it’s built at Sterling Heights Assembly.
And ten years ago, the population was already down a whopping 50% from its peak. The population was about 1.8 milion in 1950.
Some graphs of the population decline of detroit, which are pretty severe:
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/02/decline-of-detroit-vs-rise-of.html
Well, one graph. The other one I can’t verify sources for, and is somewhat controversial.
The first graph is somewhat misleading, at least in detailing Indianapolis’ growth. The reason the population there spiked in 1970 was because that was the year Indianapolis merged with the county government. As a result the city ended up taking over pretty much the entire county. If you look at a map of Indianapolis today, you’ll the see city limits do indeed mirror the contours of the county, though a few communities did manage to keep their independence.
It seems (to me) that Detroit would be an excellent place to test the late Milton Friedman’s ideas about capitalism. Friedman asked the question: why is Japan so different from India? (economically speaking).
The answer was that Japan (with almost no resources) bested India (with enormous resources) because of the greater freedom (for business to operate) in Japan.
What if Detroit offered a tax holiday to firms willing to locate there? Along with this, effective law enforcement and expeditious building permits.
Detroit could become nma boomtown (as it was in 1910).
But that will never happen with the present city government-they can’t even get their own police and firemen to live in the city!
I think first a lot of the derelict/unsalvageable structures would have to be razed. Here I’m thinking of the crumbling, vacant factories that are quite visible from the I-94-I-75 interchange. Tax breaks might not do the trick if a prospective business has to pay to demolish something. And some of those old factories would probably have some significant environmental cleanup costs.
and can someone tell me why the Packard plant is still standing?
Because most IT workers would rather live in temperate areas such as the Bay area, Puget Sound or the research triangle in North Carolina. Most IT workers don’t like Midwest winters.
Most workers don’t like Midwest winters. I doubt the Dakotas will ever see a major rise in population.
And Detroit is the worst, but hardly alone. Gary and East St Louis as others mentioned. St Louis itself is barely hanging on - the north side has several neighborhoods of abandoned property.
And mayors know this. It has been at the top of their agendas. US Conference of Mayor reports.
I think Detroit’s plan is solid. Consolidate the city down to a natural size, and allow areas revert to nature, perhaps even limited agriculture uses.
One policy proposal starting to see wider use is handing over vacant properties to non-profit housing organizations to develop low-cost housing, especially for the homeless, which is large untapped labor pool for rehab work. Offer sweat for equity and kill two birds with one stone. It borders on the ridiculous that we have so many abandoned properties and so many idle homeless. Allow the agencies to be the owners of record and the property managers. Tenants would be required to have case management.
Since most of these properties are not paying taxes, and incurring rather substantial maintenance costs, it cannot hurt the cities to turn them over to non-tax paying entities which could provide maintenance for lower costs than municipal workers. Keeping those properties livable, and lived in by residents that will pay other local taxes, is more important that getting them back on to the property tax rolls.
There is no magical “they” who could snap their fingers and restore Detroit.
First, look at the magnitude of the problem. The census figures for New York state haven’t been released yet, but from estimates it appears that even the current shrunken Detroit is larger than the cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Schenectady combined. The empty areas that people make so much of are larger than the entire land area of Rochester. If your magical “they” snapped their magical fingers and transported Rochester into Detroit it would leave that city smaller in population than it was in 2000 and still full of empty areas, many square miles of them from Rochester.
All those cities are hurting and for similar reasons. They had an over-reliance on a particular industrial base without a diversified economy to help them when that base crumbled. In addition, the trend since 1950 has been for urban dwellers to move to the suburbs and for northeasterners to move to the sunbelt. More than half of all Americans now live in suburbia. That’s true even with the growth of sunbelt cities like Houston, Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas.
Boston, New York, and Chicago were somewhat able to overcome these trends. Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore were hit hard. Pittsburgh is doing much better in its suburbs than in the city proper.
Nobody “decided” that this would happen. It was the sum total of millions of individual rational decisions that built these cities up in the first place and millions of individual rational decisions that unbuilt them after the money went away.
The global reasons why these cities appeared when and where they did can be briefly stated. The U.S. was developing a large-scale industrial economy that had to be compactly situated near the coastal and Great Lakes population bases, transportation hubs, and raw materials. None of that is true any longer. Declaring tax holidays won’t make it come true. Eliminating “corruption” won’t make it come true. Using cities in other countries as models won’t make it come true. (Windsor, Ont has had about the same population for 40 years, BTW.)
Nor is the problem entirely one of cities. Wayne County, in which Detroit sits, saw no growth in population outside of Detroit. The same is true for the counties in which the New York cities sit. Why? Because they’re all subject to the same structural problems.
