Half of Detroit property owners don't pay taxes | The Detroi
andyt @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:03 am
CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:
It's nice to know you can always count on radical conservatives blaming all their problems on those dirty poor people.
Shep as a radical conservative? He's blaming the poor for exploiting the middle class. Of course consensus on this forum seems to be that paying the poor higher wages so they're not so poor is not a good idea. You're always going to have people at the bottom of the pile. We could train and educate everybody where that's even remotely possible, and we'd still have low skill jobs that need doing and an overtrained workforce. Drive the wages of those low skill jobs into the ground, and you get working poverty. Kick the shit out of the middle class jobs, as in Detroit, and there's way fewer low skill jobs to go with them, so nobody is working. This is the rich taking their profits and moving on, leaveing devastation in it's wake. No corrupt, coke sniffing, mayors can do all this.
bootlegga @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 12:10 pm
ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:
As they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. However I do feel the uber rich have foisted their share of the tax burden onto the shoulders of the middle class.....the real entrepreneurs and innovators (and the biggest consumers)....and the heaviest taxed segment of the population. People grossing between a low end of 60 and 250 a year are getting screwed by those above and below.
commanderkai @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:35 pm
andyt andyt:
Really? It's those evil Demoncrats that drove out the middle class? They're all clustered in the suburbs still doing their middle class jobs in Detroit, are they.
Eh, actually, other than the casinos, DTE Energy, and the Ren Cen, a lot of companies moved north into Southfield and other suburban cities. Ford HQ is in Dearborn, Fifth-Third Bank is in Southfield, Chrysler HQ is in Auburn Hills, so on, so forth.
I'm not sure how anybody can put Detroit's ills on Republicans, considering the city hasn't had a Republican administration since 1962. The 1967 riot basically was the start of Detroit's collapse, and Mayor Coleman Young certainly didn't help matters at all in putting divides between Detroit and her suburbs.
andyt @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:21 pm
It's not about Repubs vs Demos. It's about Detroit having it's economic engine taken away. To hold civic govt responsible for this is nuts - it's way beyond them. I don't doubt that Detroit was poorly run, but that would have just exacerbated a losing situation. It's also not the only city going thru this, many in the Rust Belt are - it's just the one that's the poster child. To spin crap about how it's the Demoncrats who caused this is just that, crap. Wouldn't surprise me that some of the more rural areas that are tearing up their blacktop roads and replacing them with gravel to save money are administered by Repubs.
commanderkai @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:48 pm
andyt andyt:
It's not about Repubs vs Demos. It's about Detroit having it's economic engine taken away. To hold civic govt responsible for this is nuts - it's way beyond them. I don't doubt that Detroit was poorly run, but that would have just exacerbated a losing situation. It's also not the only city going thru this, many in the Rust Belt are - it's just the one that's the poster child. To spin crap about how it's the Demoncrats who caused this is just that, crap. Wouldn't surprise me that some of the more rural areas that are tearing up their blacktop roads and replacing them with gravel to save money are administered by Repubs.
Detroit, in my view, is racial politics at its finest. Detroit politics played a huge role in the fall of the city, something that, although other Rustbelt cities dealt with, did not really see in such a scale like seen in Detroit. While they all suffered from the shrinking of America's industrial and manufacturing sector, I don't think it can be argued that Detroit has fallen from such great heights far beyond the other rustbelt cities, ranging from Chicago to Pittsburgh.
Although I'd agree that Detroit's fall was not just from municipal political figures, I'd argue the racial politics played by such figures basically caused the middle and upper classes to flee Detroit in droves, and kept potential companies and wealthy individuals from seeing Detroit as a worthwhile investment over its more functioning suburbs like Southfield, Troy, Auburn Hills, Dearborn, and others.
andyt @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:03 pm
sounds like both sides of the color divide played their role:
$1:
The Detroit metropolitan area, has a long history of racial antagonism between the city and its suburbs. According to Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, that antagonism was the primary reason for the failure of regional cooperation that could have mitigated or even prevented Detroit’s decline.
“Especially after the devastating riot of 1967, the racial divisions and antagonism between the city and the suburbs became extremely entrenched,” he said. “The racial hostility made it very hard, politically, to get anything done cooperatively.”
