Who Knew Detroit Was This Bad? - Part II

As a former Michigan resident, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the state . . . well most of the state. I never did learn to like Detroit. I did learn to pity it, however. I have written previously about the problems facing Detroit. Here are some updated factoids, courtesy of MSNBC:

• The jobless rate has climbed past 21 percent
• There are 15 candidates for the Feb. 24 special mayoral election necessitated by the conviction of [mayor] Kwame Kilpatrick for trying to cover up an affair with a former top aide.
• The city's deficit is approaching $300 million, and he ordered all departments to cut their budgets by 10 percent.
• Several dozen schools have been closed in the past three years
• The FBI's latest statistics, for 2007, show Detroit with the highest violent crime rate of any major city. . . some offenders, notably those without homes of their own, were now expressing reluctance to leave jail when their sentences were done. (But, on the bright side, "property crime in some Detroit neighborhoods [has] stabilized or declined because targets of opportunity [are] fewer now that most remaining residents are poor and many of the homes have been abandoned and cannibalized.")
  
• About 44,000 of the 67,000 homes that have gone into foreclosure since 2005 remain empty, and it costs about $10,000 to demolish each vacant house. (do the math, and that means 440 million dollars just to tear down vacant housing created within the last three years).
• The residential real estate market is catastrophic, with the Detroit Board of Realtors now pegging the average price of a home in the city at $18,513. (According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the average price of a new car sold in the United States is $28,400).

Keep in mind these stats were likely taken before the recent near-collapse of the American auto industry. If the "Big 3" go under, it may just be time to admit that the city has failed, move everyone out and just plow everything under. Over half the population has left in the last 50 years. I've never heard of a city being depopulated like that, not since the black plague in the Middle Ages.

One observer does manage to diagnose the root of the problem, however:

"Up until the '70s, you could come to the city without education, without speaking English, and get a job in the auto industry and instantly be in the middle class, economically speaking," said Mike Stewart, director of Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Library and an expert on the auto industry. "A lot of folks in the city depended on these jobs for generations — they don't exist anymore," he said. "A lot of Detroiters are unprepared, educationally and technologically, to cope."

If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then three generations of minds are . . .?

"Unprepared educationally" is a nice PC euphemism. What he meant was "illiterate." As I cited in my previous post on this subject Detroit has a 47% adult illiteracy rate.

The article points out that the surrounding areas aren't doing too bad. I can confirm that from personal experience. Prospects for improvement aren't good when all the need is concentrated in the area least able to deal with it.

Maybe we should declare a hurricane and disperse Detroit's population throughout the country, like we did with New Orleans. Many wouldn't return, but would that really be a bad thing? America can help that many people, Michigan alone can't, nor can the city of Detroit.

I wonder how much we'd need to pay Canada to take Detroit off our hands?