After bankruptcy, few options for Detroit to grow revenue. Slash costs, fix the balance sheet and take money that was once tied to debts and spend it on police, fire and other city services. That's the premise of Detroit's bankruptcy: short-term pain for long-term benefit, and cuts for Detroit's creditors, but better outcomes for residents. But of the $1.7 billion that Detroit's post-bankruptcy plan is expected to generate, only about $900 million comes from restructuring the city's debts. About $483 million comes from projected new revenues, $358 million from cost savings. "We don't have $1.7 billion in the bank," said former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr, who led the city through bankruptcy.
"We think we've made our estimates reasonable. " Simple enough on paper, but in reality? Both raising revenue and cutting costs have proved problematic for generations of Detroit leaders. In short, it's not that easy. Why is it different now? Here's where Detroit is starting: timely reporting of revenue and expenses.
Where cash comes from The big picture. The Michigan Daily. In the last 20 years, the population of Detroit has shrunk dramatically, causing concern among many cities about gentrification, which is the process by which higher income individuals occupy low-income urban areas, raising prices forcing residents to leave their homes and relocate. Wednesday night at Weill Hall, a panel of urban planning experts and a city official discussed the definition of gentrification and the effects it has on Detroit. About 60 students and faculty attended the event, sponsored by the Detroit Partnership, a student organization advocating education and service in the city. State Rep. John Olumba spoke at the panel and discussed his experiences representing Detroit.
Olumba said the traditional definition of gentrification sometimes overlooks the social factors involved in such movements. “It’s OK to have a hard and fast definition of (gentrification),” Olumba said. “You introduce plight into a neighborhood,” Dewar said in the panel. Detroit's Abandoned Building Problem Is An Actual 'Blight Emergency,' Says City Manager. Detroit is now undergoing an official “blight emergency,” according to an order signed by the city’s emergency manager last month.
One-fifth of the city’s housing stock, approximately 78,000 homes, are vacant. If emergency sounds too strong, consider the case of Bill Wade, a 61-year-old Detroiter with multiple sclerosis who is paralyzed from the waist down. When he talked to WXYZ-TV, Wade said he lives in fear that the structure will go up in flames and set his house on fire. “I worry about that house [next door] because if I’m not here and I’m running an errand and that house goes up [in flames], he’s stuck,” Wade’s wife Linda explained to the local news station.
According to Reuters, 60 percent of the city’s annual 12,000 fires involve blighted and abandoned buildings. Empty since 2005, the house next to Wade’s has been hit by scrappers, and is now a home for rodents and small wild animals, WXYZ reports. For many young women, blight can represent a different kind of danger. Getty Images. 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. 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. "We have seen a significant slowing of people leaving the neighborhoods, and it will continue to improve," Mayor Mike Duggan said. Detroit, suburbs reach water deal. It's official: Detroit and the suburbs have struck a water deal. Leaders voted today to let Detroit lease its massive, crumbling water and sewer system to a new, regional board called the Great Lakes Water Authority. The deal was originally cooked up as part of Detroit’s bankruptcy, as a way for the city to fix its water system – which is in serious need of expensive improvements – and for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to pay down what it owes the city’s retirees.
The deal: Detroit gets money, and the counties get more influence For years the surrounding counties – Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb – have been buying their water from the city. This deal will, at least in theory, give suburbanites more direct power over the system, and (they hope) lower rates in the long run. "Unlike all other communities, Detroit will only pay the authority what they collect from their residents. In exchange, the authority will pay Detroit $50 million a year in lease payments. But that didn’t happen. Detroit Has a Spending Problem. America needs to learn from the destruction of Detroit. It is a lesson in how people can stubbornly stick to political dogmas—even as financial collapse destroys everything around them that they love. On February 19, a team of independent auditors appointed by the state of Michigan concluded that Detroit is a total and complete financial mess. The report says the city will face a $100 million shortfall by June. And that is only the beginning of the city’s problems.
With Detroit’s population down to a little over 700,000, city debt stands at $20,000 per man, woman, and child. It is sad to see how dysfunctional and corrupt one of America’s formerly most prosperous cities is. According to the report, Detroit leaders were totally unable to even come close to balancing the budget during the biggest economic boom in U.S. history. Now with the national economy deteriorating, its unionized employees aging, and Detroit’s promises becoming more expensive, its deficits are growing fast. Wrong! The Abandoned City of Detroit - Photography: Zach Fein.