If someone can figure out a structural solution, then the situation will change. Not tomorrow, but maybe over 40 or 50 years.
Or global warming could be the answer. Burn those suckers out of the South. 
would this really work in practice, though? I mean, it’s rare that the term “the projects” gets used in a positive manner.
How will Detroit pay the police and firemen and teachers and transportation workers and sanitation workers, if all the businesses that move to the area aren’t paying any taxes?
And there are plenty of other cities willing to cut taxes to the bone to entice businesses to move there. Detroit is just one more city begging for jobs. No business is going to relocate to Detroit just because taxes are low, because Detroit is falling apart. Businesses like low taxes and low regulation, but they also need functional infrastructure and workers. You can get low taxes and a “business friendly environment” anywhere in the country. It is nonsense to imagine that Detroit would become a boomtown overnight if only they stopped collecting taxes.
And using Japan as an instance of the success of laissez-faire capitalism is mind-boggling.
Well, it strikes me that at least part of the abandonment of Detroit (as a center of industry) was due to cheap gasoline.
After all, who wanted to put up with high taxes and crime, if you could get away from it, by moving 10-20 miles away?
The suburbs of Detroit seem to be doing OK-Novi, MI looked like a nice place to me.
But consider this: if the era of cheap gasoline is indeed over, would a location like Detroit become advantageous once again? As was pointed out, Detroit sist on the Great lakes Seaway-and shipping stuff in and out (by boat) is cheap.
Yeah, Hyundai likes where they are (Alabama) because its a non-union, right-to-work state-but trucking stuff in is going to get awfully expensive.
Which is literally right down the street from me.
Anyway, the one thing Michigan, and Detroit, had going for it was the Film Tax Incentives. I was in the midst of working on a feature film, at a studio that opened just outside of Detroit, hiring about 50 or so local talent (including myself).
Now that the incentives are being cut off at the knees, the one industry that could’ve offered a ray of hope has been shot, point-blank, in the head.
As a state government, you don’t get to choose which industries will work here. If it’s thriving, bolster it. Rick Snyder’s a shill.
I’m now back working from home on out-of-state jobs. Who knows how much longer I can live here? Probably not long.
Yes, but lots of other states were offering tax incentives to film producers.
One thing that might help the Great Lakes region is the availability of fresh water. Much of the West and Southwest is dependent on the Colorado River, which hasn’t been producing much recently. So perhaps people will start to move back to the Midwest?
This is probably a better one!
That is very weird… and it is also very telling and very indicative.
700,000 people “should” be enough to support dozens of Kroger stores.
.
Unfortunately, it’s not an uncommon issue in poor urban areas, particularly those with high non-white populations. The south side of Chicago has a not-dissimilar lack of supermarkets. The thin population density of areas in Detroit undoubtedly exacerbates the problem.
Wasn’t OCP making a bid to buy out the city?
THAT’S the one! Just mind-boggling.
Bonus points for the RoboCop reference.
Some more sad photos of Detroit’s bygone glory: Haunting Images Of Detroit's Decline (PHOTOS) | HuffPost Impact
I think it is a viable part of a larger community redevelopment effort. The key issue are keeping it scale, not in terms of the multi-hundred units of the projects of the past, but for 100 or so units at a time in a moderate sized city. Accountability is also key, and non-profits provide that easier than public housing agencies. (Much easier to yank grant money or accreditation than a department budget.)
The focus of the non-profit agencies is also on transitional housing mostly for low-income families - as they should, but we now have a glut of properties, and getting the homeless out of shelters or the streets and into the same pipeline would be beneficial. As well as give them vocational training in rehab and maintenance work.
The long-term goal of case management is self-sufficiency, but studies have also shown that housing first makes a huge difference in terms of such long-term success. It is not a panacea, but takes care of most acute or temporary homeless, allowing social workers to focus on the hard core chronic homeless, which we will always have, but those numbers can be minimized.
But the sad fact is that we will not likely have a new industrial base to support the great Rust Belt cities of the past. They need to shrink to manageable sizes around whatever core economies are left, and perhaps a few abandoned (looking at you East St Louis.) New industries not reliant on geography the way the steel mills were are not going to choose the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes region to set up shop. Chicago and Toronto are probably the only major cities that area can support. The rest will likely settle down to 1-2 million or so for the whole metro areas. It sucks to lose so much housing stock and infrastructure, but people have abandoned cities since the dawn of history, and I doubt that trend will stop.
Cities are as organic as anything else in life, they just tend to have longer lifespans.