COMPETITION INSTEAD OF COOPERATION
In Part 1 of our series, we looked at how proposals to deal with the current crisis ignore or exacerbate long-term problems.
In Part 2, we looked at a series of proposals from the 1970s that attempted to treat Detroit as an integral part of a single metropolitan region, proposals that many experts say would have radically altered Detroit’s trajectory from then to now.
Here, we probe the obstacles to achieving regional cooperation, obstacles driven in significant measure by the narrow perspectives held both by city officials and advocates as well by their suburban counterparts.
Finally, in Part 4, we will examine the nature and plausibility of the solutions — at the local, regional, state, and federal levels— that would need to be put in place if anyone were serious about trying to help Detroit thrive at any time soon.
— Editor
According to Joe T. Darden, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University and a co-author of Detroit, Race, and Uneven Development, it has long been customary for both city and suburban residents and policy makers to view regional policy through a lens tinted by racial and class-based prejudice.
“Whenever these proposals have come around, the only thing people have thought about is how their particular group, their community, is going to lose,” he said. “Even when it might benefit them in the long term, the tendency is to see every policy as benefiting the other side more.”
Suburban resistance
When policy makers began talking about regionalism in the 1970s, the suburban towns surrounding Detroit were almost exclusively white. Through a mixture of local antagonism, workplace discrimination, and segregated housing policies at all levels of government, African Americans were largely shut out of these communities, Sugrue said.
“People saw the suburbs as being sanctuaries from the city, which they associated with crime and violence,” he said.
According to June Manning Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, the suburban official who best exemplified that attitude was Orville Hubbard, who served as mayor of Dearborn, a nearby suburb, from 1942 to 1978. Hubbard was an out-spoken critic of integration, and built much of his political base by promising to keep Dearborn “lily white.” In his 1989 biography of Hubbard, the writer David L. Good quotes Hubbard as saying, after the 1967 riots in Detroit, “I’m not a racist, but I just hate those black bastards.”
When, in the 1972 case of Milliken v. Bradley, a federal District Court Judge required that children in Detroit schools be bused to suburban schools and vice-versa, in order to desegregate the Detroit Public School District, the decision provoked an intense response in the suburbs. In the suburb of Wyandotte, an effigy of Steven Roth, the District judge who decided the case, was hung at the end of a mock trial. (As detailed by Part 2 of this series, the Supreme Court ultimately reversed the District Court’s decision and held the suburbs harmless from the desegregation remedy.)
“Especially after the devastating riot of 1967, the racial divisions and antagonism between the city and the suburbs became extremely entrenched,” he said. “The racial hostility made it very hard, politically, to get anything done cooperatively.”
COMPETITION INSTEAD OF COOPERATION
In Part 1 of our series, we looked at how proposals to deal with the current crisis ignore or exacerbate long-term problems.
In Part 2, we looked at a series of proposals from the 1970s that attempted to treat Detroit as an integral part of a single metropolitan region, proposals that many experts say would have radically altered Detroit’s trajectory from then to now.
Here, we probe the obstacles to achieving regional cooperation, obstacles driven in significant measure by the narrow perspectives held both by city officials and advocates as well by their suburban counterparts.
Finally, in Part 4, we will examine the nature and plausibility of the solutions — at the local, regional, state, and federal levels— that would need to be put in place if anyone were serious about trying to help Detroit thrive at any time soon.
— Editor
According to Joe T. Darden, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University and a co-author of Detroit, Race, and Uneven Development, it has long been customary for both city and suburban residents and policy makers to view regional policy through a lens tinted by racial and class-based prejudice.
“Whenever these proposals have come around, the only thing people have thought about is how their particular group, their community, is going to lose,” he said. “Even when it might benefit them in the long term, the tendency is to see every policy as benefiting the other side more.”
Suburban resistance
When policy makers began talking about regionalism in the 1970s, the suburban towns surrounding Detroit were almost exclusively white. Through a mixture of local antagonism, workplace discrimination, and segregated housing policies at all levels of government, African Americans were largely shut out of these communities, Sugrue said.
“People saw the suburbs as being sanctuaries from the city, which they associated with crime and violence,” he said.
