In 2013, Americans witnessed a slowly sinking ship finally submerge. Once a bustling urban center rife with economic prosperity, the city of Detroit, Michigan filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S history on July 18, 2013 (Fletcher, 2013). Over recent decades, Detroit has been the victim of both economic and demographic decay. To put the magnitude of the city’s desolation in perspective, during the middle of the twentieth century, the city’s population was approximately 1,850,000, making it, at the time, the fifth most populous city in the nation. As of 2013 census data, however, the city has dropped to the eighteenth most populous city, with a population of 701,000, the lowest it has been since the 1910s when the city was still developing. What this means is, in a little over half a century, Detroit has seen a population loss of nearly 60%. In fact, it’s the only city to have climbed above one million people and then fallen below that mark (Johnson, 2013). To make matters worse, Detroit’s unemployment rate, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, has risen to 23.1%, the highest of any large city in the nation (U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). Not surprisingly, Detroit is also the nation’s most poverty stricken city, with 36.4% of individuals and 31.3% of families living under the poverty level (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). Detroit even claims some of the highest crime rates in the country, and thousands of its houses and industrial buildings are abandoned (Koremans, 2013).
The question is: What caused Detroit, the Rust Belt’s most valuable player, to crumble? The answer to this question is contested on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s easy to point fingers and make the col...
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...ker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism
Sugrue, Thomas J. (2005). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press. pp. 47–49.
Fine, Sidney (1989). Violence in the Model City: The Cavanaugh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967.
"Detroit is "Most Dangerous City in America" for fourth year in a row, Forbes report says". CBS News. October 22, 2012. Retrieved November 17, 2013.
Wolff, Richard D. (July 23, 2013). "Detroit's decline is a distinctively capitalist failure". The Guardian.
Snyder, M. (2012, January 19). 17 Facts About The Decline Of The U.S. Auto Industry That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe. The Economic Collapse. Retrieved November 17, 2013, from http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/17-facts-about-the-decline-of-the-u-s-auto-industry-that-are-almost-too-crazy-to-believe
A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 explains in detail how the author deciphers the ghettoization process in Cleveland during the time period. Kusmer also tries to include studies that mainly pertained to specific black communities such as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, which strongly emphasized the institutional ghetto and dwelled on white hostility as the main reasons as to why the black ghetto was
Newark began to deteriorate and the white residents blamed the rising African-American population for Newark's downfall. However, one of the real culprits of this decline in Newark was do to poor housing, lack of employment, and discrimination. Twenty-five percent of the cities housing was substandard according to the Model C...
Mayor Mike Duggan has recently added his voice to the many others in regards to asking for state help for Detroit Public Schools. While he observed some schools that were properly maintained, he noted that conditions in some schools would “break your heart” including issues with heating and severe water damage that prevented children from using the gymnasium. Duggan’s tour came to a quick and early end, however. Many schools were closed in early January due to teacher sick-outs as a form of protest to what teachers call “deplorable conditions for them as well as students.” These protests are in direct response to the building conditions, pay cuts, and the recent plan by Governor Snyder. In addition, the school system is projected to run out of funds in April. Duggan encouraged the state to help fix Detroit schools. Of the districts ninety-seven s...
In his book, New York City Politics: Governing Gotham, Bruce Berg, states that a “city’s political system involves a complex set of functions around three broad themes: democratic accountability, the delivery of public goods and services and the maintenance of civil harmony” (1). It can be argued that the endurance of a governing political system is directly related to how well it satisfies the aforementioned themes and thus maintains the general vitality of a city. Alternatively, a political system’s inadequacy, notable through contingent events such as a fiscal crisis, engenders the empowerment of a replacement. Analyzing, New York City’s governance, it is my contention that both machine and reform politics have been marshaled at different points in history as the reasoning behind the city’s fiscal crises but the systems themselves are not entirely flawed. They both exercise similar components of strong governance although each system mobilized a different socioeconomic
DETROIT, known as the "Automotive Capital of the World," is the largest city in the state of Michigan. The city sits at the heart of an official three-county metropolitan region comprising Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties.
With people losing their jobs, it’s harder to pay bills so people lose their houses due to foreclosure. People making a decent pay wage refuse to stay in communities where every other house is vacant and vandalized. I think many parts of Detroit are still divided by color because of crimes also. People who have families or plan on starting families don’t want to raise their children around violence. I was born in Detroit, I can honestly say I love being from Detroit. My parents make enough money to stay outside of Detroit but they chose not to which I g...
In the 1960’s, Detroit was the most prosperous cities in the United States. Although Detroit was a place of high employment and high per capita income, today’s Motor City is facing debt and bankruptcy.
