Bridge • The Center for MichiganTracking progress in Detroit police response times a fool’s errand. Detroit Police have reduced the amount of time it takes officers to respond to emergency calls since the city sought bankruptcy protection in 2013. How much the department has improved is difficult to gauge, however. 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. Rick Snyder, the man who appointed Orr. “You remember those days? A shaky benchmark Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan touts improved police emergency response times at a Midtown Detroit church recently. Mich. school head to DPS: Address health, safety issues. With more than half of Detroit Public Schools closed Monday by a teacher sickout, Michigan’s top school official called for the district’s emergency manager to address health and safety issues in classroom buildings in response to teachers’ complaints.
State superintendent Brian Whiston said in a statement that DPS Emergency Manager Darnell Earley should meet with district, state and local representatives in response to a press conference and a rally Monday where teachers expressed concern over schools with leaky roofs, broken boilers and shortages of books. “I care deeply about the safety and well-being of teachers in Detroit, just as I do the students,” Whiston said. “They all still need to be in the classrooms teaching and learning, though. If buildings have health and safety issues, they need to be addressed immediately with the district administration and all appropriate agencies.”
“We are set up for failure,” Jackson said. “Our goal is not to shut the schools down,” she said. 1. 2. Autos troubles, race at root of Detroit collapse. Blue-collar workers poured into the cavernous auto plants of Detroit for generations, confident that a sturdy back and strong work ethic would bring them a house, a car and economic security. It was a place where the American dream came true. It came true in cities across the industrial heartland, from Chicago's meatpacking plants to the fire-belching steel mills of Cleveland and Pittsburgh. It came true for decades, as manufacturing brought prosperity to big cities in states around the Great Lakes and those who called them home. Detroit was the affluent capital, a city with its own emblematic musical sound and a storied union movement that drew Democratic presidential candidates to Cadillac Square every four years to kick off campaigns at Labor Day rallies. The good times would not last forever.
All of the nation's industrial cities fell, but only Detroit hit bottom. More affluence followed in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the auto industry was booming. 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. Bowles, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, was in office for seven months in 1930 before people demanded his removal.
His ascension to the mayor's office was followed by a spike in crime, and he was suspected to be linked to some of Detroit's underworld figures, according to “Detroit: A Biography" by Scott Martelle. 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. Coleman A. Kwame M. Related. Bridge • The Center for MichiganDetroit struggling to create jobs outside of downtown.
A stretch of Livernois Avenue, tabbed as the “Avenue of Fashion,” is a “critical commercial corridor” where city leaders now say job growth can once again take place. Detroit has a host of well-documented problems – poverty, crime, street lights, mass transit – that hamper its recovery. But the ability to create jobs may be its biggest hurdle. More jobs could mean less poverty and more tax revenues to fix the many broken things. “It’s absolutely critical that Detroit grow jobs,” said Teresa Lynch, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a principal at Mass Economics, which is helping the Detroit Future City’s group work on economic development strategies.
A large part of the problem is where jobs are located in the city. A Bridge look at jobs within Detroit’s sprawling boundaries shows that perhaps no other large city in the country finds most of its jobs confined to such a tiny sliver of its land, with much of the rest a veritable jobs desert. Detroit’s Job Creation Problems – Bronars Economics. Detroit urgently needs job creation. No American city faces more difficult economic problems than Detroit.
Even seemingly good economic news is misleading. Detroit’s unemployment rate fell from 27.8% in the summer of 2009 to 16.3% in the most recent jobs report. However, the apparent decline in unemployment is illusory. Some of Detroit’s economic problems are due to the mass exodus from the city. Detroit is No Longer the Motor City In 1978 when the “Big Three” automakers had an 80% share of the domestic car market there were over a quarter of a million auto manufacturing jobs in Detroit. A Longer Workweek in Manufacturing At a time when many economists are concerned that most job creation consists of part-time jobs, the workweek in Detroit is getting longer. A substantially longer workweek means that during the economic recovery (from 2009 to 2012) about 44% of the increase in labor inputs in Detroit’s manufacturing sector were achieved by a longer workweek instead of job creation.
A city in flames: inside Detroit's war on arson. For eight long years, the firefighters of Highland Park, Michigan, worked out of a warehouse. There was no red-bricked facade, no lanky Dalmatian. No freshly washed engines gleaming in the sun. No second-floor fire pole to descend in the dead of night to wailing sirens. Whatever idealized vision you have of firefighting, Highland Park is not it. Instead, picture a hulking, boxy building on the edge of an industrial park about six miles north of downtown Detroit. A small metal sign points the way, light blue with “Fire Dept” stenciled in all-caps white, the previous tenant’s name erased with spray paint. The Highland Park fire department opened nearly a century ago, in 1917, to serve the booming city. "We do stuff kind of old-schoolish, because that’s what we have: old-school, crap equipment," says Scott Ziegler, a first-generation fireman who’s worked in Highland Park for four years.
"We’ve pulled up to stuff we just couldn’t control. " "We’ve still got a lot of nice neighborhoods here. Detroit Jobs Might Return, But Workers Still Lack Skills. DETROIT, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr has a long list of things to fix in the city and among them is one that may sound surprising: there are not enough skilled workers to fill job openings as they become available. “Every problem in this city revolves around jobs,” said Lindsay Chalmers, vice president of non-profit Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit. “That’s at the heart of the issue for Detroit.” The decline of manufacturing jobs, above all in the automotive industry, has played a major role in the slide of the Motor City’s population to 700,000 from a peak of 1.8 million in the 1950s.
