Economy
What Really Ails Detroit?
The city’s former health department director is making a historic run for governor—at age 33. And he’s got ideas about why Amazon just spurned the Motor City.
Hours after Amazon announced its HQ2 shortlist, Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed took to Twitter to express how he felt after Detroit didn’t make the cut: “We’ve been too busy cutting corporate taxes and spending $1BN in corporate welfare,” he wrote, “so we don’t have the resources we need to invest where it matters.”
El-Sayed’s diagnosis of the city’s maladies is built on two strains of first-hand experience. The son of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed was born and raised in metro Detroit; he’s a Rhodes Scholar and former public health professor who, in 2015, became director of Detroit’s Health Department. At 30, he was the youngest health official of any major American city.