By Minnah Arshad  Even with four times as many Detroiters working from home since 2019, commuters are still on the road for about as long as they were before the COVID-19 pandemic began. According to the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of remote workers in Detroit increased from 3.5 percent in 2019 to 15.1 percent last year. However, the average commuting time for Detroit workers has remained stagnant at around 25 minutes, according the bureau’s estimates. “Even something like a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic hasn’t had that profound of an effect on drive times,” said Jeff Horner, an urban studies and planning professor at Wayne State University. “There’s always going to be a relatively long commute, because we live in this sprawled-out city.”  

By Sarah Todd and Amanda Shendruk  Daily living is a lot of work – and the world relies on the unpaid labor of women to keep households functional. Women spend an average three to six hours per day on cooking, cleaning, watching over small children and ailing relatives, and any number of other domestic tasks, compared to men’s average of anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. Some economists warn that paying women for household work could wind up encouraging them to drop out of the labor force. A 2021 study by Yulya Truskinovsky, assistant professor of economics at Wayne State University, supports this concern. “Often, we think we prefer to have a family member take care of [relatives] rather than a stranger or a professional. But at the same time, compensating people for providing care is pulling them out of the formal labor market,” Truskinovsky said. “If we don’t kind of design compensation in a way that mimics the formal labor market, then I think there are a lot of costs.”  

It doesn’t look like much: Just a sea of tall weeds littered with broken bottles, pieces of smashed china and a wide variety of things that most of us would just call trash. But to a group of Wayne State University students, these are keys to the past. And they can open doors that have been locked for more than 100 years. The 13 students (and a handful of volunteers) armed with shovels, spades, measuring tape, markers and whatever else they need to carefully dig into and document the past are exploring what may be the richest archeological site in Hamtramck. “What we’ve learned through preliminary archival research thus far is that this site was the location of commercial and residential buildings from at least 1881 onwards,” said Krysta Ryzewski, WSU chairperson and professor of anthropology at Wayne State, who is directing the students. This is the third archaeological dig Wayne State has done in Hamtramck.    

As parents recorded them, big smiles, giggles and tears filled the eyes of young Black girls as they reacted to seeing Halle Bailey as Ariel in the teaser trailer of the new live action adaptation of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Bailey, a Grammy-award winning artist marks Disney’s first Black live-action princess. In Disney’s 100-year history, there has been one Black Disney princess. As some praised Disney’s bold move, there has also been criticism over Disney’s decision to cast Bailey. Lisa Doris Alexander, a professor in the African American Studies department at Wayne State University, says she believes seeing this clip of a Black Ariel shows why it’s so important for children to see representation. “You only have to look at the TikTok videos of little Black and Brown girls seeing the trailer for the first time beaming with joy to know my thoughts,” Alexander said. “That’s why representation is so important because those little children are saying ‘she looks like me,’ ‘an undersea princess looks like me’ and that brings them joy. The story of the ‘The Little Mermaid’ is a bit problematic, but we should let the little ones have their joy.”     

To many in the LGBTQ community, there seem larger, more pressing issues, and in some cases there are. Homelessness. Mental health crises. Suicidality. But tobacco use, more likely among LGBTQ people than other groups, is a health threat. Michigan authorities are working to address the inordinate rate of smoking and vaping among LGBTQ people. Overall, LGBTQ people are 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to smoke cigarettes than heterosexual individuals, as reported by the state health department. Unmet health care needs and substance abuse are linked, and addressing the higher rates of smoking is important because of all the possible and well-documented health consequences associated with smoking. “Which then magnifies the health disparities that exist,” said Luisa Kcomt, assistant professor and expert in health equity and health disparities at Wayne State University. “So, if we don’t pay attention to tobacco use, and it keeps proliferating, and we allow the tobacco companies to market to them, then they’re just going to have a higher risk of getting sick earlier and dying sooner.”  

The world, including metro Detroit, is reacting to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Janine Lanza, associate professor in the history department at Wayne State University, discussed the impact the queen had on so many lives. “I think that much of the way she ruled was shaped by the fact that she was a woman on a throne that was meant for men. She was relatable, she was a young wife and a young mother when she took over the throne when her father died. And yet, she always had a stature and a regal way about her that showed that she was doing her duty to the county and to the institution of the monarchy. And so, she really blended those two elements of being queen very well, I think,” Lanza said.  

