian travelers reaching Pompeii. 'City of the dead, city of the dead,' Thackeray wrote."

Thunderdome? City of the dead? Ouch! But is that really Detroit?

Certainly, the photographs and the conditions here don't have to be exaggerated much to present a truly horrific picture. The national press corps isn't making this stuff up.

"We're holding up a mirror to how life is here," says Steven Gray, the Time reporter who will live for the next year in a home the magazine purchased in Detroit as a base from which to chronicle our struggles. "And some of it is not pretty."

But it is irresistible, at least to a national press corps that has been beating a path to Detroit all year. The city is a smorgasbord of social and economic story angles. Every bad news item can be found on our table, from unemployment to the shattered middle class, from a failed school system to race and class struggles to a nation leading murder rate. We got it all, and all in one place.

Karen Dumas, communications director for Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, says she gets more calls from national reporters wanting to interview her boss than she does from the local press.

"There's a fascination with Detroit," she says. "... They see it as a microcosm of what other urban cities will be facing."

Hopeful stories not told

What irks Detroit's defenders is that the entire story isn't being told. Schiavone was impressed during his visit by the unexpected resilience he encountered.

"There's muted optimism," he says. "And I hadn't read anything about that."

That's why Larry Alexander, who just a few years ago was courting the national press to Detroit to hear a story of rebirth and vitality, now cringes when he learns another out-of-town journalist has checked into a hotel.

"My first reaction is always 'I hope they tell a balanced story,' " says Alexander, head of the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. "I want them to dig in and discover all the hard work a lot of people are doing to make the city and the region work. The reality is more hopeful than what you read in these negative stories."

In fairness, that more hopeful story is also harder to see. Nearly every big city has stylish skyscrapers, interesting cultural offerings and redevelopment projects. That Detroit has some of these as well isn't really news.

But not every city has entire city blocks of its downtown district boarded up. Not every city has trees growing out of the top of its once landmark office towers. Not every city has waterfront warehouses that have been rotting for 50 years or more. And not every city has 70,000 blighted buildings waiting to be torn down.

Our deterioration is hard to miss, and harder not to talk about.

Detroit is often described as the new New Orleans. But there's a key difference. New Orleans woke up the morning after Katrina hit and found itself under water. In Detroit, the water has been rising an inch at a time for decades. We've adjusted.

Filtering out the despair

From the windows on the west side of our downtown offices, we get a generous view of the Detroit River as it slips beneath the Ambassador Bridge. On a bright day, with the sun dancing off the water and the bridge arching across a blue sky, the sight is thrilling.

Between here and there, however, is a string of decaying structures, including the iconic Michigan Central Depot. But I don't usually notice them.

If you live or work in Detroit for any length of time, you train yourself to filter out the blight and focus on the beauty.

For us, this is more than the old cup half full or half empty question. Yes, we know that buildings are falling down all around us. We get that more people are out of work here than anywhere else in the country -- those are our co-workers being escorted out the door. And we understand that the misery index is not this off-the-chart everywhere else -- we do get out of town once in awhile.

But if we saw ourselves through the same desperate and despairing lens that others see us through, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Looking on the bright side is a survival tactic. It's also more than that.

Our view of our town is colored by our hopes for it.

Kerry Doman is 27 and owns both a business and her own condo in Detroit. Had she stayed in Chicago, she says, she wouldn't be able to make either boast.

"There's opportunity here that you don't see in other cities," says Doman, founder and chief executive of after5detroit.com, a thriving entertainment Web site. "It's like going to a small college versus a big public university. You can really get involved and make a difference here."

Doman grew up in Oakland County and, like many of her peers, headed to Chicago after college. Although the Windy City is a magnet for young professionals, she found it isn't as fertile for youthful entrepreneurs as Detroit.

"The barriers to entry are lower here," she says, "while the access to the people you need to know is much higher."

Doman represents both the more hopeful Detroit that Alexander says is ignored and the undercurrent of optimism that Schiavone picked up on during his visit.

It's the rest of Detroit's story, and we have to work harder to tell it.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The News. nfinley@detnews.com">nfinley@detnews.com or (313) 222-2064.