Government - Chicken or Egg
Detroit has many of the problems that large cities face including below average schools, high taxes, high crime and shoddy infrastructure. Unlike most large cities, however, Detroit has lost a large part of its population.
Oh, the downtown area may be gaining some renewal, but the rest of the city is dying slowly. A map of southeastern Michigan's vacant properties shows Detroit with an extraordinarily high number of vacant properties... somewhere between 40,000 to 70,000. Exact counts seem to be unavailable... even close counts.
What is available are the census data that show since 1950 that Detroit has gone from 1,850,000 to 950,000 people in 2000... almost 50% population loss. The 2004 Detroit population estimate is just over 910,000. This while the region total has increased from 3.3 to 4.7 million.
One can debate all day about reasons... bad economy, racial intimidation of whites, cheaper land elsewhere, better schools and government elsewhere. The point is that Detroit is dying. It is becoming a downtown without a city. And the effect is not being reversed by the current Detroit administration.
The reality is that Coleman Young set the tone for the city during his 20 years as mayor during the 1970s and 80s. Today, he is revered by most remaining Detroiters for his "leadership", but the reality is that instead of addressing the city's problems when he took office... he exacerbated them with his "race card" politics.
So, today Detroit is a "city of minorities". It is also a city from which better-educated minorities have departed. It is a city of crumbling, vacant houses and streets without lights. It is a city too big for its present dynamics. It is a city in need of radical surgery to save its life.
Take a look at the map if you haven't done so... click on the blue link above. If we presume 50,000 vacant properties is a good number, then that property represents enough housing or business opportunities for at least 200,000 people... maybe more. That's 20-25% of the present Detroit population. Then let's presume that 10-20% of the inhabited property is substandard by any standard.
So now we have 1/3 of the city that is rotten. That's equivalent to an arm and a leg. The city is crippled. And the state is hobbling along so it lets Detroit do what is has been doing and getting what it has been getting.
What's the answer... the solution? The answer is that Detroit has been in decline for 1/2 a century and any turnaround must either be based on a total change in government... or a turnaround will take at least 1/2 century given current government processes. The solutions are myriad... and painful.
- confiscation of vacant and abandoned property
- rezoning from residential to public and forced buyouts - creation of green zones
- closing of 20% of schools, renovation of the rest, and a takeover by the state
- reduction by 30% of government employees and state supervised restructuring of departments and processes
- creation of tax-free "enterprise parks"
- establishing a tax structure that is "competitive" with suburbs
To accomplish this, U.S. senators and representatives from Michigan need to push for return of Michigan dollars back from the federal government. The enormous drain of money from this region to be given to others is preventing Michigan from addressing its very real problems. Southeastern Michigan, particularly Detroit, cannot rely on the automobile industry to make up the tax outflow.
It is unlikely that the federal government will give up its power to collect taxes; therefore, it is time for Michigan to become more assertive in its demands for the return of those revenues to this state to be used to address problems the state and Detroit are not capable of addressing. Money is needed to accomplish the changes necessary to restore the dying city of Detroit... money, not rhetoric.
From 
