I took a ride down Mound Road in Detroit on Father’s Day, the route my Dad used to take for many years to Hamtramck when our family visited my Busia (grandma).

Both are deceased now so I haven’t taken the Mound route in many years, and what I found was one of those jolting experiences that many of us with previous connections to Detroit endure when driving through the “old neighborhoods.”

What I saw was desolation and miles of a once-major roadway reduced to nothing. Other than some gas stations and liquor stores, Mound is mostly infested with weeds on both sides of the street, where businesses once stood, and the same conditions exist in the wide median. In the distance, I could see homes that were crumbling, or boarded up, or burned down.

This is the same Mound Road that, less than a dozen miles to the north, represents a suburban mix of stores, strip malls, restaurants, factories and office buildings that generate an estimated $8 billion of annual economic activity.

I doubt that the stretch of Mound in Detroit generates one-tenth of 1 percent of that amount.

In fact, anyone who has driven the streets of Detroit’s East Side knows that the ratio of weeds and street-side trash to neighborhood jobs has to be at least 100,000:1. In many neighborhoods there are simply few to no active businesses where a resident can find work.

Inevitably, one has to conclude that the growth and prosperity in Detroit’s downtown and Midtown, which has received constant praise from the national media, represents a minor step for the city’s overall African-American population that is mired in poverty.

What’s more, complaints about white gentrification in the city’s core pushing out low-income black residents seems way off the mark. Poor blacks live within blocks of the Woodward corridor and, in a city that’s less than half full, the amount of housing is not an issue except for the fact that many rental homes are in deplorable condition.

So, Bridge Magazine took a look at Detroit’s condition, with the help of Alan Mallach, a scholar at the Center for Community Progress in Washington, based on his new book, “The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America”. Mallach offered this caution about celebrating the so-called Motor City renaissance: “Detroit is 80 percent African-American. If you walk around Campus Martius, the faces you see are 80 percent white. The people moving into the city are more likely to be white. The people moving out are more likely to be black.”

Here are a few excerpts from that interview:

Is there gentrification in Detroit?

A little. Downtown is now occupied by relatively upscale, predominately white people. But that was not a residential neighborhood in the past, so (few) were priced out and you can argue it’s not true gentrification … In terms of neighborhoods in the classic sense of gentrification, there’s very little in Detroit.

What has happened far more is that viable working-class neighborhoods have declined drastically as residents move out and become concentrated poverty areas. The number of neighborhoods where that has happened is far greater than the number that have seen gentrification.

Detroit is a big city. Are soaring rents in one or two neighborhoods a problem?

There’s a real difference in what’s happening in Detroit and Cleveland and Washington D.C. or San Francisco. If you are priced out of (Detroit’s) Midtown, you can find something that is comparable a mile away. If you are priced out in San Francisco, that’s not an option.

… But even if there’s little gentrification, you write that the issue is more emotional in Detroit than other cities. Why?

There is a pervasive narrative in the national media about being a clean slate. “Come to Detroit, you young artist, you Millenial, you techie, and you can reinvent yourself and the city.” This is deeply offensive and contributes to the sense that there are people using Detroit in a way that’s not in the interest of the majority of its residents.

And who is making the big decisions about Detroit? (Mayor) Mike Duggan, Dan Gilbert … Race is the subtext for all these issues.