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.