I read that the city of Detroit has over $14 billion in debt. The city has been losing population for 30 years-vast stretches of the city are now abandoned wastelands. The area of the city (450 square miles) is simply too large for the city to provide police and fire services. In any case, can a disaster like this be turned around? Or should the city be broken up, and absorbed by surrounding towns/cities? The downtown looks viable-cold the city be simply reduced in size, to the point where it could survive?
Don’t know if it could be broken up, but do you think the folks in adjoining city’s want to take any part of Detroit?
Frankly, the biggest problem is that the city council is beyond incompetant, and they consider receiving help from “outside the city” (meaning, from white people) to be something akin to treason. Of course, if the state wants to dump a truck full of money on them, they wouldn’t say no, but don’t you dare try to hold them accountable for how the money is spent! Putting the city into receivership is pretty much the best thing that could happen to Detroit.
As for solving the underlying problems, they are working on tearing down the vast tracts of abandoned buildings, but there are so many that this will take years & years even under the most optimistic of scenarios. There are plans in the early stages to clear out and level entire neighborhoods, so that the population can be more concentrated and city services can be more effectively provided. Something like this is probably necessary. Tearing down the old Packard Plant would be a huge step in the right direction, but this would probably require federal funding, since it’s expected to cost something like $20 million (it’s huge, and has asbestos and other nasty stuff) and neither the city nor the state have that kind of money just lying around.
They can take large areas of ‘abandonded’ houses, sue the crap out of the banks who are not paying their taxes or maintaining them and force those banks to demolish and remediate the lots, then either sell the lots cheap to the adjoining lots or turn them into green spaces complete with urban farming. (Open spaces are easier to patrol and protect)
Then they can select key buildings to be taken forward and look at demolishing some of the remaining buildings to create an open market in central areas.
There is no reason that Detroit can’t be taken over as an artist colony mixed amongst the businesses that are still remaining there.
The biggest thing against Detroit is that law in MI where voting doesn’t really count. Who, in their right mind would move to MI if your property could become “ruled by an appointed BFF of the governor” at any moment?
Detroit is already doing some things along these lines. Large areas of abandoned houses and buildings have been torn down and converted back into farmland, which gets rid of some of the decay and reduces the city’s size closer to what it should be. They still have a lot more to do though, obviously.
Here’s an article about it from 2010:
Here’s a more recent article from 2012:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/17/us-detroit-raze-idUSBRE86G0RJ20120717
Per your subject line “what will happen” - the state can do things that the city’s elected officials can’t do, or won’t do (because they need the city to reelect them). The state-appointed emergency manager can void contracts, and can take measures that are unpopular with the city’s residents without worrying about getting reelected.
As Gary notes, none of the surrounding suburbs will want any patches of land that Detroit wants to unload.
OK - this is probably going to be a really dumb question so sit down…
Does taking on more land immediately increase costs for a city? For example, if it’s abandoned, open space and since there’s no one living there, there are no additional services to provide (well I expect some police presence is always required).
But does a city, for example, pay property tax to the county or state? Is there some other form of cost to incur?
So if I’m a neighbor city of Detroit could I just say “Hey, tell you what; I’ll take this chunk of land for a park. I’m not gonna give you anything but I’ll take it off your hands. Deal?”
I suggest selling the city to Omni Consumer Products. I hear they have some very innovative strategies in regards to policing.
Here is an article about Youngstown… once one of the deadest towns around. They’re clearing out abandoned houses, promoting urban farming and they have some other things going for them. BUT, their comeback started long before the gas/oil play and they are considered a model of how to downsize a town.
Cleveland is also in a downsizing and doing pretty well.
Maybe they could get Glenn Beck interesting in it. I hear he’s making a fictional city 
Exactly. Besides, who really cares about the city itself so long as we’re getting a Robocop statue erected downtown.
I am not sure about the taxes, but in the case of Detriot, they still have pockets of homes still being lived-in, so the problem is of density, in that the City still needs to provide services to all these little hamlets throughout the city proper, and that is expensive over such a large area.
