My Solution to Detroit's Problems

It's quite simple. It's actually already been done in Phillie, New York, and the entire province of Ontario: Abolish as many of the local jurisdictions in the Detroit area as possible, including Detroit proper. The resulting super-municipality would look great in national city rankings. This would help the suburbs, they'd no longer be "a hi-rise bolted on to the ghetto" to paraphrase a quote frequently attributed to their dear leader. It would have a tax base, there would be one guy whose entire job was to ensure blacks and whites stopped arguing about stupid bullshit that happened in the 70s, and it would have much better numbers then every other rust belt city.

The basic structure would not be what they did in Ontario or Phillie, but NYC. Boroughs will be necessary because nobody wants to give up significant elements of autonomy, even if the autonomous unit in question is a glorified tax-dodge (I'm looking at you Grosse Pointe Shores). The new Boroughs would take on a lot of the functions of their local Board of Education. They'd also retain most of the powers of the local cities. The City-County of Detroit gets police departments, County Government functions, functions the cities have already sent to multi-government agencies. Transit, for example, is by and large a fief of SEMCOG.

The pros for the City proper would be twofold. First: with no shitty headlines about how Detroit is worst at everything it would be a lot easier to convince people to move to the City Proper. Second with access to the entire region's resources we might be able to get a handle on crime. Get a handle on crime and Auto and Homeowner's insurance rates fall, since Detroit Auto insurance alone typically costs an individual $1,000 more then if he lived in Dearborn, this makes it much easier to stay in the City. If those things happen property values go up, which means property tax receipts go up, which means the schools district can afford to stop sucking...

The advantage for the rest of the region would be less, but would still be important. First, it would mean suburbanites gained a measure of control over the Detroit-brand. They had no say in whether Kwame got fired, but they definitely suffered when he did his thing. Second it's really hard to convince people to move to suburban Detroit from outside of the region when your entire sales pitch is "this tiny little suburb you've never heard of is not a hell-hole, unlike that nasty City of Detroit." Third a lot of them actually want the things that can only be provided by a real Metro Government, like mass transit.

Why Detroit is Screwed

Given all the great things I mentioned about Detroit in my last diary, you're probably wondering how Detroit got to be in such bad shape. It's a perennial winner on the worst-crime lists, it doesn't really have a per capita income, and it's bankrupt. The answer is simple: for all the advantages Detroit's heritage and geography bestow. It's not a City in the same sense that all the other cities on the worst-crime list are.

I'll compare Detroit to Chicago, and NYC because they're the big boys in terms of Northern Cities, and Cleveland because it's fairly typical of the Rust Belt and I've lived here a few years. Legally speaking there are a lot of similarities between the four cities. They're all the core of larger regions, but Detroit is truly unique in a lot of ways.

All three have a greater proportion of their region's population then Detroit. They are all more diverse economically, racially, culturally, and in every other way then the actual Municipality of Detroit. The actual box on the map called Detroit is overwhelmingly black, overwhelmingly working-class, and if you believe in things like the black under-class probably majority under-class. The reason is pretty simple: after the '67 riots every White person right of Trotsky decided to move from the City. Which meant property values collapsed, and pretty much every black person with the ambition/ability to buy a house as an investment has also left.

In the most cities some people haven't left solely because they're too poor to afford a move, and others are hanging around solely because they're not sure their criminal schemes would work on the other side of the street; but in most cities these groups aren't what you'd call a "statistically significant proportion of the population."

Another major difference is the level of power City Elected officials have. Most small cities have multiple independent elected boards with actual political power. There's almost always a School Board and a City Council, and a Mayor. In the Midwest and East Coast there's also a County government. But as Cities get bigger they need more centralized governments, so the Mayor usually ends up in control of most of those boards. Chicago and Cleveland have no elected School Boards, but they do have County governments over them. NYC is actually technically in charge of five County-level Boroughs. You just can't run a big city effectively without a lot of centralization.

Detroit does much of this. The Mayor isn't quite a dictator, but he's definitely got the advantage in fights with City Council. What he doesn't have is any influence over the County, the School Board, the elected Board running the local Community College, etc.

Look at it this way. Let's say you were conservative, and ran for Mayor of Detroit on a platform of cutting taxes and firing the entire City Government. If you won you could do virtually nothing to cut the property tax because most Detroit property taxes aren't levied by people the Mayor can order around. You'd have to win major elections to all the Boards I mentioned. If you were left-wing and you ran for Mayor you'd probably be doomed to lose re-election because the people of Detroit are convinced the Mayor has influence over the schools, and that's just not the case.

