Posted on 06/03/2013 4:50:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
Detroit, once one of the nation's most vibrant cities, faces imminent bankruptcy. That's the headline from the report last month of emergency fiscal manager Kevyn Orr, issued 45 days after he was appointed this spring by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to take over the city's government.
"The path Detroit has followed for more than 40 years is unsustainable," Orr said, "and only a complete restructuring of the city's finances and operations will allow Detroit to regain its footing and return to a path of prosperity."
The police department, his report says, "is in disarray." Nearly one-quarter of fire department operations could be "largely inoperational" on any given day. The city-owned electric grid "has been a disaster," and the city's water system, which serves a region with 4 million people, "has a history of dysfunction."
The city's 78,000 vacant structures and 60,000 vacant land parcels "present an ongoing public safety and public health concern."
It's a tragic situation that could be regarded as just the fault of corrupt public officials. The most recent former mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, has gone to prison.
So has former City Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the wife of 48-year congressman John Conyers.
But Detroit's problems are more fundamental. Detroit is an extreme case, but similar problems afflict many of our central cities.
As it happens, I was, in some small sense, present at the creation. I grew up in Detroit and in affluent suburban Birmingham, and in the summer of 1967, I was an intern in the office of liberal Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh.
That was the summer of Detroit's six-day riot, in which 40 people were killed. Part of the time, I found myself in the misnamed command center with the mayor and Gov. George Romney.
In my childhood, Detroit was proud of being the fifth-largest American city, the center of the auto industry and the home of Hudson's, the nation's second-largest department store.
Detroit's inventors, entrepreneurs and financiers made it the second-fastest growing city from 1900 to 1930, behind only Los Angeles, which started off much smaller.
Newcomers poured in from eastern and southern Europe, from the farmlands of the Midwest and Ontario, from the hills of Appalachia and the Black Belt of Alabama to work in the factories.
Detroit was the prime example of what I have called "Big Unit America," in which the heads of large organizations -- big business, big labor, big government -- made the big decisions and the hundreds of thousands of people below them, small cogs in a very large machine, carried them out.
For a time, Big Unit America seemed to work splendidly. The Big Three automakers, with some cooperation from the United Auto Workers and at the behest of big government, made Detroit "the arsenal of democracy." Arthur Herman tells the story in his most recent book, "Freedom's Forge."
The big units' prestige continued high for a generation after World War II. General Motors' president was Time's man of the year in 1955. John Kenneth Galbraith's 1967 book, "The New Industrial State," argued that big automakers could manipulate demand through advertising and should share more of their inevitable profits with union members and the government.
That was just about the time the big units started to sputter. But Detroit's leaders didn't notice.
White flight to the suburbs accelerated after the 1967 riot, and in 1973 Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young -- smart, charming, politically shrewd.
But his 20 years in office were disastrous for the city. He ended what he considered police brutality, and crime rates soared. There were hundreds of arsons every year on Devil's Night, Oct. 30.
Young relied on big units for economic growth. Big government paid for projects such as the People Mover, which moved few people. The city condemned one of its few viable neighborhoods for a General Motors plant. Unions were given a stranglehold on city finances.
Numbers tell the story. In 1950, there were 1,849,568 people in Detroit. In 2010, there were 713,777. White flight was followed by black flight; there were fewer black residents in 2010 than there were 20 years before.
General Motors and Chrysler were forced into bankruptcy in 2009, and Hudson's downtown store was demolished in 1998.
Now Detroit has ineffective public services and overwhelming public obligations. Bankruptcy looms. The "big unit" model doesn't work anymore.
This is my complete lack of surprise.
What???? Socialism doesn’t work...but that’s not what Dear Leader is saying...something does not compute!
Randy Johnson ran out of gas?
Let’s not forget the principal problem
Democrats control the city.
This is what democrats/socialism running a city results in
I wanna go home
I wanna go home
Ohh how I wanna go home
Last night I went to sleep in Detroit city
And I dreamed about those cotton fields and home
I dreamed about my mother, dear old papa, sister and brother
I dreamed about that girl who’s been waiting for so long
I wanna go home
I wanna go home
Ohh how I wanna go home
Home folks think I’m big in Detroit city
From the letters that I write they think I’m fine
[ From: http://www.metrolyrics.com/detroit-city-lyrics-bobby-bare.html ]
But by day I make the cars, by night I make the bars
If only they could read between the lines
‘Cause you know I rode the freight train north to Detroit city
And after all these years, I find, I’ve just been wastin’ my time
So I just think I’ll take my foolish pride
And put it on a southbound freight and ride
And go on back to the loved ones
The ones that I left waitin’ so far behind
I wanna go home
I wanna go home
Oh how I wanna go home
I wanna go home
Yeap - people who get into arguments with liberal/progressive minded idiots point to Detroit — and the argument is over for the lib....
“Let’s not forget the principal problem
Democrats control the city.”
Yes that is the main problem
Exactly
In some cases, yes, but to real believers, no. A diehard liberal will always blame the failures of government on not enough wealth redistribution.
This is exactly what the Democrats and Obama want for America. Evil and corruption is at the core. The Democrat Party is the the Party of the Destruction of America.
Understandable...for those of us like you and me - we see clearly that the Kool-Aid is tainted and pass...those that think wealth distribution is the the one element of the overall failure shouldn’t even be engaged in conversation...the USSR is another fine example of wealth distro - even though the supporters of such methodology will claim that a few elite took advantage of the system causing it to collapse...the obvious is never in their reach....lost minded souls to say the least...
Cave to unions, cave to government regs, resulting in cars no one wants at 10 times the cost of what they should be, and Voila! General Motors and Chrysler were forced into bankruptcy in 2009.
The thing that killed Detroit—quite literally!—is the fact they don’t have a diverse economic base to save the economy. You can gripe all you want about New York City and Chicago—much of it legitimate—but the economic base of New York City (finance, mass media, entertainment, and high-end clothing) and Chicago (manufacturing and huge transportation hub) has kept both cities from falling into the abyss that Detroit has fallen into.
The problem with Detroit is that they finally ran out of other people’s money. Kudos to Lady Thatcher.
LLS
I’m surprised the author didn’t point out why this decline — in both Detroit and the country at large — was inevitable. The “Big Unit America” model only worked because the U.S. was the sole industrial power to emerge from World War II with its infrastructure unscathed. Once the rest of the industrial world got back on its feet, the era of American industrial dominance was over. I’d even suggest that the era of American industrial dominance was not good for America, because it took away a lot of our competitive fire.
That’s a good point. What has happened in a globalized economy is that a city is in a prime location if it has a deep water port, or rail connections to deep water ports. As international trade has grown, a city’s location on the Great Lakes has become less important to its industrial strength. It’s no coincidence that cities like Buffalo and Cleveland are dealing with a similar decline to Detroit’s.
another Commie failure
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.