Daniel Flores
Detroit After Bankruptcy. 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. Joe Crandall, a Detroit Fire Department arson investigator, referring to the city's high rate of arson. 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. Arson Chief Charles Simms said the city is making progress in its long struggle with arson. 'Arson is like a cancer' How corruption deepened Detroit's crisis. Detroit Has Worst High-School Graduation Rate. Detroit Race Riot (1967) The Intersection of 12th Street and Clairmount, Saturday, July 23, 1967 Image Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press Image Ownership: Public Domain The Detroit Race Riot in Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 1967 was one of the most violent urban revolts in the 20th century. It came as an immediate response to police brutality but underlying conditions including segregated housing and schools and rising black unemployment helped drive the anger of the rioters. On Sunday evening, July 23, the Detroit Police Vice Squad officers raided an after hours “blind pig,” an unlicensed bar on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue in the center of the city’s oldest and poorest black neighborhood.
A party at the bar was in progress to celebrate the return of two black servicemen from Vietnam. Although officers had expected a few patrons would be inside they found and arrested all 82 people attending the party. At 2:00 a.m. Sources:Allen D. The rise and fall of Detroit: A timeline. Sign Up for Our free email newsletters On Thursday, Detroit made history — and not in a good way. The heart of the U.S. auto industry and home to the Detroit Tigers, Eminem and the White Stripes, Motown, and (maybe) Jimmy Hoffa's body became the largest city ever to file for bankruptcy. In many ways, this financial crisis is 60 years in the making. As the Motor City faces an uncertain future, here's a look back at some key dates in the long, storied past of one of America's great cities: July 24, 1701Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac establishes a French settlement, Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit (the strait), along with 100 French soldiers and an equal number of Algonquins. 1760Britain wins the city from the French. 1796U.S. forces capture Detroit from the British.
Feb. 1, 1802Detroit becomes a chartered city, covering about 20 acres. 1827Detroit adopts its forward-looking city motto: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus (We hope for better days; it shall rise from the ashes). 1899Ransom E. Root Causes of Detroit’s Decline Should Not Go Ignored. Recently Detroit, under orders from a state-appointed emergency manager, became the largest U.S. city to go bankrupt. This stirred predictable media speculation about why the city, which at 1.8 million was once America’s 5th-largest, declined in the first place. Much of the coverage simply listed Detroit’s longtime problems rather than explaining their causes. For example a Huffington Post article asserted that it was because of “racial strife,” the loss of “good-paying [sic] assembly line jobs,” and a population who fled “to pursue new dreams in the suburbs.”
Paul Krugman, who has increasingly become America’s dean of misguided thinking, downplayed the city’s pension obligations, instead blaming “job sprawl” and “market forces.” The implication is that Detroit’s problem just arose organically from structural economic changes, and within decades somehow produced a city of abandoned homes and unlit streets. The foremost measure would be addressing taxes. Photo by Kate Sumbler. The Downfall of Detroit: White Flight and the 1967 Race Riots | husseinbazzi. 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. The result was 43 dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed (Rutgers.edu). Works Cited Feagin, Joe R.. Like this: Like Loading... Vanishing City: The Story Behind Detroit’s Shocking Population Decline.
The news this week that Detroit’s population plunged more than 25% to just 714,000 in the last decade shouldn’t be surprising. The city’s collapse is as well-documented as it is astonishing – the population peaked at nearly 2 million in the 1950s, driven in part by a post-World War II auto industry boom now long gone. (More on TIME.com: See tilt-shift photography of Detroit) Predictably, Detroit officials have vowed to challenge the Census Bureau’s report.
“I don’t believe the number is accurate,” the mayor, Dave Bing, said in a hastily scheduled news conference Tuesday. But there is another story behind these numbers. (More on TIME.com: See Detroit school kids’ dreams for the future) Simply put, Detroit is at a crossroads. But for all the talk of Detroit’s revival aspirations, this week’s numbers are sobering. (More on TIME.com: See pictures of a Detroit food bank) Nine Reasons Why Detroit Failed. My hometown of Detroit has been studied obsessively for years by writers and researchers of all types to gain insight into the Motor City’s decline. Indeed, it seems to have become a favorite pastime for urbanists of all stripes. How could such an economic powerhouse, a uniquely American city, so utterly collapse? Most analysis tends to focus on the economic, social and political reasons for the downfall.
One of my favorite treatises on Detroit is The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue, who argues that housing and racial discrimination practices put in place after World War II played a primary role in the decline of Motown. Everyone seems to know the shorthand narrative for Detroit’s fall. But here’s the thing. So why has Detroit suffered unlike any other major city? Detroit’s decline has been going on far longer than most people realize, because of the city’s lack of attention to creating a pleasant built environment. Emphasis added. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Detroit population drops again but loss is slowing | Detroit Sun Times. American households are making more money today than they did three decades ago—in some places, a lot more.
In order to find out which places have seen the greatest increase in household income, we turned to the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), which uses historical reports from the decennial Census and the American Community Survey to track median income over time. Research site MooseRoots then adjusted all the data to 2015 dollars to filter out the effects of inflation. On the whole, households in northeastern states have seen the largest income increase since 1980, with New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont ranking among the top five.
South Dakota and the District of Columbia round out the top list. Only a handful of states have seen median household incomes actually decrease since 1980—and several of them are in the Midwest. Unfortunately, this picture of economic prosperity gets a lot less rosy the more you look at extra caveats and context. 5. 4. 3. 2. Detroit Is an Example of Everything That Is Wrong with Our Nation.
Back on July 18, 2013 the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Detroit is now seeing a little life, but the city is far from where it once was. Once the wealthiest city in America, known as the “arsenal of democracy,” Detroit was the fourth largest city in the U.S. in the 1960s with a population of two million. Now it has become an example of everything that is wrong with the American economy, Detroit has become nothing more than a devastated landscape of urban decay with a current population of 714,000 whose unemployment rate at the height of the recession was as high as 29 percent, and has only decreased due to the rapidly decreasing population.
Visiting Detroit is the closest Americans can come to viewing what appears to be a war-torn city without leaving the U.S. This former powerhouse is a barren stretch of land, devastated by looters and and full of run-down, vacant houses. Unfortunately, Detroit is not alone. Anatomy of Detroit’s Decline - Interactive Feature. Mayor Coleman A. Young of Detroit at an event in 1980. Richard Sheinwald/Associated Press The financial crisis facing Detroit was decades in the making, caused in part by a trail of missteps, suspected corruption and inaction. Here is a sampling of some city leaders who trimmed too little, too late and, rather than tackling problems head on, hoped that deep-rooted structural problems would turn out to be cyclical downturns. Charles E. Edward Jeffries, who served as mayor from 1940 to 1948, developed the Detroit Plan, which involved razing 100 blighted acres and preparing the land for redevelopment.
Albert Cobo was considered a candidate of the wealthy and of the white during his tenure from 1950 to 1957. Coleman A. Kwame M. Dave Bing, a former professional basketball star, took office in 2009 pledging to solve Detroit’s fiscal problems, which by then were already overwhelming. Related.