Despite recent gains, Michigan has 350,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2000. Seismic shifts in the local labor market have left many unskilled workers behind. “In the old days you could graduate on Friday, get hired at the Ford plant on Monday and they’d train you,” said Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. Detroit Fire, Police Departments Suffer Deep Cuts. DETROIT (WWJ) – A city plagued by arson fires now has fewer engines on the streets and police officers on patrol. City budget cuts hit the Detroit police and fire departments this week, eliminating 10 engines and four ladders from the Detroit Fire Department’s budget. Five of the cut engines being removed from service are considered “browned out” in spotty service for the past seven years, according to reports.
One of the four ladders cut is also considered “browned out.” The department will also be demoting two battalion chiefs to captain, 15 captains to lieutenant, 41 lieutenants to sergeant and 90 sergeants to firefighters, among other demotions, as part of the cuts. The demotions are expected to push out younger firefighters. It’s all part of the 2012-13 budget passed by Mayor Dave Bing, which also slashes $75 million — or 18 percent — from the police department’s $414 million budget. Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee said the reduced budget means fewer officers on the streets. Detroit plans to sell off closed fire stations. By Bryan Dyne 5 June 2013 Eight vacant buildings once operated by the Detroit Fire Department─seven fire stations and the former firehouse headquarters─are being sold by the city of Detroit to private investors and developers to be transformed into restaurants, wineries or micro-distilleries in an effort to raise money for the city.
The minimum bid for the fire stations are $637,000 while the former headquarters is being sold for $1.25 million. It is not yet clear who has bought the fire stations or for what price, though it is known that Southfield, Michigan developer Walter Cohen has plans to purchase the former headquarters and turn it into a boutique hotel. He plans to have eighty upscale rooms and a Cajun restaurant on the first floor. Cohen has previously been involved in the gentrification of the Park Shelton residential buildings. The stations to be sold include Ladder Nos. 8, 12, 16 and 38 and Engine Nos. 10, 18 and 49. The Vinewood fire station which once housed Engine No. 10. How Detroit’s arson investigators and a local prosecutor are extinguishing the flames | Local News.
Hope for better things — what some Detroiters might have felt when they watched any of the four buildings off Grand River near Livernois and Joy Road burn just over a week ago. But that's not what the chief of arson and fire investigations in Detroit does. Chief Charles Simms plans for better things, and is working to lay a solid foundation for Detroit to build on. In his office downtown, a week before Angels' Night, Simms sits at a round table. There are big jars of candy on it, Tootsie Rolls and Twizzlers — "My lunch," he jokes, not looking nearly old enough to have been with the Detroit Fire Department for 28 years.
He smiles amicably and gestures for us to sit, turning periodically to answer his desk phone. Across the table from him, there is a wall that acts as a white board. On it, a list of solved serial arsons, written in red marker, with the number of fires set and the status of each case. But under Chief Simms' watch, that's changing. The Motor City Muckraker Catastrophic Revenge. Housing crisis accelerates blight in Detroit neighborhoods. By Debra Watson and Anne Moore 21 October 2008 Dire conditions in a once prosperous East Side Detroit neighborhood underscore the impact the wave of home foreclosures is having on working people across the United States. While the effect of the mortgage crisis on the Wall Street banks is headline news, the media rarely inquires into the social consequences of the foreclosure epidemic. Some three-quarters of a million people have lost their homes across the US so far this year and foreclosure filings are up 82.6 percent from a year ago, according to the web site ForeclosureS.com.
The same report notes that 107,500 homes were lost in September alone. The city of Detroit has the highest repossession rate for a major city in the US, with real-estate owned (REO) homes—that is, homes repossessed by banks or mortgage holders—at 3.7 percent in 2007. Cleveland, Ohio came in a close second with a 3 percent REO rate. "We finally came out to see what it was about, why the news trucks were here. 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. The News reviewed records of more than 9,000 suspicious fires from 2010 to mid-2013 and found that arson has decimated the northeast, southwest and far west sides of Detroit. "People don't realize arson is a felony. The News found: Detroit school issues deeper than education. When you see the reports about the perils of the American public school system, the one place that is mentioned most often is Detroit.
Thus why when MSNBC chose the Motor City to host Making The Grade, it was essentially a no-brainer. There are many common misconceptions about Detroit. Whether it involves our crime rate, our personality, or our slew of abandoned buildings and houses that dot the city’s landscape. One of them, however, is not our educational system. Things are not good. In fact, in recent years the numbers have been absolutely startling. In May, a study by the National Institute for Literacy revealed that 47 percent of the city’s 714,000 residents are considered “functionally illiterate”. Just 3 percent of Detroit’s fourth graders and 4 percent of eighth graders meet national math standards. Whatever the case, those numbers are far too low. Administrators blame teachers and parents. Things were not much better at the city’s largest high school: Cass Tech.
Why Detroit's teachers are 'sick' of their inadequate schools. Detroit Teachers, Former Students Share Horror Stories of Toxic Schools. Volume of abandoned homes 'absolutely terrifying' Explicit cookie consent. Chapter 9 draws to an end.