Dana Houle’s twitterfeed about Detroit’s problems is facinating. I cut and pasted her discussion below:
If someone says “Detroit’s problem is…” & then mention fewer than 7 or 8 factors, they don’t know what they’re talking about
Detroit’s bankruptcy may balance the city budget, but it will do nada for most Detroiters. Focus on the people, not the banks.Detroit’s high point? When about 35% of workers nationally & about 50% in Michigan were unionized.Blaming Detroit’s problems on only Detroiters or their elected officials only is a childish view of the world, personal over structural.Unions biggest contribution to Detroit’s problems: helping workers in 40’s to 70’s make enough $ to move to nicer homes in ‘burbs.increasing prosperity contributed to early white flight.Detroit was a very late-growing city: it went from being a fairly small city in 1890 to being the 4th largest city in the country by 20’s……so there wasn’t a significant elite. Most major investors in auto industry were on east coast, & Henry Ford purposely avoided Detroit.After WWII auto industry immediately went back to consumer goods. Military Industrial Complex bypassed Detroit for CT/L Isle, CA, South etc.Detroit had one of the most discriminatory housing markets in US. When blacks were finally allowed to move out of Black Bottom, real……estate agents devastated everyone by redlining: scared whites to sell out & flee, ripped off blacks w horrible mortgages/interest rates.Because Detroit was so heavily Catholic, white flight happened parish by parish. 1960 my dad’s neighborhood entirely white, by 1967……my grandparents & the Japanese family next door were only non-African Americans on their block. Whites who left mostly gave up on the city.Detroit never had mass transit. There was never a strong tradition of “going in to the city/downtown” like Chicago/East Coast cities.Prosperity was part of Detroit’s undoing, combined w racism. Racial covenants were overthrown in city, but not in ‘burbs. Whites……helped by the best paid working class in the history of mankind could afford to move to more comfortable homes in ‘burbs, which also……happened to mostly have unofficial racial covenants. It’s gotten a little better in recent years, but Detroit metro region still segregated.BY FAR the biggest problem for Detroit is de-industrialization. Poverty porn focuses on homes & public buildings, but the amount……of shuttered and abandoned industrial plant in Detroit is staggering. There’s probably more square miles of dormant industrial land……in Detroit than there is total square miles of Washington DC.Suburbanization also wasn’t just getting away from Detroit, it was going nearer jobs; almost all post-WWII MI auto plants built in suburbs.If you want to talk about Detroit’s problems of last 20 years, forget about white flight; that was pretty much done by 1990. Real……problem in Detroit in recent years is the exodus of the black working & middle class. Why stay in city w 55 minute waits for police?If you have some money & don’t have kids to educate, life in Detroit in or near downtown prob better than it’s ever been. But life……almost everywhere else except a few northern neighborhoods, SW Detroit & a few other pockets is nasty, brutish & too often short.No city/metro area in America was more scarred by a riot than Detroit after the 1967 riot. Blacks remember the heavily Alabamian……& rabidly racist police force. Whites remember the devastation to wide swaths of the city. Both memories were correct, but made it hard……for people who were adults at the time to not talk past each other for the next 40 years.
UPDATE: Some stats about Detroit:
• The city’s unemployment rate has nearly tripled since 2000 and is more than double the national average.
• The homicide rate is at historically high levels, and the city has been named among America’s most dangerous for more than 20 years.
• Detroiters wait an average of 58 minutes for police to respond, compared with the national average of 11 minutes.
• An estimated 40% of the city’s street lights didn’t work in the first quarter of 2013.
• Roughly 78,000 city structures have been abandoned.
Apt. 11d 
Certainly Detroit has been ill-served by its elites, black and white, political and business. It would be more interesting to hear some constructive suggestions, however.
My idea, which I made up on the subway this morning, having never been in Detroit in my life or thought about it much, is for the City to condemn/seize for taxes property parcels sufficient to form big coherent tracts, de-annex them (because no one trusts the municipal government) and establish alternative municipal government, and sell them to developers. That will bring in some cash and reduce the responsibilities of the current city government.
Of course, since there aren’t going to be new elites, it may be that there is no answer. It’s hard to change dysfunctional cultures.
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Pittsburgh never got that bad, and looks now like it will avoid bankruptcy for the foreseeable future, but you see many of the same processes. A big part of the issue in Pittsburgh is the older generation working when prosperity was at its peak assumed things would be better in the future (or didn’t care so long as somebody else had to pay for it) and so the pensions for a city of 600,000 are being paid by a city of 300,000. Unlike some of the cities you heard about in California, these pensions aren’t generous.
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And I really don’t understand the extremely punitive way some people get when it comes to municipal bankruptcy. Giant businesses go under all the time and nobody seems to worry about punishing the shareholders for being part of a company that went under even if that company’s management did huge amounts of damage to the economy because it was managed by fools. There is a bankruptcy proceeding of which the main purpose is to pay what can be paid of the debt so that the assets which remain productive can be redeployed by somebody. But, a city that has billions of dollars of fixed assets in its streets, sewers, and whatnot is apparently not allowed to restructure debt so that it can function on its current revenue and let people employ those assets.
