Detroit filed for federal bankruptcy protection today, becoming the largest Chapter 9 bankruptcy ever. Estimates are the total debt may be as high as $20 billion against assets of…not much.
I was hoping that with the ouster of the Kilpatrick regime and the appointment of Kevin Orr as emergency [del]dictator[/del] manager that there might have been a turning point on the horizon, but it looks like the city’s complete fall from grace is now complete.
Now I hope they can get through bankruptcy quickly; restructure their appalling finances with some federal oversight, and shed a lot of the dead weight in the municipal bureaucracy.
The city of Guanajuato, Mexico may be breathing a sigh of hope. They sent a few of their famous mummies on a tour of United States science museums and while in Detroit the museum was closed.
Apparently the city was unable to participate in whatever their part of the contract was to move them on. So they have been in a warehouse there for a year or two while other cities wait.
I wonder how high up on the fix-it list mummies are. Not as high as paying the blacksmith, I suppose.
We just watched the documentary, Detropia, and while it isn’t the best thing we’ve ever seen, it was an interesting view into what happened in Detroit (and it obviously still happening).
One of the interesting points from the film is people saying things like, “I have a job that I have to go to - don’t take my bus away!” That is sort of the problem in a nutshell - she has a job, she wants to go to it, she has no way to get there except by bus, but the city can’t afford to run buses - there simply isn’t any money for it any longer. So the buses stop, she loses her job, maybe her house, she stops paying whatever taxes she had been paying, and the negative feedback loop just continues and magnifies. I can’t even begin to try to figure out how you solve a problem like that.
I think bankruptcy is the only thing that will help in the long term. But it will be ugly in the short term. One thing for sure, lawyers are going to make money. There are a whole bunch of issues that have never really been dealt with before, but involve millions to billions.
Guess I’ll have to make sure go check out DIA one more time before it turns into a garage sale.
A few years ago I went to a business event at the convention center in downtown Detroit. I had a short opportunity to look around. It was incredibly depressing. Dozens of big, tall buildings, completely abandoned.
But…but, it’s the state’s fault! They owe us money! And it’s the federal government’s fault! And it’s Rick Synder’s fault! It’s everyone’s fault but the City Council’s; that much is for sure. :rolleyes:
The documentary showed the city planners trying to put forth a scheme to get people to move into the city core instead of having one or two families on a street and the rest of the street vacant, but the people weren’t interested in being told that you can no longer live there. I don’t know if that is going to be part of the solution, or if it is too little too late, or if that’s just the city trying to put their bad management onto the citizens.
I have never even been to Michigan, let alone Detroit.
However, even I have seen this coming for quite some time now…haven’t there been reports about this impending doom of Detroit for at least 5-10 years?
Longer than that. But there was some (perhaps misguided) hope that an emergency manager could at least negotiate a settlement with creditors and avoid an actual bankruptcy. Restructuring the city’s debt and obligations would go a long way towards recovery. (There are still structural problems, like huge tracts of mostly-abandoned housing that have to be dealt with, and a corrupt and entrenched bureaucracy.)
That’s why fiscal responsibility has to be the top priority. Because when a government entity runs out of money, things get much uglier for vulnerable citizens than they would had the government merely cut back on services. Cuts hurt. Bankruptcy is catastrophic.
So, the way I see it, people abandoned Detroit for the suburbs. The suburbs are under a different tax structure and don’t support Detroit proper.
In Canada, provincial governments saw this coming a decade ago and forced amalgamation on municipalities. Toronto was forced to amalgamate with surrounding towns, forming the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), as were Ottawa and Halifax. There are no doubt others, but these three I’m aware of off the top of my head.
This forced amalgamation was unpopular, however the benefits are now hugely apparent: the suburban taxpayers are now contributing to the overall tax revenue of the city core. There’s no benefit to moving to the suburbs because your municipal tax bill will still be supporting the city.
In retrospect, this forced amalgamation was a stroke of genius. Had Michigan forced a similar amalgamation principle on Detroit and its suburbs they would not be in this mess today.
That’s not really accurate. Michigan has an income tax and a lot of that money finds its way to poorer cities via social programs and subsidies.
Detroit’s current geography is not capable of sustaining amalgamation with surrounding towns. There are already entire cities within Detroit that are 90% abandoned. The population has halved over the past few decades. A huge part of their problems were caused by trying to support a city as big as Detroit with less than 50% of the tax base that they once had. The city will likely have to disincorporate large sections entirely to keep basic services sustainable.
Thanks. Man, I wish I could even pretend to imagine what it would take to clean up this mess: I can’t. It seems like a total clusterfuck all around. Detroit was once one of the greatest cities in America, and now look at it. I can’t even imagine a recovery plan.
Someone has already mentioned Robocop. Was Detroit picked as a counterintuitive or predictive choice in that movie? That is, was Detroit chosen as the setting because it would contrast with expectations (thereby making it more science-fiction-like) or because the makers predicted that Detroit turn badly in the future?
It’s possible that Detroit, like Chicago, may simply be past its peak.
In western Canada, cities just expand their borders. You may have been farming in Rocky View County before, but as of the first of the next month, you’re farming in the City of Calgary. The land area of Calgary is huge, because it keeps expanding in just that way. Other cities, such as Edmonton and Lethbridge, grow their areas the same way.
I was in the GTA (resident in North York, actually) at the time of the amalgamation of Metro (1997?), and I was surprised at the opposition to the plan. I didn’t see that North York was any better off by itself, and I knew enough about local history to know that Toronto had grown by “eating” other municipalities: the municipality of North Toronto in the early part of the 20th century, Forest Hill in the 1950s, etc. The events of 1997 were just Toronto growing again.
As for Detroit, I’ll admit that I do not know enough about the city to comment knowledgeably. However, I have seen the city from across the river in Windsor; and I’ve been to Michigan, where I found vibrant cities such as Kalamazoo and Lansing. I would hope that the state government can step in (if they are allowed to), and help Detroit. It is the home of Motown, of historical “Detroit Iron” (i.e. classic cars), and it would be a shame if it were to be left to die.
I don’t know how it works in Michigan, but in some states cities have entrenched protections against being dissolved by the state. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Ontario, so while a government that does it may lose the next election, amalgamation is still presented to the voters (and the next government) as a fait accompli. In my state I think the constitution would have to be amended by the voters to allow forced amalgamation, and instead of voting on a government and its entire legislative program, we’d vote on “Issue 3: Taking your already too-high property taxes and sending them to urban crack addicts” or “Issue 3: They’re trying to dilute our city.” (A few years ago a larger suburb and a very tiny suburb explored merging. That’s allowed here if the voters in both communities agree. The tiny suburb already buys all of its services from the large suburb, so there was no issue of losing local control. The voters on the tiny side still voted against the merger.)