Hamtramck? (Detroit, Warren, Sterling Heights: rent, car insurance, crime)

[OuttaTheLouBurbs]

I have a couple of questions about Hamtramck.

A) From a quick Google Maps Tour, it appears that Hamtramck has suffered far less blight and destruction than most of Detroit. Why is this?

B) I checked Wikipedia and it said that Hamtramck is very diverse, with many groups of Polish, African, and Arabian descent (among many other ethnicities) being scattered about in the city. How did it get to be so diverse, as opposed to the majority-black city and majority-white suburbs?

C) How is crime in Hamtramck? It looks to be surrounded by a number of bad neighborhoods, and thus likely suffers from a lot of spillover crime. Is this the case? If so, is it bad?

D) How has Hamtramck survived being an independent municipality for so long without having been annexed?

E) Is Hamtramck doing well in terms of economy and demographics? Are jobs and people sticking around and/or increasing in number, or are they leaving? If so, at what rate? Is Hamtramck on the rise or on the decline?

[animatedmartian]

A) Mainly because the factories adjacent to the city never really closed. That kept the working population stable and kept Hamtramck's tax revenue more or less stable. Whereas Detroit, the cumulative effect of many factories closing and moving meant that the working population was more unstable and the effect of lost tax revenue is a lot more apparent.

For comparison, look at Highland Park. It's roughly the same size and age as Hamtramck, however it use to have the Chrysler's HQ on the east side of the city and it used to have many more factory jobs than it currently does now. After quite a few factories closed in the early 70s, many whites left Highland Park taking the tax base with them leaving just a predominately poor black population, much in the same way that it happened to Detroit. Hamtramck never went through this process.

B) Hamtramck never went through residential segregation that many then affluent neighborhoods in Detroit and inner-ring suburbs had. Hamtramck is much of what the inner-city of Detroit used to resemble; diversity albeit with a majority working class population making up the bulk of the tax base. The diversity comes from the many low skill jobs that immigrants often flocked to during the earlier parts of the 20th century. Back then, inner-city Detroit had just as much diversity as Hamtramck does now if not more.

The Arabic population has been a more recent arrival likely due to cheap rents compared to farther out suburbs.

C) Hamtramck is actually pretty safe for the most part. It's still somewhat rough though not any worse than you'd expect in a blue-collar little suburb but not to the point that'd it prevent most people from moving there. More people worry about graffiti on the side of their building than they do about any other sort of crime here.

D) Michigan has very strict annexation laws that make annexation of an independent municipality very difficult.

Detroit, actually, has never annexed an independent municipality. Pretty much everything that it has gobbled up used to be townships. For whatever reason, many suburbs around Detroit never wanted to be annexed by the city and it's been this way since the 1930s. Hamtramck Township used to extend to 8 Mile, but incorporated what little it could into a city to prevent being completely annexed by Detroit. Highland Park, Grosse Pointe(s), and Dearborn all did the same thing.

E) It's kind of eh. Right now, Hamtramck is sort of the popular spot for young urban dwellers looking for cheap rent and the slowly growing immigrant population, but are both countered by the slow out migration of the older Polish residents. Since the closing of the American Axle plant in recent years, the city did take a hit to it's tax revenue that it really didn't need but luckily the city still has pretty good support from GM's assembly plant which produces the Volt. However, Hamtramck is still kind of eh. It's not getting any worse, but it's not seeing the same sort of growth that suburbs farther out are seeing.

I think a future Hamtramck will largely benefit from a revived Downtown Detroit as it'll be a secondary option for those looking for cheap rents and a walkable environment. Only time will tell how soon that occurs though.

[aoletsgo]

Animatedmartain summed it up nicely. I would only add that in general the Polish neighborhoods are/were very tight knit communities and did not up and move as quickly as other neighborhoods. Another example is the area in Detroit along Michigan Ave near Dearborn, that neighborhood had a lot of Polish residents that stayed in Detroit a lot longer than other parts of the city.

[jonnynonos]

I would imagine there only a very, very negligible amount of Poles left in Hamtramck.