The study of abandonment must convene upon Detroit at one point or another. No other city in the United States has undergone such a dramatic level of population decline, abandonment, and urban decay over the past few decades. As many of the posts under the research section of this site convey, industry in America has toppled and left behind an amazing amount of abandoned and decaying architecture. Detroit, the nation's most industrious city, reflects this in a unique way. The failing industry was met with, social, racial, and political tensions.
Today, not only is nearly half of Detroit's 138 square mile area vacant, beautiful architecture is left with no hope of use. The photo galleries below document examples of the size and scale of abandonment and decay in Detroit. Urban Meadows: The abandoned and demolished neighborhoods of Detroit, MI.Detroit has over 10,000 vacant homes.
Packard Plant: Enormous abandoned auto plant.Packard made cars in Detroit until 1957, when this plant closed. Detroit to get $21 million more for blight demolition. WASHINGTON — The City of Detroit stands to receive an additional $21.25 million in demolition money from the federal government under a proposal authorized by the Obama administration and approved Wednesday by a state housing board. The money will be enough to take down nearly 1,300 blighted structures if recent averages hold. The Free Press was the first to report that U.S. Treasury officials had signed off on allowing the Michigan State Housing Development Authority to move another $32.7 million of a $498-million award made in 2010 under the Hardest Hit Fund to its demolition account with the lion’s share — roughly two-thirds of the total — going to Detroit and the rest to Flint.
Nowhere in the nation has that argument been used more than in Detroit, which had already received or been promised up to $107 million in reimbursements from the fund for tearing down abandoned, decrepit structures. “This program has always been about allowing the states to determine where their needs are. Detroit’s white population rises. Detroit’s white population rose by nearly 8,000 residents last year, the first significant increase since 1950, according to a Detroit News analysis of U.S.
Census Bureau data. The data, made public Wednesday, mark the first time census numbers have validated the perception that whites are returning to a city that is overwhelmingly black and one where the overall population continues to shrink. Many local leaders contend halting Detroit’s population loss is crucial, and the new census data shows that policies to lure people back to the city may be helping stem the city’s decline. “It verifies the energy you see in so many parts of Detroit and it’s great to hear,” said Kevin Boyle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who studies the intersection of class, race, and politics in 20th-century America.
The Northwestern University professor grew up on Detroit’s east side. “I think it’s a trend. The influx of whites helped slow Detroit’s population decline last year. Whose Neighborhood Is It? Photo On June 25, 1974, suburban residents of Detroit won their four-year battle to overturn court-ordered busing of black city students across county lines into their schools. In a key 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Milliken v. Bradley, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that 41 white suburban governments had not committed “significant violations” of the Constitution. Burger wrote: No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of public schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process. The victory in Milliken was based on the assumption that African-Americans would be bused in, not that they would be living next door.
Southfield, Mich., for example, which had been 0.7 percent black in 1970, by 2010 had become 70.3 percent black, and its schools nearly 95 percent black. According to Schelling, Zhang writes, Coleman A. Young, 79, Mayor of Detroit And Political Symbol for Blacks, Is Dead. Coleman A. Young, the combative, tart-tongued former union organizer who became the first black Mayor of Detroit when he was elected in 1973 and then went on to run the city for a record 20 years, died on Saturday at Sinai Hospital in Detroit.
He was 79. The cause was respiratory failure, officials said. A popular and streetwise politician, Mr. Young became a hero to black voters who saw his victory as a sign of their growing power in local government, especially in cities in need of healing after race riots in the previous decade. But like the other black mayors, Mr. Afterward, the Motor City lost even more of its factories, stores and jobs as well as thousands of its middle-class residents, particularly whites who had been moving to the suburbs in great numbers since Detroit's 1967 race riots. ''I don't dispute the gravity of Detroit's problems,'' he wrote.
Mr. Mr. Even so, Mr. But that was not enough to keep businesses and residents from fleeing the city. 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. In each case, household income has risen over 30% in just 30 years.
Only a handful of states have seen median household incomes actually decrease since 1980—and several of them are in the Midwest. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 5. 4. 3. Detroit's population loss slows; some suburbs see gains.