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. 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 News and analysis on the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. post_newsletter348 follow-orlando true after3th false My home town of Gary, Ind.,was another thriving, though smaller, urban area before the late ’60s.
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.
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. 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. Still, he is best known for his big mouth. “I’m just readin’ the clouds, Brooks.”
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. 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. When Detroit declared bankruptcy in July 2013, it said it had $18 billion in debts it could not pay. Detroit’s bankruptcy case was expensive, but now it looks like it was worth the money.
State prepares to collect city income taxes for Detroit Detroiters and people who work in the city will be able to pay their individual city income taxes electronically starting with the next tax season after the state Treasury Department begins processing the city’s income tax collections in January, officials said today. The state is taking over Detroit income tax collection as part of the city’s post-bankruptcy efforts to improve its bottom line, and the Treasury Department will begin processing the taxes in January. The move will make it easier to file taxes while also boosting compliance, likely resulting in increased revenue for the city, the officials said. “Taxpayers deserve an easy and convenient filing process and the ability to e-file directly with the state will do just that,” Detroit Chief Financial Officer John Hill said in a news release. “More efficient tax collection also means the city will have more resources to provide vital services to our citizens.”
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.
Report Shows Real Factors Behind Detroit Crisis: Revenue Decline, Wall Street Deals Play Largest Role Modest Pension Benefits Play Little Role in Financial Crisis DETROIT — In their push for bankruptcy, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and other public figures are incorrectly looking at Detroit’s long-term debt—figures generated using aggressive and in some cases inaccurate assumptions—to the detriment of solving the City’s immediate cash-flow crisis and its long-term structural challenges, according to a report released Wednesday by Demos. Detroit is not a corporation, it’s a city, and its bankruptcy proceedings have been focused on the wrong numbers. The Detroit Bankruptcy shows how the current bankruptcy filing is the result of a severe decline in revenue, caused by the 2008 financial crisis, and cuts in annual state revenue sharing starting in 2011. “Detroit is not a corporation, it’s a city, and its bankruptcy proceedings have been focused on the wrong numbers,” said Wallace Turbeville, Senior Fellow at Demos, who authored the report. Detroit’s crisis was caused by multiple factors:
Whites moving into Detroit, blacks moving out as city shrinks overall - Crain's Detroit Business White people are moving back to Detroit, the American city that came to epitomize white flight, even as black people continue to leave for the suburbs and the city's overall population shrinks. Detroit is the latest major city to see an influx of whites who may not find the suburbs as alluring as their parents and grandparents did in the last half of the 20th century. Unlike New York, San Francisco and many other cities that have seen the demographic shift, though, it's cheap housing and incentive programs that are partly fueling the regrowth of the Motor City's white population. "For any individual who wants to build a company or contribute to the city, Detroit is the perfect place to be," said Bruce Katz, co-director of the Global Cities Initiative at the Washington, D.C. No other city may be as synonymous as Detroit with white flight, the exodus of whites from large cities that began in the middle of the last century. In the three years after the 2010 U.S. Elizabeth St. St.
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
Rush Limbaugh: Detroit Went Bankrupt Because Blacks Drove Out Whites Economists are attributing Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing to problems facing the entire Rust Belt region: a shrinking tax base, high health and pension costs, sprawl, and general dysfunction. But on Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh added another cause to the long list of factors that have contributed to the city’s downfall: black people. During an appearance on Fox News’ On The Record with Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday, Limbaugh claimed that “unchecked” Democratic rule “since the last Republican mayor [in] 1957” created a lazy and bloated culture of out-of-control spending and corruption. “You’ve had that — that town has been a petri dish of everything the Democrat Party stands for, everything the Democrat Party loves — massive unions, massive pensions, pay people pensions and health care long after they’ve stopped working,” he said, before arguing that the city’s first black mayor exacerbated the city’s spending and sparked racial riots that chased white people into the suburbs:
A Dream Still Deferred AT first glance, the numbers released by the Census Bureau last week showing a precipitous drop in Detroit’s population — 25 percent over the last decade — seem to bear a silver lining: most of those leaving the city are blacks headed to the suburbs, once the refuge of mid-century white flight. But a closer analysis of the data suggests that the story of housing discrimination that has dominated American urban life since the early 20th century is far from over. In the Detroit metropolitan area, blacks are moving into so-called secondhand suburbs: established communities with deteriorating housing stock that are falling out of favor with younger white homebuyers. If historical trends hold, these suburbs will likely shift from white to black — and soon look much like Detroit itself, with resegregated schools, dwindling tax bases and decaying public services.
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. 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. Related
Detroit, General Motors and the American Dream In 1953 GM President Charles Erwin Wilson sat in front of a committee of senators during his confirmation hearing as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense and famously said that “for years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The comment caused a brief firestorm of controversy because it seemed such a shameless expression of corporate greed and self-interest, and it forced Wilson to divest himself of a considerable amount of GM stock so as to avoid a potential conflict of interest. Sixty years after that quip, however, it is becoming more and more apparent that Wilson was exactly wrong: what was good for General Motors has not proved to be good for the nation, nor, ironically, has it proved good for Detroit. What was good for General Motors in the post-war period was, simply put, suburbanization. Those cars, in turn, depended on a vast new infrastructure of roads that were built by states and by the Federal government.
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.