Headlines from the Detroit Free Press:
DPS [Detroit Public Schools] expects a $400-million shortfall3 years ago, I wrote that:
Situation is likely to worsen if enrollment drops below 100,000
The city is too strategically located to be abandoned entirely. But it has not yet reached its nadir. Detroit's present population is about 900,000. When it reaches about 750,000, there will be imminent threat of collapse. The state will be forced to step in. At that point, there will be significant opportunities to remake Detroit into a model city.Nothing in the past three years has changed that.
- The school system is nearing the point of collapse. The city's government is inept and corrupt.
- The only decent and honest mayor in the past 3+ decades, Dennis Archer, left in disgust and Kwame Kilpatrick was immediately elected by the residents of the the city... a testament to their unbridled stupidity and racism.
- Vast tracts of the city are uninhabited or uninhabitable.
- The governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, has too many problems of her own to get involved in Detroit's fiasco.
- And Michigan's economy is no longer able to subsidize the city.
What's to be done with a city that has no present or discernible future? While I gave possible approaches in my 2005 post, the reality is that until Michigan's economic and political/budgetary mess is fixed, there are no fixes for Detroit... just more of the same.
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