Across the Detroit Public Schools Community District, student math performance, which was already alarmingly low before the pandemic, has gotten even worse. Federal COVID relief funds were used to support summer programs, but district officials are still laboring without a clear formula for how best to tackle the problem. While there’s growing consensus on the benefits of one-on-one and small-group tutoring for literacy education, math experts and educators continue to debate the most effective solutions to the more recent learning loss and the longstanding insufficiencies that have plagued math education in Detroit and across the country. The school board approved a $319,500 contract with Math Corps, a nonprofit tutoring group housed at Wayne State University, to provide Tier 2 and Tier 3 support for students at Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School.  

It seems like whenever you turn on your TV, check social media or even tune into the radio, the rise in mass shootings consumes the headlines. It's something that has become an unavoidable reality in the U.S. But what does the oversaturation of violence in the media do to our psyche? Pontus Leander, the director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State, said the normalization of violence culture in the U.S. could lead to more shootings. "We might not notice that in a certain context or a certain situation, that we are gradually - over a period of weeks or months or years - getting used to the idea of a behavior that was previously not only not normative, but appalling," Leander said. 

Do you have grandparents or parents who swear not to wear white after Labor Day weekend until Memorial Day weekend? The fashion rule seems to be fading, but holds some history. Local 4's style editor Jon Jordan and Wayne State University's lecturer of fashion design and merchandising Monika Sinclair weighed in on the history of the fashion rule. The rule is connected to social class in New York City and started in the 19th century. Those who were white and linen in the summer wore them for many reasons, but of a higher class, especially in New York City, could afford to wear white since they were not doing labor that would get their clothes dirty. Sinclair said the rule was started by wealthy women who came from old money who wanted to separate themselves from society. "They were the ones that could afford to leave the city and go on vacation and put away their dusty clothes from the city while wearing lightweight, white clothing. White was seen like a leisurely type of apparel back then. It would be considered formal wear because they were used to being dressed in these corsets and big gowns, but essentially, they were white," Sinclair said. "So if you had white clothing, you had money. You could afford to go on summer vacations and wear white and stay cool."  

It’s been more than a century since women’s right to vote was ratified as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The word that led to what became known as the 19th Amendment – ratified August 18, 1920 and certified by the secretary of state eight days later – was a multigenerational fight, primarily led by women. It was not just done by the upper-class white women who have received the most attention, however. Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color, many of whom would wait years or decades to have equal access on the ballot, also played key roles. The same is true for queer women and gender-nonconforming people, some of whom sought personal and financial independence from the constraints that came with traditional marriage. Historians in recent years have been untangling the full picture of the people behind the 19th Amendment and the complexities in why they organized. Liette Gidlow, professor of history at Wayne State University and author of “The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 18902-1920s,” has examined the ways in which some Black women sought to organize and vote despite the barriers. “Those experiences of African-American women trying to vote in the South after 1920, and often not being able to, resonate with us today in that they show that the work is never done, that this country has a long history of people gaining rights and then losing rights,” she said. “It’s not a narrative of progress. It’s not a story of ever-expanding freedom. Sometimes, Americans gain rights and sometimes they lose them.”  

By Bryce Huffman With monkeypox cases on the rise in Michigan, some queer advocates in Detroit worry the heightened risk to gay men could create a stigma for a virus that can harmful to everyone. As of Friday, there were 17 confirmed cases of the virus in Detroit and 72 total across the state. Monkeypox is a viral infection closely related to smallpox and causes the same symptoms – flu-like fevers, headaches, backaches, muscle aches and chills. The virus is transmitted by close, personal contact, including skin-to-skin touches, kissing or other sexually intimate contact, or by touching fabrics or objects touched by someone infected. According to the CDC, over 7,510 cases have been recorded nationwide and most cases involve men who have sex with men or patients that are identifying as LGBTQ. Chris Sutton, broadcast coordinator for LGBT Detroit, worries that messaging around who is most at risk to contract monkeypox is triggering and will increase anti-gay stigma. Patricia Wren, chair of the department at Wayne State University, said the messaging around monkeypox makes people assume it is only sexually transmitted, but it’s mostly spread through long periods of close contact, not necessarily sex. “Right now, there may be more cases in men who have sex with men. These men may also be better informed about sexually transmitted diseases and, thus, more likely to see their physician if worrying symptoms appear,” Wren said. “But if the HIV/AIDS pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that viruses – including monkeypox – are transmitted by specific behaviors and not by sexual orientations or identities.” 

