I've come to think of Grosse Pointe Park as a cautionary tale | Opinion

When my husband and I moved to Grosse Pointe in 2005, we had a short window to find a house, and after walking through every three-bedroom in our price range, the choice came down to two virtually identical brick Colonials. One was in Grosse Pointe Woods and the other in Grosse Pointe Park, and a significant price difference compelled us to choose the Woods. We’d be in the Grosse Pointe school district either way — that was our main concern.

But the Park had so many of the softer advantages I’d hoped for. The first friend I made lived there, and confided over coffee, “You know, the Park went for Gore in 2000.” After 20 years in Indiana, I missed living where Democrats reached critical mass maybe most of all. But what was done was done. As we say here, “Five cities, one community.” The Woods would do.

Trouble in Grosse Pointe paradise

Lately, I’m thinking we made the right choice. I’ve come to think of the Park as a cautionary tale, and a harbinger, of a time when we will never stop fighting with one another, when the red/blue template we’ve laid over everything from public health to foreign policy fully engulf every aspect of life.

Her neighbor put a KKK flag up.The police bought him curtains.

This year the Park was roiled by another municipal election — non-partisan, like all the Pointes — that had seven candidates vying for three open city council seats, a challenge to the one-term incumbent mayor, a question on cannabis businesses and more. This, as the only other contested races in all the other Pointes were a municipal judgeship and a musical-chairs council seat (four running for three) in the City of Grosse Pointe. Campaign yard signs were sparse everywhere but the Park.

Now, one could see this as a case of complacency in the other four cities, and one could be right; the last mayor of the Woods served so long, almost entirely unopposed, that I started calling him Papa Doc. New blood is a good thing in local politics.

Or one could look at the last election in the Park, in 2021, which was so remarkable for its vitriol that I wrote a story about it for Deadline Detroit, my employer at the time. Control of city council was at stake, with conservatives threatening a new progressive majority, all with a newly energized, and malevolent, Grosse Pointe News stirring the pot. This year, that wasn’t the case. The progressives lost in 2021, and while two of the winning candidates this year might have a toe in that camp, they don’t threaten the new status quo, which seems to be to give development backed by wealthy donors everything it wants.

I spent the last few weeks calling around, to residents and candidates and interested observers, talking about what’s going on in the Park, discussing infrastructure and public safety and economic development and transparency in public business, and ended up saying, in every conversation, “... but these aren’t red/blue issues.” Finally, someone replied: “They are now.”

And that, finally, is what bothers me about what’s happening in the Park, which I suspect will start making its way up the Lake St. Clair coastline, penetrating Oakland County, or even percolating Downriver, as suburbs trend blue. Even hyperlocal issues like parking and water mains and whether restaurants should go here or there will become death struggles rather than opportunities for compromise and consensus problem-solving. All will be dropped into the great centrifuge, whipping us to opposite sides to yell at one another.

Shawn Fain's UAW strategy wasn't nuts.It worked.

The Park has benefited from the generosity of the wealthy, politically conservative Cotton family, who have backed several restaurants in the small West Park business district on Kercheval. But restaurant patrons need parking, and houses in the adjacent, starter-home Cabbage Patch neighborhood have been demolished to make room for cars, leaving nearby residents, who bought homes next door to families and now live next door to parking lots, wondering who’s really paying the price for all this development. In this, the complaints resemble those of Detroiters who wonder why wealthy developers seemingly get everything they want while ordinary residents wait for crumbs. And inevitably, this gets expressed in red/blue terms.

How’s your school board?

And for those residents who believe their community will never be so gripped, I can only say, don’t be so sure. That school district we were so keen on? It serves all the Grosse Pointes and part of Harper Woods, and hoo-boy, that is quite dramatic these days. After a painful, protracted budget battle earlier this year, we thought things might be settling down, until one member of the moderate/liberal minority — on a board split 4-3 — had his job transferred to Washington, D.C. The majority had the job of appointing his replacement, and reached for an obstreperous losing candidate from the last election.

I watched part of the candidate interviews. One of the moderate minority board members asked the eventual appointee — Terence Collins, whose success was assumed to be a foregone conclusion, as he’d run on a slate with two of the eventual winners — about civility, specifically his Facebook comment that used the term “government suckass.” He said he’d need to know the context.

And now the majority is 5-2.

Fighting, tired and tired of fighting

So that’s where we are in our leafy green Eden. Which is to say, in the same place a lot of Americans find themselves. Simultaneously feeling we’re fighting for the future of democracy and so, so sick of it all.

I sometimes think of the one that got away, that house in the Park. It had a beautifully redone basement family room with, no kidding, a working fireplace. I go into our plain old basement and think, man, that would have been nice. Then I remember that in 2021, it probably would have flooded during that terrible June storm, and I could have found myself cleaning raw sewage out of it. It seems like a metaphor.

Nancy Derringer is a mostly retired journalist living in Grosse Pointe Woods. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.