Tax reform for Detroit residents needed for economic development. If a wave of potential new Detroiters is standing by, waiting for the word to move in (or move back), those words might just be “tax reform.”
It’s no secret to anyone who lives or works in the city that Detroit has the highest tax rates in Michigan – and a few taxes that almost no one else in the state pays. For instance: Detroit’s property tax rate is the highest in the state for cities with more than 50,000 people. Detroit also has the highest income tax rate (2.4 percent on residents, 1.2 percent on nonresidents who work in Detroit) And it is the only city, county, township or village in the state to levy a utility tax – 5 percent on electric, gas and phone bills. Taxes have piled up on residents for decades as a declining tax base forced city leaders to scramble to replace lost revenue.
'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. Clark's detailed, important analysis is published by Next City, a nonprofit team of urban affairs journalists based in Philadelphia.
The Bills That Want to Solve Detroit's School Crisis - The Atlantic. Three months into her son’s first pass at third grade, Arlyssa Heard had a breakdown.
Judah was bright, but had begun calling himself stupid. The chaos of Detroit’s precarious education landscape had forced him to switch schools every few months, leaving him further and further behind. There was no central system to transfer Judah’s records when he moved, and according to Heard the school where he started the 2014-15 academic year had a single teacher assigned to 44 third-graders. Heard was virtually alone in trying to deal with the fact that her boy, then 8, could write only the first two letters of his name. Heard says she was one of the parents Detroit Public Schools turned to when it needed a strong family showing at a rally or community members to serve on a task force. “Here I was this advocate for education, and I couldn’t find a place for my son,” she says.
The scope of the problems plaguing Detroit schools—both traditional district schools and charters—is almost unfathomable. Whites moving into Detroit, blacks moving out as city shrinks overall - Crain's Detroit Business. White people are moving back to Detroit, the American city that came to epitomize white flight, even as black people continue to leave for the suburbs and the city's overall population shrinks.
Detroit is the latest major city to see an influx of whites who may not find the suburbs as alluring as their parents and grandparents did in the last half of the 20th century. Unlike New York, San Francisco and many other cities that have seen the demographic shift, though, it's cheap housing and incentive programs that are partly fueling the regrowth of the Motor City's white population. "For any individual who wants to build a company or contribute to the city, Detroit is the perfect place to be," said Bruce Katz, co-director of the Global Cities Initiative at the Washington, D.C. -based Brookings Institution. "You can come to Detroit and you can really make a difference. " In the three years after the 2010 U.S. The city's black population was nearly 776,000 in 1990. Elizabeth St. St. The rise and fall of Detroit: A timeline.
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Detroit, Michigan Population 2017, 2016. White Flight - How Detroit Lost Its Way. 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.
Detroit population rank is lowest since 1850.