Detroit has gone bankrupt.
It's probably long overdue.
I don't know shit about Chapter 9 bankruptcy law. Apparently, whoever is in charge then gets a lot of power to shed obligations, unless the state passes some laws limiting that.
Figure that the first group of people who are going to be royally hosed with be the city's retirees. Since Detroit's Overlord works for the governor of Michigan, a Koch-brand Republican, expect that the poor, the workers, the schoolchildren and the retirees will bear the brunt of Detroit's restructuring and that the investor class, who hold the city's bonds, won't even notice what happens.
As for the "Detroit will come back" claim by said teabagging governor, I don't know what drugs he's been using, but they're apparently very strong ones. This website today lists almost 400 residential properties in the city that are for sale for $10,000 or less.
So the good news is that you can buy a home for very little in Detroit, and the bad news is then you'd own a home in Detroit. Sixty years ago, Detroit had a population of about 1,850,000 and now has a population of a skosh over 700,00 people. That's one reason why the city has blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings. Much of the city probably can (and should) be bulldozed and turned back into prairie.
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8 comments:
Detroit suffers all the bad things that happened to the old west mining towns. While it was good the corruption was ignored. When the mines started to peter out the people left and the places often just ended as deserted ghost towns.
Detroit. Union made - Democrat run - with racial diversity up da yazoo. The Big Three turning out crap autos for 20 or 30 years. Ain't no damn wonder it's bankrupt.
Imported from Detroit? No thanks.
-Moe
Cripes, Moe, the last bit of the first sentence is damn close to being racist.
I guess that's opposed to the corporate bankruptcies engineered by the venture capitalists? Patriot Coal is a fine example; they spun the part of the company holding the pension bag of from the rest of it and then, well, you know what happens.
That's how fuckers like "Mister 47%" got so rich.
Thing is, the people *didn't* leave. The Detroit Metropolitan Area continues to grow in population. All that has happened is that first the white population, then affluent minorities, fled the city to the suburbs, leaving behind only the desperately poor who cannot afford to move to the suburbs and the pension obligations that they voted for but now intend to renege on now that they moved to the other side of the city boundary line. Apparently stepping across a line is excuse enough for breaking your promise to the people who provided you services back when you lived in Detroit...
In a fair world 2/3rds of those pension obligations would be divvied up among the suburbs surrounding Detroit where all the white people moved. But of course, as you mention, the Kochsucker currently in charge wouldn't want to discomfit whites and affluent blacks when he can just impoverish tens of thousands of lower-middle-class retirees with a brush stroke. I mean, they're just *old people*, it's not like they're *really* people, right?
- Badtux the Sardonic Penguin
BTW, Moe -- there are only three auto plants left in Detroit, providing only 10,000 or so jobs. Furthermore, American cars haven't been "crap" as you claim for quite some time, and the American automotive industry has been quite profitable the past two years, so profitable that they've even managed to repay the government loans that bailed them out years before they had to do so. I've owned American cars for most of the past thirty years (excepting 5 years that I owned a Korean car, and 2 years that I owned a Japanese car) and they've been reliable as bricks, even if the build quality on the older ones wasn't up to Japanese standards. The days when American cars were crap that fell apart a year after you drove it off the lot passed long ago...
Thank god I didn't call anyone a "Crazy Ass Cracker"
Hey BadTux, I stopped driving Detroit iron 8 years ago - love me a Japanese ride for evermore.
When you're broke you're broke, don't matter how many promises you made.
-Moe
Mo, Detroit city proper is broke. The Detroit metropolitan area as a whole (i.e., the ring of suburbs around Detroit created when whites fled desegregation)... not so much. They're quite affluent, actually, a place of broad streets and narrow minds. Not as affluent as back in the days when Detroit was an economic powerhouse, but still, twice as many people live there as would be necessary to keep Detroit's pension benefits funded.
But of course that would require that they live up to their obligations that they incurred back in the days when they lived in Detroit proper. White man speak with forked tongue, as any Native American can tell you. Just one more of a string of promises broken over the centuries by white men...
- Badtux the Not-forked-tongue Penguin
Hey BadTux,
They moved away from the city proper, the white flight game. I understand that part, I do not understand how they still have any obligation to the inner city.
If I don't like a town or state or what ever, as soon as I see that sucker in my rearview my obligation ends.
Please explain the flaw in thinking.
-Moe
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