Reflections on my hometown

I've been kind of down lately. Having some physical problems that affect my mobility, stuck in the late-winter doldrums. And when I get depressed, my thoughts naturally turn to my hometown, Detroit.

Since the demise of mayor-for-life Coleman Young, the entertainingly racist demagogue who ruled Motown for twenty years, the pile of ruins where Detroit used to be has suffered under a succession of uninspiring lightweights. The only one who did anything noteworthy was Kwame Kilpatrick who, while at least as corrupt as Coleman on one of his virtuous days, managed to get himself ousted and arrested for a text-message scandal, of all things. Lord, how the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, last night the current victim mayor, Dave Bing, gave a state-of-the-city speech in which he acknowledged what everybody knows and nobody wants to come out and say: Detroit isn't coming back. Even with all the number fudging that has come to be such a Detroit tradition at census time, the city doesn't even claim more than 900,000 people - I'd be surprised at half that - and they're at least 30% unemployed and rattling around in the ruins of a city designed for 2 million. This is a city that doesn't even have chain grocery stores anymore: When Farmer Jack sold out to Kroger, Kroger bought everything except the two remaining stores in Detroit, which promptly closed and they were the last. The only national chain that's doing well in Detroit is Dollar General - which should tell you all you need to know about the finances of the average Detroiter. In downtown Detroit, parking garages outnumber occupied office buildings because Detroiters don't actually work downtown as anything but janitors - all those office workers go home to the suburbs every night. Having done it myself for a while, I can testify that they breathe a sigh of relief when they cross Eight Mile Road. It's been going on like this for decades, just getting worse and worse.

Bing's theme was 'Together we can reinvent Detroit'. Yeah - you can reinvent it as the village it was before industrialization - if the city unions will let you. Which they won't. Bing's already in trouble with the unions from when he timidly called for 10% pay cuts and furlough days. Most of the speech was the usual lying blather about "politics as usual," "the red tape, poor customer service and pay-to-play culture" of City Hall, a "new tone of cooperation," "aggressive job and business creation," rainbows, unicorns and hails of Skittles. But he did come out and say Detroit "must shrink to grow," whatever that means.

The only specifics about what that means is a vague plan to abandon and bulldoze entire blighted neighborhoods.

In the next few years, Bing said he plans to focus more on neighborhoods, including plans to demolish 3,000 eyesores this year and 10,000 in the next three years. He said he was "unveiling the plan," but he's made that announcement repeatedly for the past few months.

"For too long, our focus has been downtown at the expense of neighborhoods," Bing said.

The problem is that people still live in those neighborhoods, and they won't leave without being paid. Detroit has exactly no money to do any such thing. According to Gary North, median housing prices in Detroit have gone from $41.000 in 1994 to $7,000 today. Mortgage defaults are by far the highest in the country. What this has done to property tax revenues is - well - end them. Likewise, the city income tax doesn't collect much from all those unemployed people. Bing has no cash to do anything with. Unless he can get it from the feds, he won't get it. Whatever he does get from outside will evaporate without trace in the presence of the public "workers" unions and all those corrupt city officials, none of whom will just go away when Bing asks them to. In fact, if Bing follows tradition for Detroit mayors since the '60's, he's the worst of the bunch.

Detroit isn't even a great place to be from. Given the collapse of one major industry after another, I sometimes wonder if post-automotive Detroit isn't a harbinger of everywhere I've ever been.

Yeah, I've been a little depressed lately. Forgive.