According to June Manning Thomas, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, the suburban official who best exemplified that attitude was Orville Hubbard, who served as mayor of Dearborn, a nearby suburb, from 1942 to 1978. Hubbard was an out-spoken critic of integration, and built much of his political base by promising to keep Dearborn “lily white.” In his 1989 biography of Hubbard, the writer David L. Good quotes Hubbard as saying, after the 1967 riots in Detroit, “I’m not a racist, but I just hate those black bastards.”
When, in the 1972 case of Milliken v. Bradley, a federal District Court Judge required that children in Detroit schools be bused to suburban schools and vice-versa, in order to desegregate the Detroit Public School District, the decision provoked an intense response in the suburbs. In the suburb of Wyandotte, an effigy of Steven Roth, the District judge who decided the case, was hung at the end of a mock trial. (As detailed by Part 2 of this series, the Supreme Court ultimately reversed the District Court’s decision and held the suburbs harmless from the desegregation remedy.)
Vamp018 @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:09 pm
commanderkai commanderkai:
andyt andyt:
It's not about Repubs vs Demos. It's about Detroit having it's economic engine taken away. To hold civic govt responsible for this is nuts - it's way beyond them. I don't doubt that Detroit was poorly run, but that would have just exacerbated a losing situation. It's also not the only city going thru this, many in the Rust Belt are - it's just the one that's the poster child. To spin crap about how it's the Demoncrats who caused this is just that, crap. Wouldn't surprise me that some of the more rural areas that are tearing up their blacktop roads and replacing them with gravel to save money are administered by Repubs.
Detroit, in my view, is racial politics at its finest. Detroit politics played a huge role in the fall of the city, something that, although other Rustbelt cities dealt with, did not really see in such a scale like seen in Detroit. While they all suffered from the shrinking of America's industrial and manufacturing sector, I don't think it can be argued that Detroit has fallen from such great heights far beyond the other rustbelt cities, ranging from Chicago to Pittsburgh.
Although I'd agree that Detroit's fall was not just from municipal political figures, I'd argue the racial politics played by such figures basically caused the middle and upper classes to flee Detroit in droves, and kept potential companies and wealthy individuals from seeing Detroit as a worthwhile investment over its more functioning suburbs like Southfield, Troy, Auburn Hills, Dearborn, and others.
commanderkai, you hit the nail dead on and won't getting any disagreement out of me or anyone in NE WI and All of Texas.
commanderkai @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:35 pm
Suburbs resisting rulings to have their students bussed to schools in the city to end segregation isn't exactly unique to Detroit. Desegregation busing really was not effective, and no doubt further increased tensions between Detroit and her suburbs, the same with many other cities. That's why the plan basically collapsed in the 90s.
Plus, in the article you failed to link, but Google happily provided for me, you missed out how Detroit itself resisted regionalism (again, under Coleman Young, considering he was mayor for 20 years) because it would be giving up power to the suburbs. To quote, page 2:
$1:
According to Myron Orfield, the director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, the mutual resistance to cooperation is typical of highly segregated regions. “There are always two partners in segregation,” he said. “In the case of Detroit, you have political leaders that view power as being more important than success.”
“In the suburbs, they were saying ‘I’m going to lose my money,’ and in the city, they were saying, ‘I’m going to lose my political power,’” Darden said. “No one saw how they might gain.”
“In the suburbs, they were saying ‘I’m going to lose my money,’ and in the city, they were saying, ‘I’m going to lose my political power,’” Darden said. “No one saw how they might gain.”
Here's the article if anybody else wants a decent read:
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/ ... a?page=0,0
In the end, the issues really haven't changed much. Detroit's resisting an emergency manager from the state because municipal politicians will lose power. Detroit is, or has fought tooth and nail against regionalism proposals over Cobo Hall and the Detroit Zoo, along with others. The suburbs get annoyed at what they see is corruption in Detroit.
Vamp018 @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:58 pm
May I inject the other tow in that region please. Chicago and Milwaukee, both not in MI but WI and IL. Chicago as current is going the way of Detroit and Milwaukee has been in decay for years. Those two are going the way of Detroit.
andyt @ Sat Feb 23, 2013 7:55 pm
commanderkai commanderkai:
$1:
According to Myron Orfield, the director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, the mutual resistance to cooperation is typical of highly segregated regions. “There are always two partners in segregation,” he said. “In the case of Detroit, you have political leaders that view power as being more important than success.”