In short Detroit's core problem is that it's designed stupidly. The City itself does not have the legal powers necessary to run a large city. The City map is such that it has no tax base, but it does have several hundred thousand extremely-expensive-to-govern residents. There are some advantages the City has, which allow it to overcome these issues in a good year, but Michigan hasn't had a good year since I was in High School.

What's great about Detroit

I'm planning on making a lot of Diaries about the City, and since the City is in pretty bad shape most of them are gonna be quite critical.

But I want everyone to know that this criticism isn't just some white boy in Cleveland who likes to rip on easy targets. I love the City. I didn't move out because I wanted to, I moved out because the economy sucked and a 5-hour-a-week job changing the world didn't pay the bills.

So here's why Detroit is great, and worth saving.

1) History/Brand. If Detroit were doing well, and the Chinese wanted to build an auto plant in the US, they'd have to consider Detroit. They would not have to consider Grand Rapids, Flint, or Northville.

2) Cultural amenities. Detroit has teams in all four Major Sports. It has Golf. The region has NASCAR. It has a great theatre district, wonderful museums, a decent library system, etc. Pretty much the only thing it lacks is an MLS team, and I suspect that will happen sooner rather then later. Particularly if the City actually solves it's problems.

3) The weather. Yes, I said weather. It's great and it's getting better.

Unlike most of the West we have plenty of fresh water to drink. The entire Great Lakes flow through the Detroit River. Then there's global warming. It will increase the variation in rainfall from year to year. If North Dakota gets a lot of rain the entire Mississippi will have to deal with high levels on the river, and potential flooding. If Western Wisconsin gets a bunch of rain Lake Michigan barely notices.

Then there's the South. They get hurricanes, which will get worse with global warming. Their energy costs are also mostly AC, which will get more expensive for them as global warming progresses. OTOH Detroit's energy costs are mostly heating, which means global warming saves us money.

I could go on. Did you realize that the Jet Stream blows West and most Michigan snow is water that's evaporated off a Great Lake? That means that most snow in the Lower Peninsula comes the lake just West of the peninsula (Lake Michigan), and it has an entire state to fall on before a city in the Southeast gets a share.

One thing non-Detroiters really don't get about Detroit...

Is how incredibly racially divided the region is. Matty Yglesias is ussually a fairly smart observer of urban affairs, but he recently predicted Mitt Romney of all people would be made the Emergency Manager of Detroit.

What he really doesn't understand is how racially divided the Detroit area is. For pretty much my entire life the vast majority (read:90+%) of the region's black population has lived in the City proper, and vast majority (again more then 90%) of the region's white population has lived in the suburbs. Most rust belt cities have neighborhoods where white working class people live. Detroit simply doesn't. There are Arab areas (Warrendale), Latino areas (the Southwest side), upper-middle-class areas, and pockets that have working class blacks and hipster-class whites (like Woodbridgee, where I grew up), but there is no equivalent of Chicago's mostly white working class neighborhoods or Cleveland's West Side.

Which means that the normal Urban-Suburban BS in Detroit is complicated by racial BS. The Mayor of Detroit is in a very real sense the King of black people in the region, and even the state. The closest thing he has to a counterpart (Oakland County Exec. L Brooks Patterson) is de facto King of the region's white people. This makes coordinating local governments pretty much impossible, and also means that it's very difficult for white guys who grew up in Oakland County to get anywhere in the City proper. Tobocman managed it, but a) he was running for the non-black district (the Southwest side is considered Latino territory), and b) the black power structure in the City still doesn't consider him fully trust-worthy. Mitt Romney's pre-2012 biogaphy makes him a lot less acceptable the Tobocman, and (to blacks, at least) Romney spent most of 2012 sending coded racist signals to the country at large.

The reason I bring this up now is simple: I am very worried abut Detroit. The people who live there do not realize how much trouble the City is in. They don;t realize how unusual it is for the central city of a major region to be almost-all-black, for the suburbs to be in their own Counties, etc. The conservatives think "If only Archer had gutted police pensions everything would be fine," while liberals seem to be convinced the City will be able to magic up a couple $Billion in tax money to cover a reasonable level of city services.

The only people who are actually thinking in terms of massive changes are the Detroit Future City Plan people, but I have yet to see a copy of their plan that will actually display on my 13-inch MacBook. The PDF is bigger then my monitor. And most Detroiters do not access the internet on $1,000 MacBooks, they access it on $50 SmartPhones.