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I don’t have anything insightful to add other than to mention that I’ve traveled to MI recently for work (not to Detriot, to Lansing*) and was surprised to learn how few people there live where they work. No one I met lived anywhere near Lansing. They were all willing to drive 45 to an hour or more each way to avoid living in either Detroit or Lansing. My impression is that the suburban flight that started in the mid- 20th century has kept on going apace and the chance for any sort of urban renewal is very low.
* Wow, is Lansing a depressing place, especially in January. It’s what I imagine eastern bloc countries were like in the late 80s: dilapidated, with lots of low concrete structures, and absolutely no one on the streets even in the middle of the day.
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Last year I was in Detroit several times on business, and I was stunned at the emptiness of the city. Empty freeways (even during rush), empty lots across the street from large downtown buildings. I was told by local colleagues that it was not safe to be downtown at 4:30 on a weekday. And it was certainly true that they rolled up the sidewalks right around that time. The only folks left were the ubiquitous parking lot guards in their little guard towers.
Ironically, my hometown of Chicago has directly benefited from Detroit’s middle-class flight. A not insignificant number of Detroit natives have ended up flourishing in Chicago. I’m not sure what it means that Chicago has many of the same issues (age of infrastructure, union history, racial segregation) and yet we seem to be OK here, whereas Detroit is just falling apart. I am suspicious just of the raw size of the town in square footage, and the lack of pub trans. With such low density once people start thinning out, the whole thing just collapses.
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Some people have suggested dealing with problems like Detroit’s (large sprawling geographic area with a poor city) by redefining government and taxing zones into large metropolitan areas. So, if all of Detroit’s pension money is dumped in the suburbs where the cops retire, then it could end up benefitting from that sprawl.
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I don’t think that would pass the voters, but I do think they need to force state governments to maintain certain minimum standards. In education, for example, courts have held that just because the kids come from poor families, they can’t have a school with no funding. Basic city services don’t seem that different to me. If the locality can’t function, the state should be forced to do something about it.
I’m still not sure what is going to happen to a small, very poor school district in a suburb here. The district was shut down for being completely unable to educate the kids, which took something like a decade, so now the state is trying to find another district to take the kids using the money that the district can raise from its tax base. Of course, if the district were able to raise enough money to educate the kids from its own tax base, the state’s earlier take-over of the district would have fixed it. Now, they are going to lose another year waiting for all the other local districts to refuse to take those kids for a payment that is about half the going per kid spending around here. Then they’re going to waste I don’t know how many years proving that a charter school can’t function on that little money either. And then who knows, but there’s a whole generation gone.
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This would never fly. You can’t forcibly annex a city against the wishes of its voters in order to take its tax revenue–and if you did, the voters would move. Only chance is a state bailout, but Michigan is also struggling.
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Presumably the permissability of annexation depends on the specific rules in Detroit and Michigan. I’d guess it’s not easy, or it would have been done already.
But, in Columbus, OH, permissive annexation can occur. A brief google search suggests that Columbus has this power through its control of water and sewer utilitie. which give it the upper hand in negotiations. historically the upper hand was used to annex. These days it seems like the threat is used to negotiate tax deals.
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It might be hard to get the suburban residents to agree to that. Do the residents of your town want to pay New York City taxes? Or have their schools run by the New York City Board of Ed? Would their enthusiasm be increased if New York City were in dire financial straits?
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Why would you stay in Detroit? The math doesn’t work for city finances. A city of 700,000 people can’t pay the pension costs of a municipal structure built for 1.8 million.
At present, there are 285,000 working adults in Detroit. There are 30,000 current and retired city workers. A 9 to 1 ratio of taxpayer to worker ratio can’t be sustainable.
Detroit is the equivalent of a failed state. It is irrational to blame people for leaving. It is irrational to expect them to pay high taxes to live in a state of nature. History shows that cities die.
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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A 9 to 1 ratio of taxpayer to worker ratio can’t be sustainable.
I don’t know what you mean by sustainable, but Social Security has not had that many workers per per social security recipient for something like 60 years now. If Detroit is to die, the people still there won’t disappear. Many of them have no ability to earn income and would need moved into housing that will need to be built somewhere else by somebody else at a cost that is certainly higher than having them live where they are.
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Apparently, Pittsburgh is in better shape than Detroit, but actually has bigger pension problem. Between that and the constant kvetching on Facebook, I’m getting pretty tired of Baby Boomers.
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Detroit’s average income is only $25,000 or so. 30% unemployment. The median sales price for a property in Detroit is $52,000, according to Trulia. The median sales price reflects a 12.5% decline from last year, which probably reflects the declining population. The figures do not include the multitudes of abandoned houses. No, it’s not sustainable.
Rome declined from about 2 million people to 30,000. Detroit’s on the same path. High taxes, no services, no schools, no jobs.
Why would you stay in Detroit, if you could move to North Dakota? I’m not kidding about that, although not that long ago that would have been a punch line.
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