Detroit population rank is lowest since 1850 For the first time since before the Civil War, Detroit is not among the nation’s 20 most populous cities. Detroit’s population was 677,116 as of last summer, a loss of 3,107 residents from the previous year, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s the smallest decline in decades, but it was enough to drop the city to 21st in the nation, surpassed by Seattle, Denver and El Paso, Texas. The last time Detroit wasn’t a Top 20 city by population was the 1850 census, when it ranked 30th, according to the bureau. “A lot of Detroiters really think of themselves as being in one of the country’s biggest cities, and that’s just not true anymore,” said Kevin Boyle, an author and history professor at Northwestern University, who grew up in Detroit. “It’s just a fundamentally different place than it was a half century ago.” The slide is a vivid reminder of shrinking clout in state and national politics and programs. “We are almost out of the woods,” Metzger said.
Explicit cookie consent IT WAS inevitable that the rights of creditors and pensioners would come into conflict, especially in places that suffer from high debts, sluggish growth and an ageing population. Admittedly Detroit, where a bankruptcy plan proposes deep cuts to the wealth of both bondholders and retirees, is an extreme example. But it does point to where future battle lines will be drawn. The city, which filed for bankruptcy last year, has an estimated $18 billion of debt and has seen its population fall by more than half since 1950. There are no easy solutions. It does not seem unreasonable that retired workers should be treated more generously in bankruptcy than unsecured bondholders (although that may drive up borrowing costs for other cities). Once a worker has retired, it is very hard to replace lost income. In contrast, most municipal bonds are held as part of a diversified portfolio; any loss resulting from a writedown will cause only a small dent in the investor’s wealth.
Volume of abandoned homes 'absolutely terrifying' Detroit — Detroit has had more homes foreclosed in the past 10 years than the total number of houses in several suburbs — or all of Buffalo, New York. Since 2005, more than 1-in-3 Detroit properties — 139,699 of 384,672 — have been foreclosed because of mortgage defaults or unpaid taxes, property records show. The vast majority are houses, and the tally is so huge it shocked even those who spent years working on foreclosure in Detroit. "When you see it on a map, it's absolutely terrifying," said Chris Uhl, a vice president of the Skillman Foundation that is working to prevent foreclosures. To get a sense of the loss, consider all the houses in Warren, Livonia, Royal Oak, Southfield and Allen Park. Empty them. "Even if you are deeply involved, you can't help but be staggered by these numbers," said Steve Tobocman, a former state representative who served as co-director of the Michigan Foreclosure Task Force. > Explore a database and map of tax-foreclosed homes in Detroit "I'm hysterical.
Explicit cookie consent DETROIT may be one of the only cities in the rich world where it is possible for someone on a fairly modest income to buy a street. At the edges of Boston-Edison, a historic district of gorgeous old houses built as one of the city’s first wealthy suburbs between about 1900 and 1930, so low has the cost of housing fallen that fairly grand houses can be acquired simply for the cost of back property taxes. A local reporter who showed me around is in the middle of building his own empire—buying up abandoned homes and renovating them. Copying him was extremely tempting. But the cost of such attractive housing is so low because people don’t want it. Chief among the costs that are higher in Detroit is transport. And yet owning a car in the city is actually surprisingly expensive too. What applies to cars also applies to other things people in most cities take for granted. And all this is just the financial cost.
Taxes fall in Detroit neighborhoods Many Detroit homeowners will see their property tax assessments drop 5%-15% this year, although bustling downtown and Midtown will see an increase of 5%, city officials said Monday. It's the latest adjustment in Detroit's three-year effort to reassess every one of the city's 220,000 homes, something that Detroit's chief assessor, Gary Evanko, said the city hasn't done in at least 45 years. Officials want to ensure that property tax assessments more closely match home sale prices in a city deeply scarred by the subprime mortgage foreclosure crisis. City officials said large portions of northwest, north and northeast Detroit will see 15% reductions, while the southwest, near west and lower east parts of the city will see reductions around 5%. Some of the city's more stable neighborhoods — Boston-Edison, Indian Village and Sherwood Forest — will see increases of 15%, reflecting rising sale prices. Collection rates are rising, Duggan said.
U.S. war on drugs has failed, report says The United States' war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so as long as it emphasizes law enforcement and neglects the problem of consumption, a Washington think tank says in a report co-chaired by a former president of Mexico. The former president, Ernesto Zedillo, in an interview, called for a major rethinking of U.S. policy, which he said has been "asymmetrical" in demanding that countries such as Mexico stanch the flow of drugs northward, without successful efforts to stop the flow of guns south. In addition to disrupting drug-smuggling routes, eradicating crops and prosecuting dealers, the U.S. must confront the public health issue that large-scale consumption poses, he said. "If we insist only on a strategy of the criminal pursuit of those who traffic in drugs," Zedillo said, "the problem will never be resolved." The report, which is the work of Brookings' Partnership for the Americas Commission, offers especially pointed criticism of the way the drug war has been waged.
