Forty per cent of the street lights are out because of broken bulbs, neglect and copper thieves. Last year, the mayor unveiled a plan to save money by cutting out lighting in less-populated areas. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas,” said the city’s chief operating officer.
I’m old enough to remember when Detroit was a great American city. Today, it can’t deliver basic services. Firefighters can’t use the ladders on their trucks because they haven’t been inspected in years. Police take nearly an hour to respond to the most serious emergency calls. People know not to call 911 if they have a heart attack – they’ll probably be dead before the ambulance arrives.
People who could get out have already done so. The population has plunged from 1.8 million to 700,000 since the 1950s, and large parts of the city have reverted to the wild. Some houses are worth less than the cost of demolition, so some people who decide to leave simply walk away. “The city is past being a city now; it’s gone,” resident Kendrick Benguche told The New York Times.
Who or what killed Detroit? The conventional narrative is the collapse of the auto industry, exacerbated by white flight, which gutted the tax base and sent the city into a death spiral. But other cities’ economies have collapsed, and they’ve come back. The answer, in Detroit’s case, is decades of mismanagement, incompetence and looting that went ignored by anyone who could do anything about it. As commentator Walter Russell Mead, who has been brilliant on this subject, has written, the people who ran Detroit were largely indistinguishable from a criminal enterprise. » | Margaret Wente | The Globe and Mail | Saturday, July 20, 2013
