Key players provide inside look at Detroit bankruptcy | The Michigan Daily. Key players in Detroit’s now-infamous bankruptcy proceedings convened at the Ford School of Public Policy on Wednesday to discuss the city’s growth since the city first filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The panel focused on the impact of the Detroit “grand bargain,” which decreased the city’s $18 billion debt, restored public safety services and increased funding to city infrastructure. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven W. Rhodes, who oversaw Detroit’s bankruptcy, designed the $194.8 million bailout, known as the grand bargain, to garner support for a deal from unions and retirees. The panelists examined how Detroit’s financial challenges halted the city’s full operation — from its road, school and emergency services to the pension plans and benefits for city retirees — and credited the grand bargain with its revival.
Detroit’s two pension plans accumulated $3.5 billion in debt obligations Rhodes said. “They were protesting about that,” Rhodes said, “There were demonstrations in the streets.” A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck. Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck? Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that. While U.B.I. has been associated with left-leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives.
It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work. Photo Sam Altman, president of the tech incubator Y Combinator, recently proposed to fund research into U.B.I. Mr. Andrew L. Data shows Detroit is arson capital. Detroit — Nationwide fire data support Detroit's reputation among firehouses as the arson capital of the United States. "It's been that way for years. Every time you'd go to a seminar, you meet up with investigators nationwide and all they want to talk about is Detroit," said Jon Bozich, who retired in 2001 as the chief of the city's Arson Squad. "People used to say the arsons would only stop when the city runs out of fuel. It hasn't happened yet. " Detroit has averaged 3,800 to 6,000 suspicious building fires annually for years. Of those, about 700 to 1,000 are usually investigated and confirmed as arson, according to department statistics.
Nationwide, no city with a population of at least 300,000 has as many suspicious fires or arsons per capita, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports and the National Fire Incident Reporting System of the U.S. And Detroit is near the top of both lists in total suspicious fires and arsons, despite its smaller population. "The numbers are wacky," he said. The Threat to Detroit’s Rebound Isn’t Crime or the Economy, It’s the Mortgage Industry. As a young married couple, Steven and Corey Josephson chose to begin their lives together in Detroit.
They came from Greeley, Colorado, a city that couldn’t be more different. It was founded as an experimental utopian community; its majority-white population has more than doubled since 1970; and its unemployment rate is lower than the national average, and about half that of Detroit. But in August 2014, they left. Corey, a theater and English teacher, grew up in Michigan, and Steven found a position in Detroit’s Teach for America program, teaching science to the youngest kids at Coleman A. Young Elementary School. Along with their beagle, Baley, they moved into a house in northeast Detroit near 8 Mile Road. “He bought the house originally for $40,000, but home values are not even close to that,” Josephson says. Two different stories are playing out in Detroit — though they seem like they should contradict each other. But at this point, at least, there’s room for everyone. Detroit: Organized for failure. Detroit has a "strong mayoral" system, with the mayor approving departmental appointments.
The council approves budgets, but the mayor is not obligated to adhere to any earmarking. The city clerk supervises elections and is formally charged with the maintenance of municipal records. City ordinances and substantially large contracts must be approved by the council. The City Council The Detroit City Council, one of the country's few full-time City legislative bodies, consists of nine (9) members elected at large for a four-year term. The City Council was first constituted as the legislative body of the City in 1824 (replacing a Board of Trustees) and was called the Common Council until July 1, 1974 - the effective date of Detroit's new City Charter.
The Council Divisions. The City Council monitors the administration of City government and City departments to see that laws and programs are operating effectively and in the best interest of citizens. The Mayor. State prepares to collect city income taxes for Detroit. Detroiters and people who work in the city will be able to pay their individual city income taxes electronically starting with the next tax season after the state Treasury Department begins processing the city’s income tax collections in January, officials said today.
The state is taking over Detroit income tax collection as part of the city’s post-bankruptcy efforts to improve its bottom line, and the Treasury Department will begin processing the taxes in January. The move will make it easier to file taxes while also boosting compliance, likely resulting in increased revenue for the city, the officials said. “Taxpayers deserve an easy and convenient filing process and the ability to e-file directly with the state will do just that,” Detroit Chief Financial Officer John Hill said in a news release. “More efficient tax collection also means the city will have more resources to provide vital services to our citizens.” Detroit Redlining Map 1939 | DETROITography.
Part of Detroit’s history of racial discrimination is comprised on housing discrimination, which in turn contributed to job discrimination, interpersonal racism, and continued racial inequity of opportunity. These areas of Detroit were targeted for “urban renewal” in the 1960s which displaced thousands of black residents to public housing complexes. Today these areas of Detroit have more vacancy (see map) than others either because the redlined properties were managed by slumlords whose properties deteriorated (see map) more quickly or from renewal efforts that didn’t consider the displacement of black residents. The racial divisions we see in our neighborhoods today are the result of deliberate actions taken in the past. (State of Opportunity) This segregation of housing, which was legal up until the 1980s, also furthered school segregation and the inadequate education of Detroit’s black children.
You can find other HOLC maps online at: urbanoasis.org Like this: Like Loading... Related. Forbes Welcome. Forbes Welcome. Detroit's other blight crisis: Commercial decay. They’re easy to find and hard to ignore. In Detroit, many residents live and shop near hulking vacant buildings that have been abandoned for years, places that attract crime, vagrants, graffiti and scrappers. Many of these blighted buildings line well-traveled corridors throughout Detroit’s neighborhoods. But exactly who owns them and why they remain in terrible condition for so long remains a mystery to many. Standing on her porch on East Outer Drive among a stretch of homes with well-manicured lawns and hedges, Tomika Brown, 41, described the multitude of problems associated with a giant, crumbling building across the street. The building is so rundown its hard to tell how it was originally used. “It just be a lot of drunks stopping in there, scrapping,” Brown said.
Covered in graffiti, the building has all the classic signs of urban blight. The indistinguishable structure at 3040 E. The analysis underscored the complexity of the city’s commercial blight problem. 2240 W. 15401 W. Forbes Welcome.