"60 Minutes" To Focus On Detroit
DETROIT (WWJ) - Detroit's bankruptcy and financial problems will be highlighted for a national audience this weekend.
"60 Minutes" is scheduled to air a segment on Detroit this Sunday.
"When something really powerful hits a city, like [Hurricane Katrina] in New Orleans, the federal government is all over it," said Correspondent Bob Simon, speaking live Friday on WWJ Newsradio 950. "The federal government comes in with all its emergency money and equipment.
"But since the decline of Detroit took so long, it doesn't get the attention it deserves," Simon said, "and a lot of people we talked to were pretty angry about that."
Simon shared his first impression of the Motor City.
"Downtown Detroit looks like a thriving American city," he said. "It doesn't have much retail yet, but that'll come."
"It's just, as we all know, you drive five minutes out of town and you're in another world," Simon added. "I've never seen any worse neighborhoods in the United States."
Featured will be the efforts of Michigan businessman Dan Gilbert, who stands to millions buying office buildings on the cheap in Detroit's economically depressed downtown and convincing tenants to move into them to help the ailing city.
But it's not just another case of the rich getting richer, says Gilbert. "I know that sometimes there's Hollywood movies that, you know, describe every investor and profit-making capitalist as somebody very greedy," he tells Simon. "But in our case, you know, I think it's doing well by doing good. And I think that fits very nicely together."
The show airs Sunday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. on WWJ Newsradio 950 and on CBS 62.