I would say Hamtramck is still pretty blighted, but, in comparison to Detroit, yes, it's fared far better.

It was also shielded enough from the blight that even back in the early 2000s, it was a place where metro Detroit hipsters liked to congregate/sometimes live, so that probably helped it a bit as well.

[OuttaTheLouBurbs]

Originally Posted by jonnynonos

I would imagine there only a very, very negligible amount of Poles left in Hamtramck.

I would say Hamtramck is still pretty blighted, but, in comparison to Detroit, yes, it's fared far better.

It was also shielded enough from the blight that even back in the early 2000s, it was a place where metro Detroit hipsters liked to congregate/sometimes live, so that probably helped it a bit as well.

According to Wikipedia, the Demographics of Hamtramck are still about 22.9% of Polish Ancestry. I think that's from the 2000 Census but it's hardly "negligible."

[animatedmartian]

With Hamtramck's total population at around 22,000, 23% would be somewhere under 5,000.

It's probably more accurate to say that you wouldn't find very many first generation Polish-immigrants as you would 2nd or 3rd generation (or later). In most of Detroit's suburbs, there's just as many if not more residents who identify as Polish ancestry than those in Hamtramck. However, I suspect a very small percentage of them are first generation.

In that sense, it's not that hard to find Polish people in Hamtramck (or really anywhere in Metro Detroit), but it's probably a lot harder to find those who hold on to many of the older ethnic traditions that you'd usually find in immigrant dominated neighborhoods/cities. The only Polish tradition I can readily think of is Packzi Day which is today actually but in Metro Detroit it's become sort of a non-Polish tradition that pretty much everyone celebrates by driving into Hamtramck to buy up some Packzis.


Lining up for paczki - YouTube

However, other than that and the Hamtramck Polish Festival (which tends to draw a pretty decent amount of people from all over the metro), the immigrant feel of the city has definitely shifted to other groups such as Arabic and South Asian immigrants. Hamtramck has become more "Polish in spirit" because of its history rather than being a Polish dominated area.

[jonnynonos]

It says in 2010 it was 15 percent Polish.

I'll admit that's more than I thought, but it does show where it's trending. You can bet your bottom dollar the vast majority of Poles there are old, and I would expect an even larger drop off by the next census.

[amac626]

The problem with Census data is that it's not very accurate for Hamtramck for a number of reasons. Much like Detroit Hamtramck has excessive car insurance rates and a city income tax on wages. For this reason a very large number of actual Hamtramck residents claim to live in say Sterling Heights or Warren (by using the address of a friend , old neighbor, or relative) since they can avoid the both the excessive insurance and income tax rates. Secondarily there are enclaves of illegals in Hamtramck. Polish, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Bengali, Yemeni, etc... These folks are not filling out there Census forms people. They aren't filing income tax returns and they aren't living on the grid or radar of government. No one has an exact number but this is very prevalent in Hamtramck. Yes there has been an outmigration out of the younger polish and Ukrainian generations to some extent, there are still plenty of babcia's walking to Polish Market and Srodek's.

[jonnynonos]

Originally Posted by amac626

The problem with Census data is that it's not very accurate for Hamtramck for a number of reasons. Much like Detroit Hamtramck has excessive car insurance rates and a city income tax on wages. For this reason a very large number of actual Hamtramck residents claim to live in say Sterling Heights or Warren (by using the address of a friend , old neighbor, or relative) since they can avoid the both the excessive insurance and income tax rates. Secondarily there are enclaves of illegals in Hamtramck. Polish, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Bengali, Yemeni, etc... These folks are not filling out there Census forms people. They aren't filing income tax returns and they aren't living on the grid or radar of government. No one has an exact number but this is very prevalent in Hamtramck. Yes there has been an outmigration out of the younger polish and Ukrainian generations to some extent, there are still plenty of babcia's walking to Polish Market and Srodek's.

"An outmigration to some extent."

According to the census in 1970 it was 90 percent Polish; in 2010 15 percent.

Unless you think the census is so flawed it's useless that is the understatement of the year.