As eastern Kentuckians continue to search for missing loved ones, muck out their homes and prepare for more rain, they are beginning to ask who could be at fault for this past week’s deadly flooding and whether it was a natural disaster or one caused by the coal mines that have drastically reshaped and scarred the landscape. Compacted dirt, destroyed mountaintops and deforestation in eastern Kentucky have often been left ignored by the coal companies that mined there, despite legal requirements that they attempt to return the land to its natural state when mining concludes. In recent decades, that spurned responsibility has, at times, turned heavy rains into floods and caused local residents who once counted on mining for jobs and prosperity to bring litigation against their former employers in Appalachian courtrooms. About 408,000 Kentuckians live within one mile of abandoned mine land. Kentucky spent a little more than $1.5 million from its reclamation fund. The state is expected to receive an additional $75 million this year as part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, which dedicated $11.3 billion toward abandoned mine reclamation over the next 15 years. The new sum is huge, but “it’s just a drop in the bucket” to address the need for communities across Appalachia, said Sarah Surber, a public health professor at Wayne State University who studied environmental justice issues in the region and practiced law there for more than a decade. “How do you prioritize [the funding]?” she said. “You have so many that have been left abandoned or sitting in limbo, you have more coal mine company bankruptcies anticipated, so how do you decide what mines get reclaimed and what does that mean for communities and their protection in terms of pollution and flooding issues?” 

By Ameera David  Black adults in the United States are more likely than any other group to see race as central to their identity. For many of those Americans, descended from enslaved Africans, the roots of their identity through ancestry remains a mystery. Some are now using DNA testing to trace roots back hundreds of years to a specific country and ethnic group. African Ancestry, which provides such testing, noted a 35% boost in test takers between 2019 and 2021. Kefentse Chike, Wayne State University assistant professor of African American studies, said the desire to learn more about one’s roots and origin has always been there, but also believes the upward trends are tied to current events. “That’s like the missing link in our heritage and it directly impacts our identity,” said Chike. “Of course, the killings of African American men and I think this kind of came to a height or a pinnacle with the death of George Floyd.”  

The median sale price for a home in the city crossed the $100,000 mark for the first time ever. It’s a significant sign of the strength of Detroit’s housing market. Jeff Horner, a Wayne State professor of urban studies and planning, says this has double significance. “It’s an important psychological barrier for long-time Detroiters who have stayed in the city and have kept up their property, because they certainly have a lot to do with stabilizing housing valuations,” he said. Horner pointed to the work of Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration and the Land Bank as keys to rising home prices. 

By Ryan Patrick Hooper  The City of Detroit turned 321 years old Sunday, but its history predates the French. Karen Marrero, associate professor of history at Wayne State University and author of “Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century,” researches, writes and teaches early North American and Indigenous history. She says a lot of what was once here was erased by the settler presence at the turn of the century. Indigenous peoples continue to maintain their connection to the land through oral histories passed down within their nations, but physical reminders of the past are scarce. This lack of preservation is not unique to Detroit, but there are still things we can do to reinstate cultural consciousness of this land’s history. For example, the Michigan History Center is making an effort to address the lack of historical markers that would designate significant Indigenous spaces. “A lot of people don’t realize that roadways like I-94 started life as Indigenous roadways,” Marrero said. “We have a long way to go to bring back some of that history.”  

Median Detroit home prices hit $100,000, highest value ever By Arielle Kass The median sales price for a home in the city of Detroit topped $100,000 in June, the first time values have been that high, according to multiple listing and service data. The median sales price of $100,250 in the city is based on 381 sales in June, and is more than a third higher than a year earlier, when the median sales price was $72,500. The increase in values is beneficial for homeowners, particularly those who have held on to properties for many years. But it can also put houses further out of reach for the first-time buyers. In a city that has long been known for its cheap housing stock following the aftermath of the Great Recession there is also an “important psychological benchmark, of course,” in hitting $100,000, said Jeff Horner, associate professor of teaching in the department of urban studies and planning at Wayne State University. “Any time housing valuations are going up in the largest poor city in America, it’s going to be good.”