“In the suburbs, they were saying ‘I’m going to lose my money,’ and in the city, they were saying, ‘I’m going to lose my political power,’” Darden said. “No one saw how they might gain.”
“In the suburbs, they were saying ‘I’m going to lose my money,’ and in the city, they were saying, ‘I’m going to lose my political power,’” Darden said. “No one saw how they might gain.”
Read that. So far the comments here have been all about how the Demoncrats and Blacks caused the problem. My point, backed by the above, is that both sides caused this problem.
commanderkai @ Sun Feb 24, 2013 11:45 am
andyt andyt:
Read that. So far the comments here have been all about how the Demoncrats and Blacks caused the problem. My point, backed by the above, is that both sides caused this problem.
Yes and no. As much as the suburbs were hostile to Detroit, the suburbs didn't really bring down Detroit, they just resisted being a part of its downfall. Regionalism in Southeast Michigan, especially as was described by that article basically wanted to get suburban tax dollars being poured into Detroit, in exchange for a bit of oversight in Detroit's politics. The suburban cities and counties would obviously resist such a move that tied them to a city with a very anti-suburb mayor(s), and a very corrupt municipal government.
Of course the issue isn't as simple as the Democrats, or urban black voters being the only issue. Nothing is that simple. For example, Operation Iraqi Freedom was given support by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, and yet, it was always "Bush's War." Really, although there are a number of factors and parties involved in the fall of Detroit, it's hard to argue that Democratic mayors and city councilors over decades, haven't played a major role. Even now, the suburbs (which are a mixture of Republican and Democrat), which have changed quite a bit since the 70s, and have reluctantly agreed to some regionalism, municipal Detroit has resisted quite bitterly.
Current Detroit mayor, David Bing, who is also Democrat, has made great strides to repair the damage to Detroit, and fight against the City Council to deal with the suburbs and the state to help try to save Detroit. I give him a lot of respect and credit for the work he has done so far. Sadly, the city might already be long gone.
CanadianJeff @ Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:01 pm
andyt andyt:
CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:
It's nice to know you can always count on radical conservatives blaming all their problems on those dirty poor people.
Shep as a radical conservative? He's blaming the poor for exploiting the middle class. Of course consensus on this forum seems to be that paying the poor higher wages so they're not so poor is not a good idea. You're always going to have people at the bottom of the pile. We could train and educate everybody where that's even remotely possible, and we'd still have low skill jobs that need doing and an overtrained workforce. Drive the wages of those low skill jobs into the ground, and you get working poverty. Kick the shit out of the middle class jobs, as in Detroit, and there's way fewer low skill jobs to go with them, so nobody is working. This is the rich taking their profits and moving on, leaveing devastation in it's wake. No corrupt, coke sniffing, mayors can do all this.
Yeah the message doesn't fit what Shep said....so why do you assume that I'm talking about Shep? Notice the word radical....
andyt @ Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:55 pm
CanadianJeff CanadianJeff:
Yeah the message doesn't fit what Shep said....so why do you assume that I'm talking about Shep? Notice the word radical....
Well, you're right. Shep also blames the rich for exploiting the middle class, right along with the poor. So what, 1/2 a radical?
Thanos @ Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:19 pm
The sad truth is that the US cities with a majority urban black population that are controlled by black politicians of the post-MLK generations (Jesse Jackson Sr. & Jr., Al Sharpton, Kwame Kilpatrick, Harold Washington, etc) are all shitholes. The changing racial demographics chased white home and business owners out and the big industries relocated as well in order to dodge the increasing municipal tax levies that the city councils kept charging. Throw in another unfortunate fact too that the urban black political leadership in the US has regularly shown themselves to be as irredeemably corrupt as the Native reserve leadership in Canada has. There can be no progress (hell, there can't even be any maintenance of what's already been built) when the leadership cadre is composed mostly of thieves and grifters.
There's no way to talk about this without being called a racist, but whatever, call me a racist because I really don't care. The urban politics that come out of the American black community are almost entirely destructive and corrupt. Our good buddy Bart would be 100% correct when he says that the fault lies completely with liberalism when looking for the true villains that have wrecked America's cities. And the big Southern cities like Atlanta, even if states like Georgia are overall much more economically vibrant than Michigan or Illinois are, are just as equally plagued by this phenomenon as the rust-belt ones like Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland are. Corruption + liberal social/racial policies = unmitigated economic disaster.