Posted on 07/03/2010 9:10:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The fire of 1805 burned the city of Detroit to the ground, leaving little more than ashes and broken dreams. Detroit’s motto, Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus ("We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes") was crafted in reaction to this terrible disaster.
And Detroit did, indeed, rise again. It became known as the Paris of the Midwest in the early days of the 20th Century owing to the beauty of its homes and buildings and tree-lined boulevards. In the 1930s, the success of its sports teams led to a reputation as the City of Champions. In the Forties, the United Auto Workers set aside labor concerns to focus on the manufacture of planes, tanks and other war materials which garnered Detroit the name “Arsenal of Democracy.” And, of course, the whole world was enthralled by the beat of the Motown sound through the Sixties and Seventies.
Detroit was the nation’s fourth largest city in the 1950s—The Motor City: rich, prosperous, and growing.
Now, after five decades of failed liberal policies, can the once great shining city upon a hill rise from the ashes anew?
At the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Newt Gingrich began his speech by responding to Eric Holder’s recent statement that “America is a nation of cowards”:
“Let me say to Atty. Gen. Holder, I welcome an opportunity to have a dialogue with you about ‘cowardice’ anywhere anytime. Why don’t we have the dialogue in Detroit and see if Atty. Gen. Holder has the courage to talk about the failure of the Detroit school system, the failure of the Detroit teachers’ union, the betrayal of the future of thousands of young people. Let’s discuss the total failure of the Detroit political system which has taken a city of 1,800,000 with the highest per capita income in the United States and has driven it into the ground so there are now fewer than 900,000 people there with a per-capita income that is 62nd in the United States. And it’s the function of bad government, bad politicians, bad bureaucracy, and bad ideas.”
The city of Detroit provided the ideal illustration for Gingrich: five decades of failed leftist policies manifested in one troubled city. Gingrich saw the ascendency of Obamunism and subtly asserted that Detroit was a microcosm of Barack Obama’s America: big labor, a strong teacher’s union, high taxes, public utilities, strong gun control, big welfare roles, etc. Many of these policies were implemented by former Mayor Colemon Young, who reigned over the city for 20 years. One has to wonder, could the city that allowed Colemon Young to stand at the helm for two decades actually embrace Newt Gingrich and his ideas?
Real change on the way? After it became clear that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick would be tied up in legal troubles, and eventually locked up, Detroiters elected Dave Bing in a special election. Dave Bing was, and is, a Democrat, but as the founder and owner of Bing Steel he also has private-sector business experience. Bing possesses an understanding of the basic laws of supply and demand and a strong moral character.
Mayor Bing recently told Michigan radio talk show host Paul W. Smith that he is willing to consider a new idea from Newt Gingrich. Gingrich spoke at the 2010 Mackinac Policy Conference in late May where he suggested making Detroit a “tax-free” city for ten years. It would certainly be unprecedented for a mayor of Detroit to adopt such a radical supply-side economic approach. Even expressing interest in such a prominent conservative such as Gingrich is very un-Detroitian.
Bing has already ruffled some feathers with his open support of Robert Bobb, the state-appointed emergency financial manager of Detroit's public schools. Since being appointed in 2009, Bobb has uncovered wide-spread abuse including over 3,800 unauthorized dependents on employee health-insurance rolls, a $1.3 billion school budget that was not being managed by a chief financial officer, a $332 million budget deficit, and sparsely populated schools with declining enrollment.
Bobb has already closed 29 schools and has recently announced a three-year plan that will close 32 more. Robert Bobb has an unconventional idea of the “purpose of a school;” he believes that schools exist primarily to educate students and not to provide employment for education bureaucrats (crazy isn’t it?).
Mayor Bing has said, to the dismay of the city council, that he would like to take control of the Detroit Public Schools system when Bobb’s contract expires. Bing would undoubtedly continue Bobb’s work. Kwame Kenyatta of the Detroit City Council has expressed disapproval of the mayor’s budget, taking affect on July 1, because it is the result of $101 million in cuts made by the mayor, saying: “The greater harm is that come July 1, you’re going to have an impact on city services that are already at the basement level”.
In crossing out 65 lines of spending expenditures in the council’s proposed budget, Mayor Bing showed great fiscal restraint but his actions will create more critics. Council members, locals, and education bureaucrats will insist on more spending for more programs and Bing will have to be the adult in the room saying, “OK, but how are we going to pay for all of this?” Bing recently announced the closing of 77 city parks. The city-park denizens will most emphatically denounce Mayor Bing but they ought to keep in mind that Bing is trying to do something that has not been done in Detroit in ages: balance a budget.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Howting started interning with the Human Events editorial staff on June 9. John regularly attends classes at Miami University and over the 2010 summer he is attending classes at Georgetown. He is a political science major but is also pursuing a thematic sequence in Theater while taking some writing classes on the side. John is the President of Miami University's Chapter of The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and he sits on the Miami College Republican Executive Board. John grew up in Birmingham, Michigan.
Dave Bing is a true democrat but he sure seems a hell of a lot brighter than the DC marxists.
