5 Days in 1967 Still Shake Detroit. But other scars from the riots remain. Hundreds of burned or looted businesses were never rebuilt. Tens of thousands of Detroiters moved to the suburbs, including many middle-class and affluent families. The city's tax base shrank and the quality of its schools declined. City officials have found it easier to fix a police force under their control than to repair the economic wounds left by the riots. Although public debate about the city's police force has largely disappeared, the struggle continues to rebuild what is also the nation's poorest big city. ''A lot has changed,'' said Detroit's Mayor, Dennis W. But the Mayor acknowledged that other problems persisted. ''Whatever damage you inflict to your own city, it is likely to remain permanent,'' Mayor Archer said, ''because in the very same areas where there used to be flourishing businesses, they do not exist today, and in the very same areas where there used to be dense housing units, they no longer exist today.'' Mr.
Mr. But to Mr. Mr. 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. Detroit, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? Thou wouldst fain destroy the temple! If thou be Jesus, Son of the Father, now from the Cross descend thou, that we behold it and believe on thee when we behold it. If thou art King over Israel, save thyself then! God, My Father, why has thou forsaken me? All those who were my friends, all have now forsaken me. And he that hate me do now prevail against me, and he whom I cherished, he hath betrayed me. Lyric excerpts from the Fifth and Fourth and Words, respectively, of the Seven Last Words of Christ orchestral work by Joseph Haydn. I’m pissed. Ever since the announcement late Thursday that the City of Detroit was indeed going to file for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection, the Internet has been overflowing with commentary on the matter.
That’s it, people, they seem to reason. As I’ve written before, Detroit’s narrative serves everyone else as the nation's whipping boy, and that came through in the last couple of days: You can find Detroit in Cleveland, St. Yes, that is from 1957. Detroit Schools, Already in Dire Straits, Take Hit as the City’s Population Shrinks. Detroit Population Down 25 Percent, Census Finds. Billions in Debt, Detroit Tumbles Into Insolvency. Detroit: What a city owes its residents - latimes. Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Above: A person walks… (Spencer Platt / Getty Images ) Though it is the biggest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, Detroit is only one of 26 urban municipalities that have gone into bankruptcy or state receivership for fiscal insolvency since 2008. Detroit should draw attention and debate to a challenging issue underlying all these public insolvencies: What level of public services will we protect and guarantee for U.S. cities?
The Bankruptcy Court will have to face that question. It will have to determine whether Detroit can cut into current services any more than it already has. Politicians and judges who manage local fiscal crises speak of maintaining basic services and ensuring residents' minimal health and safety, but these concepts are short on specifics. As a matter of law, there is no such thing as a crime rate that is too high or an ambulance response time that is too long. Industrialism; urban decay; Census; The collapse of Detroit - latimes. Imagine for a moment that every single person living in the city of San Jose, plus another 150,000 or so, just up and left. Vanished. Poof. Gone. Leaving their homes, business buildings and factories behind. That is, in effect, what has happened to the city of Detroit, according to 2010 U.S.
Census data released this week. It's an unprecedented collapse of a major American city. In Detroit, the loss amounts to a staggering 60% of the city's peak population. There are all sorts of implications here, both for Detroit and for the nation. But there are two larger issues that have broader national implications. The second is, what are we going to do about it? Detroit has played a significant role in my life.
Racism plays a significant role too. Detroit stands as the reverse image of what we think a modern American city should be. To tweak the adage about how it takes a village to raise a child, it will take a nation to save a city. When it comes to pensions, California is no Detroit. The Detroit bankruptcy court judge's ruling that employee pensions are "on the table" for potential reductions has spurred yet another round of acrimonious debate between those on the right who blame public-sector pensions for virtually all of government's fiscal problems and employee unions that deny there's a problem at all. Neither side is right. Most of the pension funds in extreme crisis (including those in Illinois, Kansas, Detroit and Chicago) got that way not because of the pension system itself but rather because elected officials failed to make the annual required contributions needed to keep funds solvent.
Skipping these payments was politically expedient during the Great Recession, but the unpaid bills compounded quickly. SOCAL POLITICS IN 2013: Some rose, some fell -- and L.A. lost its women, almost The amounts now owed to some of the worst-funded plans, like Detroit's, are beyond the realistic ability of their sponsoring governments to pay. That's all it would take. West, South are fastest growing in latest census data. Eight of the fastest growing states are in the South or West, according to the latest U.S. census data, and five of those growing are Sun Belt states as the nation continues its political, economic and social redistribution. The U.S. Census Bureau produces population estimates each year, statistics the agency says help planners make policy decisions during the period between the mandated counts every decade. The decennial count is used to apportion congressional seats among the states, though the decision on how to carve specific districts is left to the states themselves where rival parties often compete for control.
Though the data are just an estimate, they still indicate ongoing trends and this year’s numbers, from July 1, 2013 to 2014, are no different. While the trend toward the South and West and away from the Northeast has been going for decades -- some would say centuries -- there are smaller annual shifts that often reflect factors such as the change in the economy. Ex-Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick: 'I really, really, really messed up' - latimes. Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who turned Detroit into his personal wallet, was sentenced Monday to 28 years in prison for corruption in the city that has become the modern face of municipal bankruptcy. The city’s chief executive from 2002 to 2008, Kilpatrick was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy, fraud, extortion and tax crimes as part of what prosecutors called the “Kilpatrick enterprise,” years of forcing contractors to pay off a confederate who made the money available to the mayor.