I spent some time in this city in a former career. We drove around most of the city for a mapping project. It was in February, and I saw things a westerner is not accustomed to: fire hydrants would rupture from the cold, flooding the street and cars parked would get frozen up to their axels, only to have a salt truck come by and spray that blue salt all over everything. Burned-out husks of what once were stately homes, right next to someone still living in their home. The piles of bricks where homes used to be: I told a local co-worker to send those west in a rail car and he would make a fortune. Packs of feral dogs. Bleak decay was evident on nearly every block, and we were soon numb from it.
On the bright side the downtown is fairly nice, as is Greektown. The suburbs are also nice, but the land in between is, indeed, a wasteland.
I think the efforts to reduce the physical size of the city are on the right track, but the graft and corruption within City Hall are still the most sizable obstacle to making it a more livable city.
For perspective, here is a decent photo tour of The Ruins of Detroit (no, it is not Chernobyl).
Detroit’s had 50 years of decline to turn things around. City Council’s plan was to yell at the state to give them money but don’t dare tell them what to do with the money.
Quite frankly, I think Snyder should have skipped the emergency manager and just let Detroit go to federal bankruptcy court. If they thought the previous consent agreement was onerous, then holy shit I’d have loved to see them dragged through the mud by a judge.
like the goddamn Belle Isle thing. the state was going to lease it from the city, whereby the city maintained ownership but the state would put money into the park (and from spring to fall I spend nearly every Sunday on Belle Isle, it needs the work) and let the lease expire after x number of years. All that was rebuffed because it wasn’t “good enough.” Those stupid fucks don’t realize that when you’ve got your hand out, you can’t keep slapping away helping hands.
The core problem is that Detroit city “leadership” thinks it’s more important to hold the wheel of a sinking ship all the way down to the sea floor than let someone else drive for a while and get the ship back on course. IMO, if that’s what they want, let 'em have it.
:dubious: OK, where do I start?
I’m sure there some houses owned by negligent banks, but in the vast majority of cases, these are simply houses where the owners walked away years (or decades) ago, and the property has since been siezed by the city for unpaid taxes. For the most part, the city itself is the owner, but there are so many abandoned houses that tearing them all down is a herculean task.
An art colony? Seriously? Maybe there could be a small one near Wayne State University (if there isn’t one already there) but the entire city? No way.
As for the state taking over the city, it’s not a very desirable situation, but the elected leaders have demonstrably failed to do even a marginally acceptable job of running the city. Ultimately, the state has the responsability of providing governance for its citizens.
Does the city have the authority to do that? In most cases, a municipality only has the power to put a tax lien on a property, and eventually sue to have the property sold to recover unpaid taxes. If the market value of the property is zilch, the owner normally just lets the sale go through.
I’d like to see bold measures taken-like firing the city council, and appointing the mayor of Hong Kong, or Singapore to be dictator for 5 years. Offer huge concessions to firms to come in, privatize the services, and watch as Detroit revives and thrives! It would at least prove if free markets can turn around what unions and socialism have destroyed.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
yes, and we’ll get started by riding in on unicorns crapping rainbows. Detroit’s problems stem from
- building up around industry
- that industry going away
- doing little to attract new investment in favor of blaming the suburbs for all their woes
- electing corrupt fucks like Young and Kilpatrick and circus sideshows like Monica Conyers
- continuing to blame L. Brooks Patterson for everything while everyone with the means gets the hell away from the city
- acting like it’s some grave injustice when the state says it’s had enough.
Detroit has had 50 years to do something to reverse its decline. It has had multiple proposals from the state for assistance, and those yokels have slapped them all away as “not good enough.” well, apparently they haven’t been able to figure out that you can’t play hardball when the other team has the ball. like I said above, Snyder should have washed his hands of the whole thing and let them go bankrupt.
For all the bad press about Detroit, they still somehow mange to sport franchises representing all the major sports leagues in the US (NFL Lions, MLB Tigers, NBA Pistons, and NHL Redwings). There are a lot of more prominent and populous cities that would envy that situation. I guess Detroit is still large enough of a market to support all those teams.
Well they do until one of the owners decides they want a shiny new stadium (built at taxpayers expense of course) and the bankrupt city can’t pay for it…