...cars. According to Nancy Andrews, Christopher Kirkpatrick, and Eric Millikin, “Detroit went on a binge starting around 2000 to close budget holes and to build infrastructure, more than doubling debt to $8 billion by 2012.” Detroit was borrowing money to build these infrastructures that are not capable of doing other things except to build cars; therefore, when other countries cars has found out other ways to make cheap cars and to sell their cars for a cheaper price, Detroit cannot lower their cars’ prices due to their loans for building the infrastructures. However, the Bay Area will not go bankrupt because it is not in debt. In contrast, the Bay Area is gaining a revenue, which the grand total revenue is $6670.6 millions in the year of 2013. In addition, the Bay Area is planning to gain a revenue of $276.92 billions in next twenty eight years (Plan Bay Area).
Detroit, it was once the backbones of this U.S now it’s the largest U.S city to file for bankruptcy. Thriving neighborhoods are now abandoned, not enough police to keep the city safe. Going From a population of nearly 2million to under 700,000 in a matter of years. The citizens of Detroit really need to stick together through these tough times. The problems going on in the city is by far the worst that we have seen in years and it needs to be something done about we can’t continue to watch Detroit’s Neighborhoods deteriorate like this.
The spatial isolation present in Detroit deepened anti-integration sentiment, and the resulting shift of whites out of the Rust Belt led to conditions conducive to deindustrialization. However, Sugrue notes that “[racial prejudices] are the result of the actions of federal and local governments, real estate agents, individual home buyers and sellers, and community organizations” (11). That is to say white flight is a phenomenon dependent on political climate rather than being an entirely intrinsic, prejudiced practice of whites. This is an important distinction to make, as it helps reinforce the idea that systems such as poverty and racism are exactly that—systems, and not a result of individual immorality. The same can be said for the urban crisis in Detroit: as opposed to being purely an issue of deindustrialization or poverty, Sugrue argues that the circumstances of Detroit may be in part an institutional problem. “The shape of the postwar city, I contend, is the result of political and economic decisions, of choices made and not made by various institutions, groups and
Dan Georgakas in his book “Detroit: I Do Mind Dying” he analyzes the activists and formation of the black workers. The first project that he investigates was “The Inner City Voice” (pag16), a revolutionary newspaper that help to denunciate and expose the injustices of the black communities. Georgakas states that this newspaper “reflected a belief that the paper’s hard-hitting and revolutionary viewpoint was an accurate expression of the dominant mood of Detroit’s black population” (pag16). Moreover, this newspaper helps to put in knowledge the lower class “they tried to build their paper into a vehicle for political organization, education and change(pag16) in order to inform “what was already in the streets(pag16). In other word they try to educate the mass in political education and advocate for them in their struggle and inequality in the
Shogan, Robert. The Detroit race riot; a study in violence, by Robert Shogan and Tom Craig. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964.
On June 21, the city of Detroit exploded as racial tensions finally reached their boiling point. Various news organizations, such as Time and Newsweek, covered the story. At the time of the riots, none of the reported accounts of the uprising matched. The most disputed facts were the discrepancies regarding why the riot started, the number of deaths and injuries, and the exact time the riot began. Yet, most news sources reported that around six hundred people were taken into cu...
According to Jack Patton, a retired steelworker, he affirms that the steel industry used to be the strength of the US economy, as well as the driving force of the Cleveland Economy. But now, most of the steel mills have closed, businesses have left, and Cleveland has lost thousands of jobs. On his part, Paul Volpe, an architecture, states that Cleveland used to be the centerpiece of Fortune 500 companies until most of them left and only a few now remain. The population itself has not grown as expected, thereby giving rise to the concept of “sprawl”. In the 1960’s and 70’s, part of what drives business to the suburbs is numerous free and large parking space, however, officials of Cleveland, to salvage the situation, tore down many vacant structures to create parking lots for businesses. Sadly, this effort did not work: more businesses collapsed and more people left, leaving the city in isolation. Regrettably, the problem persisted, the situation of things got exacerbated, until late 1966 when things finally exploded. This led to serious riots and protests which even drove many away; the straw that finally broke the camel’s back was when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, this led to more and more people deserting the city and eventually, the city went into bankruptcy. As tax revenues fall, basic city services also fell; police
The problems of race and urban poverty remain pressing challenges which the United States has yet to address. Changes in the global economy, technology, and race relations during the last 30 years have necessitated new and innovative analyses and policy responses. A common thread which weaves throughout many of the studies reviewed here is the dynamics of migration. In When Work Disappears, immigrants provide comparative data with which to highlight the problems of ghetto poverty affecting blacks. In No Shame in My Game, Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants are part of the changing demographics in Harlem. In Canarsie, the possible migration of blacks into a working/middle-class neighborhood prompts conservative backlash from a traditionally liberal community. In Streetwise, the migration of yuppies as a result of gentrification, and the movement of nearby-ghetto blacks into these urban renewal sites also invoke fear of crime and neighborhood devaluation among the gentrifying community. Not only is migration a common thread, but the persistence of poverty, despite the current economic boom, is the cornerstone of all these works. Poverty, complicated by the dynamics of race in America, call for universalistic policy strategies, some of which are articulated in Poor Support and The War Against the Poor.