Eight miles of murder | World news Even by the low standards of Eight Mile Road, the Triple C bar was a seedy place to die. It is a squat one-storey building, windowless and dingy. The only hint at the nightclub inside is three white 'C's tacked to a dirty wall. It was here last week that local Detroit rapper 'Proof' died in a gun battle. It was a fight that ended another young black life in one of America's toughest cities. To many, Eight Mile is a familiar name - made famous by the semi-autobiographical movie of the same name by rapper Eminem. But unlike the white rapper Eminem, the black Proof - real name DeShaun Holton - showed that most people do not escape Eight Mile. But Eight Mile means far more than another dead Detroit rapper, far more than one successful movie. Walking from one side of Eight Mile Road to the other is a jarring experience. In Detroit the unemployment rate is 14.1 per cent, more than double the national average. That decision goes to the core of the problem: race. Violence in rap
Marilyn Salenger: ‘White flight’ and Detroit’s decline By Marilyn Salenger July 21, 2013 Marilyn Salenger is president of Strategic Communications Services and a former correspondent and news anchor for several CBS stations. An almost palpable sadness has swept across the country at the news that the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. While the possibility of this had been discussed, the reality of what was once the fourth-largest city in the United States sinking to such depths is disheartening, a moment people will remember for years to come. In the late 1960s,racial tensions engulfed parts of our country, at the cost of lost lives and abject destruction. It was the beginning of the ending we are now seeing for a city that once stood tall with head held high. The term “white flight” has become less common in recent years because its huge waves appeared to have stopped as tensions eased. My home town of Gary, Ind. White flight took hold and left a lasting imprint. Continue reading
The Threat to Detroit’s Rebound Isn’t Crime or the Economy, It’s the Mortgage Industry As a young married couple, Steven and Corey Josephson chose to begin their lives together in Detroit. They came from Greeley, Colorado, a city that couldn’t be more different. It was founded as an experimental utopian community; its majority-white population has more than doubled since 1970; and its unemployment rate is lower than the national average, and about half that of Detroit. But in August 2014, they left. Corey, a theater and English teacher, grew up in Michigan, and Steven found a position in Detroit’s Teach for America program, teaching science to the youngest kids at Coleman A. Young Elementary School. Along with their beagle, Baley, they moved into a house in northeast Detroit near 8 Mile Road. “He bought the house originally for $40,000, but home values are not even close to that,” Josephson says. Two different stories are playing out in Detroit — though they seem like they should contradict each other. But at this point, at least, there’s room for everyone.
The Downfall of Detroit: White Flight and the 1967 Race Riots | husseinbazzi 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. To help end the disturbance, Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops. The result was 43 dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed (Rutgers.edu). Works Cited Feagin, Joe R.. Like this: Like Loading...
Eerie Before and After Images Show Urban Decay in Detroit | The Weather Channel Perhaps no American city symbolizes urban decay more than Detroit, Michigan. Modern day ruins of the Motor City are not difficult to find, as nature has reclaimed much of the city and neighboring areas. When their occupants left, the homes in the slideshow above became examples of what happens when weather and nature take over unattended homes. Using Google Maps time lapse function, it’s easy to see how much the Detroit suburbs have changed over just the last few years. Several homes are captured in the slideshow above and shown across several years, between 2007 and 2013. A lot changes throughout those six years. Weeds, grass and trees grow in the abandoned homes, and take over parts of each neighborhood. But the changes to these buildings stretch beyond natural occurrences. No street appears as devastated as Hoyt Avenue, which had two well-kept homes in 2009 that were completely overrun by grass and weeds by 2013. MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: Modern Ruins of Abandoned Detroit
Detroit: Why Bankruptcy? Why Bankruptcy Now? | Journal of Applied Research in Economic Development City of Detroit Like it or not, the Detroit bankruptcy filing is a page turner. What insights and lessons might an economic developer glean from it? That is our task in this issue. Since July 18th when the City of Detroit filed for the nation’s largest ever (in terms of debt) municipal bankruptcy, the Curmudgeon has been buried under an avalanche of different ideas explaining how Detroit got into this revolting situation. There have also been a pile of development-revitalization suggestions, as well as blame-placing. The ever-reticent Krugman, for example, blames job sprawl and suburbs, and a ton of media folk blame the decline on the auto industry or they resuscitate age-old deindustrialization woes. What the Curmudgeon proposes is simply to step back a bit and subject some of these “causes of bankruptcy” to a review. Right off the reader might appreciate the Curmudgeon “take” on the bankruptcy filing. Did Detroit’s political leadership stand idly by and watch the city decline? 1.
Marilyn Salenger: ‘White flight’ and Detroit’s decline By Marilyn Salenger By Marilyn Salenger July 21, 2013 Marilyn Salenger is president of Strategic Communications Services and a former correspondent and news anchor for several CBS stations. An almost palpable sadness has swept across the country at the news that the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. While the possibility of this had been discussed, the reality of what was once the fourth-largest city in the United States sinking to such depths is disheartening, a moment people will remember for years to come. To understand that the decline and bankruptcy represent so much more than dollars and cents requires a step back to a time that many would prefer to forget but remains unforgettable. In the late 1960s,racial tensions engulfed parts of our country, at the cost of lost lives and abject destruction. It was the beginning of the ending we are now seeing for a city that once stood tall with head held high. opinions Orlando Shooting Updates post_newsletter348 follow-orlando true after3th