Laura Berman

Detroiters renew a spirit to prevail in tough times

Every day Mark Gilman gets the call. An acquaintance has a friend. The friend needs a job.

What stuns Gilman, the president of a Clarkston communications company, is the regularity of the calls and the certainty that the help being sought is never for the caller, always for a friend or a cousin or a friend of a friend. It is, he insists, an entirely local phenomenon.

"It's almost as if the state motto is 'Friends don't let their friends stay unemployed,' " Gilman says. Born and raised in New England, he has lived in 15 states but regards Michigan as home. "There's a village mentality here and I don't think people realize what a special place it is. The bonds you establish here last in a way they don't in other places."

Yes, Michigan is a disaster area, and we've been down so long we scarcely remember being up. Yes, Michigan's unemployment rate is higher than it's been since 1981. Yes, we're up against another long, gray winter.

But we've been caught in such a sustained downward spiral that the recession's underside is its upside, one made visible in people's actions and attitudes. There's an intensified awareness of the way unexpected gains spring up amid losses. There's a new respect for friendship and an appreciation for community. Co-workers can be more compassionate. Acquaintances act like friends. There's an eagerness to help, with volunteer labor if not money, and a determination born of circumstances.

Here is Kelley Marks, 31, who was elected president of MorningSide, an east-side community organization, now working as a volunteer to improve her neighborhood -- one that is equal parts blight and hope. Three years ago, she and her husband, Christopher, 32, and daughter, Kristianna, now 6, moved their few possessions into a new Detroit house, one built for, and with, them by Habitat for Humanity.

To their left is a spiffy, new house like theirs. To their right is a wreck of a home, left for dead.

Months before their move, Christopher lost his job at Lear Corp., and a career in the automotive business the family had counted on. The next year, he found work -- as a delivery manager for a furniture company -- and she finished her degree at Wayne State University, in speech pathology.

It's been a precarious financial seesaw, one that has required sacrifice. They pulled the cable television, stopped eating out, cut and took Kristianna out of Cornerstone School. Three years after turning the key into their first, miraculous home, little has worked out the way they hoped: They focus not on miracles but on the work of building a future, bit by bit.

Despite disappointments, Marks speaks with passion about her work and her family. She is grateful this Thanksgiving..

"This house is my inspiration," she says. "It's an example of life's possibilities, and it keeps me dreaming, keeps me going."

Strength in numbers

People are pitching in, banding together. Community groups and chambers of commerce are gaining new members as individuals and business people try to help each other and forge collective ways to strengthen ties and attract business. In Ferndale, the Chamber of Commerce reported 43 new members since March.

"There's a sense of 'We can't let the situation beat us down,' and a growing sense of camaraderie. The massive recession has gotten all of us in different ways, but it's had a positive effect," says Kari Alterman, who heads the Detroit office of the AJC, a Jewish nonprofit organization. "By being an equal opportunity disaster, there's a renewed sense of working as one."

The Gleaners food bank hosts parties now, like a birthday bash last Sunday for a Gleaners supporter who invited her friends for lunch, cake -- and a couple of hard-working hours of labor packing donated food into boxes.

Bad times break down defenses and open paths unexpectedly. The cost of provincialism -- of hanging on to tradition at the cost of innovation -- got to be too high to maintain.

Embracing new leaders

Detroit has embraced a new mayor who, until a few months ago, lived in suburban Franklin. Its schools are being retooled by Robert Bobb, a state-appointed hired hand with a zeal for hard work and honest accounting from Oakland, Calif. Ford Motor Co. is surging forward under the vigorous leadership of Alan Mullaly, whose roots were planted in Seattle and the Boeing Corp.

Yes, in some cases, new leadership has been grafted forcibly onto institutions that foundered, from the Detroit Public Schools to General Motors. But even those grafts are taking hold.

In Royal Oak, Sarah Young -- who lived alone for a decade, insistent on her need to live on her own terms -- opted to share a house with two roommates, both men.

"It's our own version of 'Three's Company,' " she says, of their arrangement. "A lesbian, a gay guy and a straight guy."

The push together was strictly economic necessity. But she has been delighted by the change.

"It feels like more of a home than it did going solo. It requires bending and working with others, but it's a lot more fun," says Young, a masseuse. "A lot of us are getting more acquainted with the things that really matter.

Every day, Young hears her clients talk about their lives, and she sees a pattern: Those who dwell on what they've lost in these difficult times are unhappy. This is a time to master the art of appreciation. Kelley and Christopher Marks are eking out Thanksgiving today, as they do every day. He works six days, 60 hours a week, for a fraction of what he earned in a union job at an auto supplier four years ago.

But they are celebrating, as families in all kinds of circumstances are today. Few can say they've been untouched by uncertainty and setbacks over this past year: There's a shared sense of survival as accomplishment in Metro Detroit today, no matter where you live.

As they planned their own quiet holiday, Christopher Marks told Kelley, his wife and sweetheart since high school: "I'm thankful for our home. I'm thankful for you, and what better way to give thanks than to be here in our home together."

Laura Berman is a Detroit News columnist. Contact her at lberman@detnews.com or (313) 222-2032. Mail letters to The News, Letters, 615 W. Lafayette, Detroit, MI 48226 or e-mail them to letters@detnews.com