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Everything You Need To Know About Detroit's Bankruptcy Settlement. A judge gave final approval to Detroit’s plan for emerging from bankruptcy on Friday, closing the courtroom chapter of the insolvent city’s recovery after 16 months of formal bankruptcy proceedings. For city retirees and workers, the final deal is far better than what observers anticipated last fall and a significant improvement over what the city’s lawyers initially offered. Large financial companies with significant claims on the destitute city are walking away with less to show for their investments than they had hoped.

In that sense, then, working people got a better deal from the city than faceless financial firms. Friday’s ruling brings that dealmaking to a close and marks the beginning of the next stage of Detroit’s redevelopment. As Detroit sets about refurbishing itself and attempting to lure back people and jobs, here are some key numbers to know about the bankruptcy and what happens next. Detroit’s bankruptcy case was expensive, but now it looks like it was worth the money. Detroit Schools Face Cuts From Emergency Financial Manager. What It's Like Living In A Bankrupt City. Some of the many boarded up store fronts along Weber Street in Stockton, Calif., in 2012.

The Stockton City Council voted to declare bankruptcy last year, making it the largest city in U.S. history to enter Chapter 9 to that time. Peter DaSilva/EPA /Landov hide caption toggle caption Peter DaSilva/EPA /Landov Some of the many boarded up store fronts along Weber Street in Stockton, Calif., in 2012. Peter DaSilva/EPA /Landov Crime has been bad on the south side of Stockton. Stockton has long had a problem with drugs. Until Detroit's recent filing, Stockton's bankruptcy was the largest in U.S. history.

Anderson called the police recently after a boy was shot riding his bike down the alley that runs alongside her home. "He was dead by the time they got here," she says. Stockton has sought to fight back. No one is declaring victory. "There are still an unacceptable number of hours in a day when police will only respond to crimes in progress," says Bob Deis, the city manager. Detroit's population loss slows; some suburbs see gains. Detroit continues to lose residents, but the population loss appears to be slowing, with about 1% moving out between 2013 and 2014, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. In the tri-county area, the Oakland County suburbs of Lyon and Oakland townships and Sylvan Lake, as well as Macomb and Washington townships in Macomb County grew the fastest, according to the estimates.

The census makes the estimates annually based on a review of birth and death records, as well as migration. Demographer Kurt Metzger said Detroit's population loss appears to be easing. "It continues to average about 1% loss per year," said Metzger, now mayor of Pleasant Ridge. "That is significantly less than the 2.5% loss per year last decade. " By the city's estimates, Detroit lost about 1,000 residents per month in 2013; that slowed to 500 in 2014, and the number is even lower in 2015. Mobile users click here to search the population database.

Read or Share this story: 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. Bowles, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, was in office for seven months in 1930 before people demanded his removal. 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. Detroit unemployment rate climbs, highest among large cities - Oct. 28, 2009. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Detroit continued to lead the nation's cities of 1 million people or more with the highest unemployment rate in September, according to government figures released Wednesday. And for Detroit's painful unemployment rate to stabilize and eventually decline, economists say the jobless will just have to leave the Motor City.

The Labor Department said the metro area ravaged by the auto industry's collapse reported a 17.3% jobless rate in September, up from 17% in August, and 8.9% last year. Detroit also recorded the largest jobless rate increase from September 2008 with 8.4 percentage points, followed by Muskegon-Norton Shores, Mich., at 6.8 percentage points. "Detroit's labor market situation has deteriorated substantially from what was already a weak level," said John Lonski, a chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

"The only way to contract the city's unemployment rate is through migration," Lonski said. Optimism beyond. Detroit Bankruptcy Filing Raises Big Questions. Detroit has long been a watchword for urban decay, with vacant lots, high crime rates, and serious financial problems defining the city’s image. But Thursday’s bankruptcy filing raises many questions, beginning with its legitimacy. Many people in the Democratic city, where more than eighty per cent of the residents are black, believe that it represents an undemocratic political gambit by a Republican-controlled state government. The immediate question is whether a judge will block the bankruptcy petition, which was filed in federal court by Kevyn Orr, the city’s “emergency financial manager,” who earlier this year was appointed by Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder.

Orr had been threatening this move for months, and, after negotiations with the city’s pension funds and bondholders broke down, he followed through. On the face of it, that seems unlikely to happen, but there are some extenuating factors. Another question is whether the bankruptcy filing was truly necessary. Drop Dead, Detroit! For the past twenty-one years, L. Brooks Patterson has governed Oakland County, a large, affluent suburb of Detroit.

Oakland County embodies fiscal success as much as Detroit does financial ruin, and Patterson, the county executive, tends to behave as though his chief job in life were to never let anyone forget it. One week in September, he gave me an extended tour of his empire, in a chauffeured minivan. Near the end of the first day, we headed toward Lake St. Clair, at the mouth of the Detroit River, for a party on a yacht. Patterson sat in the front passenger seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. The landscape slid past, a jumbled time line of American suburban innovation: big-box districts, fuel megacenters, shopping malls, restaurants with the interior acreage of a factory. Patterson told me, “I used to say to my kids, ‘First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit.

Patterson just turned seventy-five. Detroit’s Bankruptcy Reflects a History of Racism. This is black history month. It is also the month that the Emergency Manager who took political power and control from the mostly African American residents of Detroit has presented his plan to bring the city out of the bankruptcy he steered it into. This is black history in the making, and I hope the nation will pay attention to who wins and who loses from the Emergency Manager’s plan.

Black people are by far the largest racial or ethnic population in Detroit, which has the highest percentage of black residents of any American city with a population over 100,000. Eighty-three percent of the city’s 701,000 residents are black. It continues to be an underreported story that a white state legislature and white governor took over the city and forced it to file for bankruptcy against the will of its elected representatives. It’s important to view what is happening to Detroit and its public employees through a racial lens. Government was involved at a more micro level as well.