The real question is, how will you get whites to move into an area controlled by black thugs and gangs? Never mind the leftist politics, it’s simply DANGEROUS to live in Detroit!!
Sure clean out the animals and the Communist Government and let real people back in to rebuild the place.
We actually have a decent Democrat in Governor Bredeson in TN. His is a rare breed: a fiscally responsible Democrat.
Not Colemon.
I left Detroit when he was mayor.
Far better than the one everybody in Detroit wanted: Cazzie Russell
Far better than the one everybody in Detroit wanted: Cazzie Russell
Here’s one of the plans :
Detroit plans to save city by demolishing vacant neighborhoods
This was one of those stories that had me and my producer agonizing over the material left on the cutting room floor. Mostly images that we couldn’t squeeze into our story.
Take our drive with Data Driven Detroit’s Kurt Metzger. He’s the guy who led a team of land surveyors around the city measuring Detroit’s urban blight block by block.
During the drive, we saw recently built Habitat for Humanity homes surrounded by vacant houses. We saw an almost brand new playground in another failed neighborhood. The fence around the pristine play set had fallen and the grass was overgrown. No kids in sight. Our cameras didn’t exaggerate Detroit’s decay. If anything, they couldn’t capture it all.
The old Wayne County office building, a historic landmark, in downtown Detroit has fallen on hard times. The county moved its workers out of the building. Now, only a fraction of the structure is used as a preschool. The rest of the building stands vacant.
Vacancy is a plague on much of the city’s urban core. We wish we had more time to tell the story of Detroit’s once grand train station. It, too, is a sad and empty site. Many of the station’s windows are smashed. It ought to be saved.
There’s also much more that can be said about one of the voices in our piece, the Reverend Dr. Horace Sheffield. If you ever need a history guide through inner-city Detroit, he’s the guy. His father, also a reverend, was a pioneering civil rights leader in the city who marched with Martin Luther King.
The younger Sheffield had plenty of ideas for turning the city around. He’d like to see a summit of church and city leaders search for solutions other than the radical demolition plan put forward by the mayor.
Speaking of the mayor, Dave Bing declined our multiple requests for an interview. His staff said he was simply too busy. It’s too bad. We wanted to press Mayor Bing on how he would have accomplished his goal of demolishing 10,000 dangerous residential structures by the end of his term. This plan will result in the removal of scores of residents. It’s hard to imagine all of them wanting to go. So the painful process of eminent domain, at some point, will likely be part of the plan’s end game.
And finally, apologies to the folks at Hantz Farms. Our interview with the company’s president, Mike Score, didn’t make it into the piece. Hantz hopes to take much of the open space that’s left after Detroit’s mass demolition and turn it into the largest urban farm in the world.
Best of luck to them and everybody in Detroit. The people couldn’t have been nicer during our stay. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again… it’s hard not to root for Detroit.
In most (relatively) thriving areas (ATL for example) the design and construction of major transportation network improvements is very expensive and takes forever, in part due to right of way acquisition costs. (e.g., the "Northern Arc" project in ATL.) Detroit, due to its complete implosion, offers an amazing chance to purchase right of way cheaply, perhaps to build, perhaps to land bank for future use. If you just linked the contiguous abandoned properties you would have amazing amounts of green space. This should be looked at as an opportunity to establish the foundation of Detroit 2040 (or 2050) and re-segment the status quo.
For those who haven't been to Detroit lately - you really should talk a look at the urban exploration site http://detroiturbex.com/. It will just blow you away. Hard to imagine a city contracting so rapidly that schools are abandoned with books left on the shelves to rot, rather than being shipped off to schools which remained open. Looks like Chernobyl.
It was a great city to grow up in, in the 60’s and early 70’s.
The left has brought it to where it is now.
I was back in my old neighborhood (or what's left of it) in April.
As I drove down the street a pheasant flew over my car.
A PHEASANT!
I also saw a couple dead opossum and raccoons.
The animals have taken over.
Yes, how do you get decent middle class people to move back? It’s not just whites who moved away. Middle class blacks also have fled Detroit and other cities. How do you get the middle class and small business people to come back?
Dave Bing was, and is, a Democrat...
Full stop. This enterprise is doomed. The central problem in Detroit isn't the crooked Dem pols, it's the crooked voters who put/keep them in office. IOW, the problem with Detroit is the Detroiters.
A perfect microcosm of the entire country that elected Obama.
Yes, how do you get decent middle class people to move back? It’s not just whites who moved away. Middle class blacks also have fled Detroit and other cities. How do you get the middle class and small business people to come back?
Detroit and many other cities have gone “ghetto”.
Didn’t Detroit really start going downhill after the riots of 1967? If too many productive citizens leave, then the people left behind are the underclass.
The images of Detroit are too eerily similar to abandoned parts of the old Soviet as seen a EnglishRussia.
The brother was the personnel director at the Detroit post office. At the same time the federal government regularly sent used up defectors to work at that post office.
The brother could keep track of them for the USSR.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.