Detroit’s Bankruptcy Reflects a History of Racism This is black history month. It is also the month that the Emergency Manager who took political power and control from the mostly African American residents of Detroit has presented his plan to bring the city out of the bankruptcy he steered it into. This is black history in the making, and I hope the nation will pay attention to who wins and who loses from the Emergency Manager’s plan. Black people are by far the largest racial or ethnic population in Detroit, which has the highest percentage of black residents of any American city with a population over 100,000. Eighty-three percent of the city’s 701,000 residents are black. It continues to be an underreported story that a white state legislature and white governor took over the city and forced it to file for bankruptcy against the will of its elected representatives. It’s important to view what is happening to Detroit and its public employees through a racial lens. Government was involved at a more micro level as well.
The Number: 40% These are dark times for Detroit. The city filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, and though political machinations have cast a shadow on the filing, there is no disputing that Detroit faces grave financial problems: eighteen billion dollars in debt obligations, a twenty-eight-per-cent population decline since 2000, and a municipal government that found it could no longer afford to keep the whole city lit at night. In the first quarter of 2013, approximately forty per cent of Detroit’s street lights did not work. Some of the darkness may be by design. That, of course, is small solace to those for whom the lights have gone out. Illustration by Luke Shuman.
City Life Somewhere between the ball game played to an empty stadium and the arrest of six police officers on charges including manslaughter and murder, somewhere around the time that a leaked document suggested that a man who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury while in police custody had died of a self-inflicted wound, events in Baltimore slipped into the realm of the surreal. It was not a particularly unfamiliar journey. For a long time, our domestic affairs, or at least the portion of them most explicitly tied to race, have resembled a nightmare doomed to be repeated until the underlying conflict is resolved. President Obama addressed that recurrence in a press conference at the White House last Tuesday, when he spoke about the death of Freddie Gray and what has euphemistically been called the “unrest” in Baltimore: Midway through the twentieth century, cities—especially those, like Baltimore, which were sustained by ports—connoted a kind of American swagger.
Bankruptcy Casts Shadow Over Detroit's Plan To Fix Streetlights In Detroit, fewer than half of the city's 88,000 street lights actually work anymore. Quinn Klinefelter/WDET hide caption toggle caption Quinn Klinefelter/WDET Many neighborhoods in Detroit are in the dark — not because of a power outage but because fewer than half of the city's 88,000 streetlights actually work. In some parts of town, city block after city block is filled with streetlights that never come on. "At nighttime, man, this look like a ghost town," says taxi driver Howard Askew Sr., as he drives his minivan through a blighted neighborhood only half a mile from Detroit's more prosperous downtown. The 70-year-old cab driver says in this neighborhood, you can't be sure what might jump out from a darkened street corner. "They bring cars over here and strip 'em. Detroit resident Ashley Martin says she has to get her shopping done in the daytime because it's just not safe to travel at night where she lives. It's a common complaint along Detroit's city limits as well.
Detroit Bankruptcy Filing Raises Big Questions Detroit has long been a watchword for urban decay, with vacant lots, high crime rates, and serious financial problems defining the city’s image. But Thursday’s bankruptcy filing raises many questions, beginning with its legitimacy. Many people in the Democratic city, where more than eighty per cent of the residents are black, believe that it represents an undemocratic political gambit by a Republican-controlled state government. The immediate question is whether a judge will block the bankruptcy petition, which was filed in federal court by Kevyn Orr, the city’s “emergency financial manager,” who earlier this year was appointed by Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder. Orr had been threatening this move for months, and, after negotiations with the city’s pension funds and bondholders broke down, he followed through. On the face of it, that seems unlikely to happen, but there are some extenuating factors. Another question is whether the bankruptcy filing was truly necessary.
Motown Down If you were to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts, home to Diego Rivera’s magnificent murals depicting scenes at the Ford Motor Company in the early nineteen-thirties, and then take a stroll through the surrounding streets, you might be surprised at what you would find: coffee shops frequented by young hipsters; old warehouses being converted to lofts; bike racks; houses undergoing renovation; a new Whole Foods supermarket. After decades of white flight, black flight, and urban decay, Detroit is being spoken of, in some circles, as “the new Portland,” or “the new Brooklyn.” This gentrification extends only to a relatively small area, but it is worth keeping in mind when reading about the city’s bankruptcy filing—by far the biggest municipal-bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Detroit, as everyone knows, has a lot of problems. Great swaths of the city have been left to crumble, or return to pasture. Detroit is broke—it can’t even afford batteries for its parking meters—and broken.
What Social Scientists Learned from Katrina The first time that David Kirk visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was at the end of 2005. His in-laws were from the city. Kirk and his wife visited them at Christmas, just four months after the storm hit, and then went back again on several more occasions throughout 2006. New Orleans was devastated. Thousands had fled. “I’ll admit I’d drive around the Lower Ninth, taking it all in, feeling a little guilty about being the gawking tourist,” Kirk said not long ago. Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. “I worked my connections to see who would talk to me,” Kirk went on. “This was December, 2006,” Kirk recounted. “This spring, I was on a radio talk show in Houston, Sunday morning,” Kirk said. New Orleans is a city framed by two major bodies of water. The most affluent parts of the city are on the river side: the Garden District, Uptown, the St. What Campanella was describing in New Orleans is the classic pattern of African-American demographic mobility.
Detroit pays high price for arson onslaught Detroit — Arson is a raging epidemic in Detroit, destroying neighborhoods and lives as the city tries to emerge from bankruptcy. Even amid a historic demolition blitz, buildings burn faster than Detroit can raze them. Last year, the city had 3,839 suspicious fires and demolished 3,500 buildings, according to city records analyzed by The Detroit News. Burned homes scar neighborhoods for years: Two-thirds of those that caught fire from 2010-13 are still standing, records show. "Nothing burns like Detroit," said Lt. The Detroit News researched arson for more than three months and found that it remains a huge obstacle to renewal efforts following bankruptcy. Few neighborhoods were untouched by arson and the entire city bears its costs. "People don't realize arson is a felony. Aides to Mayor Mike Duggan, who has made fighting blight the cornerstone of his administration, declined comment on The News' findings or his strategy for reducing arson. 'Arson is like a cancer' The News found:
Detroit unemployment rate climbs, highest among large cities - Oct. 28, 2009 NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Detroit continued to lead the nation's cities of 1 million people or more with the highest unemployment rate in September, according to government figures released Wednesday. And for Detroit's painful unemployment rate to stabilize and eventually decline, economists say the jobless will just have to leave the Motor City. The Labor Department said the metro area ravaged by the auto industry's collapse reported a 17.3% jobless rate in September, up from 17% in August, and 8.9% last year. Detroit also recorded the largest jobless rate increase from September 2008 with 8.4 percentage points, followed by Muskegon-Norton Shores, Mich., at 6.8 percentage points. "Detroit's labor market situation has deteriorated substantially from what was already a weak level," said John Lonski, a chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "The only way to contract the city's unemployment rate is through migration," Lonski said. Optimism beyond