Analysis: Detroit enjoys highest per-capita revenue in state thanks to high, diversified tax rates. By Jeff Guilfoyle/Citizens Research Council With Michigan’s largest city now under the direction of an emergency manager, statewide attention has focused on the city of Detroit’s finances.
The Citizens Research Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research firm, has published an analysis of the city’s fiscal structure and trends -- Detroit City Government Revenues. This report attempts to address a number of important questions to help readers be better able to develop and assess proposed policy solutions for Detroit’s fiscal crisis (a study of Detroit’s expenditures will be published by CRC shortly). Detroit police response times down, but official numbers questioned. When state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr first pleaded with a federal bankruptcy court to help Detroit in July 2013, he made his case with sobering statistics: the city's high levels of poverty, blight and abandonment, its declining population and tax revenues, and its insane crime rate.
Orr pointed out how long it took police, on average, to get to the highest-priority crimes: Fifty-eight minutes, or nearly an hour. It was partial proof the city couldn't "meet obligations to its citizens," Orr told the court. It was a shocking number - and one repeated by Gov. Which Detroit Parks Are Closing: City Closing 50 Recreation Areas (MAP) Tall grass stretching up to your knees.
Garbage. Rusted play structures. That lonesome image will become the reality in 50 parks located in neighborhoods across the city. Already poorly maintained, these playgrounds and greenspaces will be abandoned by the City of Detroit this year, Mayor Dave Bing announced Friday. Bing and Recreation Director Brad Dick both blamed the city’s dire financial situation, saying that there isn’t enough money to even attempt to maintain the city’s parks. In a statement, the city said the parks were chosen “based on lack of utilization, lack of park amenities, and/or sheer acreage to maintain due to the fact they are in close proximity to a Premier Park.” Dick, a Detroit resident, said that closing parks was a personal decision that would affect neighborhoods adversely. “It’s going to look like vacant lots, and it’s not going to look good,” he said.
“These dollars were critical in order to make a positive impact in the community,” Bing said. Detroit's gentrification won't give poor citizens reliable public services. For the past two years, I have taken postgraduate students in urban geography to Detroit, where a prosperous downtown is rising.
The city’s transformation is being celebrated and seen as potential model for other places. But George Galster, professor of urban studies at Detroit’s Wayne State University told my students to imagine the city as a bathtub. The new investments and activities are like water pouring into the tub. 'Redlining Is Alive, Well and Dangerous in Detroit,' Blocked Mortgages Suggest – Deadline Detroit. "it’s incredibly hard for home buyers to get a mortgage right now” in Detroit, a national housing economist tells local author-journalist Anna Clark, who explores home-buying changes and challenges here.
Clark delivers this eye-opener at a national news site Monday: In Detroit, there were 3,500 sales of single-family homes in 2014. Only 462 of them received a mortgage. That means that nearly 87 percent of sales were in cash — and that doesn’t include homes sold in foreclosure auction. Appraisers sometimes deliver "an appraisal that is lower than the agreed-upon price, which usually torpedoes the mortgage and the sale. " That 87-percent figure is far above the region-wide level of 53 percent non-mortgage sales last year. 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. Detroit city government revenues 2013. Detroit is a shocking example of "white flight." CofCC.org News Team “We moved away because of the crime.”
“We moved away because of the noise.” “We moved because our kids got attacked at the schools.” These are some of the excuses you hear from millions of middle class white people who have moved, sometimes multiple times, to get away from black neighbors. What became of Detroit? As Detroit approaches a new turn in its difficult journey over the past several decades, the imposition of an Emergency Financial Manager by the governor of Michigan (link), many people are asking a difficult question: how did we get to this point?
The features that need explanation all fall within a general theme -- the decline of a once-great American city. The city's population is now roughly 40% of its peak of almost two million residents in 1950 (link); the tax revenues for city government fall far short of what is needed to support a decent level of crucial city services; the school system is failing perhaps half of the children it serves; and poverty seems a permanent condition for a large percentage of the city. The decline is economic; it is political; it is demographic; it is fiscal; and it is of course a decline in the quality of life for the majority of the residents of the city.
What about race and white flight? Another vicious circle in Detroit concerns schooling. Detroit's latest U.S. Census numbers: Good news or bad? Detroit's latest population numbers show remarkable news: After decades of heavy losses, the city's population decline has slowed.
And Detroit's latest population numbers show terrible news: We're no longer among the nation's 20 largest cities, for the first time since 1860. The U.S. Census Bureau's latest population estimate indicates Detroit, still Michigan's largest city by a significant margin, lost just 3,107 residents between July 1, 2014, and July 1, 2015. It's the largest population drop of any large U.S. city. Detroit population rank is lowest since 1850. For the first time since before the Civil War, Detroit is not among the nation’s 20 most populous cities.
Detroit’s population was 677,116 as of last summer, a loss of 3,107 residents from the previous year, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Detroit’s Bankruptcy Reflects a History of Racism. This is black history month. How Detroit, the Motor City, turned into a ghost town. Try telling Brother Jerry Smith that the recession in America has ended. As scores of people queued up last week at the soup kitchen which the Capuchin friar helps run in Detroit, the celebrations on Wall Street in New York seemed from another world. The hungry and needy come from miles around to get a free healthy meal. Though the East Detroit neighbourhood the soup kitchen serves has had it tough for decades, the recession has seen almost any hope for anyone getting a job evaporate.
Neither is there any sign that jobs might come back soon. "Some in the past have had jobs here, but now there is nothing available to people. Outside his office the hungry, the homeless and the poor crowded around tables. Officially, America is on the up. But for tens of millions of Americans such things seem irrelevant. Added to that shocking statistic are the millions of Americans who remain at risk of foreclosure. For them the recession is far from over. Detroit city Michigan QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau. The Downfall of Detroit: White Flight and the 1967 Race Riots. The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city’s Near West Side.
Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot, which occurred 24 years earlier. To help end the disturbance, Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops. Marilyn Salenger: ‘White flight’ and Detroit’s decline. By Marilyn Salenger By Marilyn Salenger July 21, 2013 Marilyn Salenger is president of Strategic Communications Services and a former correspondent and news anchor for several CBS stations.
An almost palpable sadness has swept across the country at the news that the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. While the possibility of this had been discussed, the reality of what was once the fourth-largest city in the United States sinking to such depths is disheartening, a moment people will remember for years to come.