In a wide pattern of corruption, Kilpatrick received more than $840,000 to pay for personal needs like yoga and camp for his kids as well as his personal travel and lifestyle, the prosecution charged. Addressing U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds in a soft voice, Kilpatrick accepted responsibility for his crimes. “I know you have to render a sentence,” he said, according to the report of the court proceedings in the Detroit Free Press. “One thing is certain,” Edmunds said.
A year into Detroit's bankruptcy, many residents still feel abandoned. In the year since this city filed for bankruptcy, becoming the largest municipality ever to do so, leaders have adopted a more optimistic tone about the future, pledging to fix streetlights and attract new residents and jobs. But Eric Byrd isn't buying it. "No change round here yet," said the 30-year-old, looking around his neighborhood on the west side of the city.
Nearly every house on the block is abandoned, hollowed out by fire or vandals. Yards have been reclaimed by tall grass and wildflowers, and the roads are potholed and empty. By all accounts, Detroit's bankruptcy has been handled quickly and evenhandedly under the guidance of Judge Steven Rhodes. It also has enlisted $816 million from private funds and the state to help limit cuts to city pensions and protect the Detroit Institute of Arts from a fire sale. "It's more than a tough pill to swallow. The plan needs approval from more than half of the members of each voting class. Alana.semuels@latimes.com. The Fight to Save Atlantic City. Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the space to somebody else. He had bought the building three years earlier on the advice of his father, an accountant who considered distressed real estate a smart long-term bet.
This piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition. It was a bedraggled three-story clapboard house that years of neighborhood demolition and neglect had stranded at the edge of several mostly vacant blocks, which together formed an urban badlands reaching all the way to the dunes. This was the South Inlet, a once thriving part of town and now more or less a desolate slum at the northeastern end of Absecon Island, the landmass that is home to Atlantic City and three other municipalities. People from “offshore,” as locals like to call the mainland, tend to think of the island’s Inlet end as north, because it’s upcoast, but locals call it east.
Hauke went after the crumbs. If only. The Checklist. The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal.
Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care. It’s an opaque term. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do “critical care,” but that doesn’t exactly clarify matters. The non-medical term “life support” gets us closer. Intensive-care units take artificial control of failing bodies. Typically, this involves a panoply of technology—a mechanical ventilator and perhaps a tracheostomy tube if the lungs have failed, an aortic balloon pump if the heart has given out, a dialysis machine if the kidneys don’t work.
The difficulties of life support are considerable. But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. “I need to get out!” Motown Down. If you were to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts, home to Diego Rivera’s magnificent murals depicting scenes at the Ford Motor Company in the early nineteen-thirties, and then take a stroll through the surrounding streets, you might be surprised at what you would find: coffee shops frequented by young hipsters; old warehouses being converted to lofts; bike racks; houses undergoing renovation; a new Whole Foods supermarket. After decades of white flight, black flight, and urban decay, Detroit is being spoken of, in some circles, as “the new Portland,” or “the new Brooklyn.”
This gentrification extends only to a relatively small area, but it is worth keeping in mind when reading about the city’s bankruptcy filing—by far the biggest municipal-bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Detroit, as everyone knows, has a lot of problems. Great swaths of the city have been left to crumble, or return to pasture. Detroit is broke—it can’t even afford batteries for its parking meters—and broken. The Number: 40% These are dark times for Detroit. The city filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, and though political machinations have cast a shadow on the filing, there is no disputing that Detroit faces grave financial problems: eighteen billion dollars in debt obligations, a twenty-eight-per-cent population decline since 2000, and a municipal government that found it could no longer afford to keep the whole city lit at night.
In the first quarter of 2013, approximately forty per cent of Detroit’s street lights did not work. Some of the darkness may be by design. In discussing the street-light problem with Bloomberg.com last year, the Wayne State University law professor John Mogk said Detroit has a thinly spread population, with up to twenty city neighborhoods that were less than fifteen-per-cent occupied. Repairing the lights and delivering service to those areas is expensive and inefficient; prioritizing others is one way to congregate the citizens of a new, smaller Detroit.
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. 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. “That’s true,” his driver, a retired cop named Tim, muttered. Patterson just turned seventy-five. Before becoming the county executive, Patterson, a Republican, served for sixteen years as the county prosecutor.
“Well, stop readin’ ’em.” The Road Ahead. Like many Americans who fought in the Second World War, Sam Ridley, a tank commander in Patton’s drive across France, came home with big plans and a heightened sense of destiny. Within a year of returning to Smyrna, Tennessee, Ridley ran for mayor, and won. The town was just a tiny rural whistle-stop on the Louisville and Nashville line, but the war had brought an Army airfield to its outskirts, tripling its population to fifteen hundred. Sensing opportunity, Ridley formed a partnership with his twin brother, Knox, and their childhood buddy Earl Coleman; they pooled their money and built the town’s first dry-cleaning shop. As the years passed, the Ridley partnership bought a Ben Franklin five-and-dime, an insurance agency, and, eventually, the local Chevrolet dealership. There wasn’t much left that Ridley didn’t own, so he began buying up farmland and built Smyrna’s first housing developments.
Ridley served as mayor for forty years, winning ten terms, often without opposition.