Ok, I was reading thread about how run down Detroit and I was trying to think of a way you could turn its fortunes around.
It’s a given that hoping for an car manufacturer revival is futile, so just how do you change the path of a city like this.
I’m guessing you need to start encouraging growth industries to set up shop and enourage businessmen and intellectuals back.
Possibly align the city as being a mecca for the tech industries. Get universities to hire lecturers in the fields you want to encourage and subsidise startup companies.
Michigan has one of the finest universities in the world, but they’ve got serious talent drain problems. Part of it is the weather and climate; I mean, there’s a reason why people flock to California. But yeah, it’s an industrial city–a dying industrial city–in an information age. It needs some kind of serious rethink. Where’s Omni Consumer Products when you need them?
You don’t “kickstart” or “turn around” a city or region like Detroit. Such words imply that one day things are bad, and then something happens, and then after that things are noticeably better.
Detroit and areas like it are turned around only over a length of time, and by changing things that are interconnected. Want to attract industry and businesses to a city? Better make sure the hospitals and services are running well, and better make sure you’ve fixed the schools in that area, or you have a tough time luring industry. Right there you can sort of see in a microcosm how health care reform and education reform are tied to the economic health of a region in a micro sense, and the country in a macro sense. Want to help small business? Fix healthcare so business owners can afford to have employees. Want to keep jobs in America? Fix healthcare so the cost of keeping jobs in cities like Detroit or Cleveland or Akron or Indianapolis is more economically beneficial than sending them overseas.
Everything is interrelated, and the time has come to stop thinking about fixing one thing. Start fixing it all over a long period of time–that’s the only way.
To go along with what Triggercut said, Detroit will probably need a confluence of factors and some luck. For example, a national level economic boom, even a somewhat irrational, bubbly one, will at least get it some investment and development that it doesn’t pragmatically merit under normal circumstances. They’re also going to have to spin the wheel on political leadership and get lucky there. It would be useful if the voters voted on the basis of excellence not populist appeal or race.
(For anyone who wants to play the insider/outsider game here, I’ve got a bunch of relatives in Ecorse).
UM has been trying for a number of years now to reinvigorate the region by turning it into a “life sciences corridor”, but time and politics have conspired against them.
First, you had a governor for 12 years (John Engler) who hated Detroit and UM (he was an MSU graduate) who did everything he could to deprive SE Michigan of resources in favor of western Michigan. Then the tech bubble popped, which detroyed a lot of fledgling startups. Ann Arbor lost a huge “anchor” to the life sciences initiative when Phizer pulled out of the city about what, 6 years ago now? And it didn’t help that under Engler the state had passed a ban on basically any use of stem cells in any sort of research, which scared away potential investors or businesses that might want to do medical research.
Engler’s successor, Granholm, became governor after the economy was fully wrecked here, and has spent the last 7 years patching holes in a leaking boat which is still sinking. The state finally overturned the stem cell ban just this past November, so we’ll see if that helps. But meanwhile, UM’s big investment in the life sciences has largely ground to a halt–hell, they can’t even find senior faculty to hire away from other institutions who are willing to come to Michigan to become part of the initiative (that’s been profiled in the A2 paper several times, by the way–they’ve changed their tactics now, and are largely pitching to new people in the field who haven’t made reputations now, hoping they will find a diamond in the rough).
Yes, it is all definitely interconnected. Bad roads, bad reputation for violence and poverty, bad sports teams (that sort of thing is peripheral, but anything that helps with a region’s reputation as a good place to LIVE helps, and other than the Redwings, this region’s teams have mostly sucked for years). Politics that don’t attract business, a reputation for pollution, poor social services, everything works against SE Michigan these days. Even a crooked mayor who is now in jail, along with his girlfriend. Detroit just keeps punching itself in the face over and over.
Detroit (and Michigan as a whole, because Detroit is acutely symptomatic of the same things that are dragging down the rest of the State’s economy) needs a lot of things. A city government that’s actually more concerned about its citizenry than their own well-being would be a big start.
This next mayoral election is an opportunity for Detroit to finally put someone in charge who might be able to effect some positive change, much in the way Archer did in his short term.
You need to get people to move back to the city, you need job creation in high paying fields, you need to stop the hemorrhaging of recent college grads to other states.
That last point may actually start to happen as a side effect of the economic collapse, now that the rest of the nation is starting to hurt the same way Michigan has for the last 8 years. People will graduate, find that job prospects nationally aren’t any better than locally, and then stick around.
Detroit had some forward momentum up until the Wall Street wankers nuked the economy from orbit, and hopefully we’ll be able to pick things up faster since we were already near rock bottom.
Oh come now. The Tigers have done very well for the last few years. American League champs in '06, remember? There’s the Shock. Are you forgetting the Pistons?
These days, the Lions are the only Detroit franchise that’s not pulling its weight.
The Tigers were good for one year, then collapsed again this past season. And I am still vividly remembering the Juan years (was it years, or did it just seem like them?). The Pistons, again, were good for one year, and this year aren’t even going to make the playoffs if they keep going as they currently are. Unfortunately, nobody knows who the Shock are, though I definitely grant they have established a tradition of excellence. The Lions are the Lions, and their suckitude more than overwhelms any long-term excellence the Wings bring to town.
All that aside, though, sports franchises are just a symptom, not a cure or a cause. Bottom line is, Detroit isn’t going to attract good paying jobs and high-earning citizens back to town until they fix all the other issues: trying to establish casinos as the economic base of a city was stupid. Streetlights that aren’t functioning in many portions of the city. Snowplowing that has been relegated to only major thoroughfares due to lack of funds. A city council that has fucking FISTFIGHTS during their meetings. A mayor incarcerated. A tri-county government that can’t agree on mass transit issues, renovation of their convention center, how to attract business.
Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to see Detroit revitalized. But right now it has so many gaping wounds its hard to imagine even stabilizing the patient, let alone healing him.
But I guess it wouldn’t be off to revise my statement to exclude the mentally ill, extremists, the hopelessly irrational, and possibly fundamentalists. Not to say those categories don’t overlap at all.
The first report by Detroit’s emergency manager declares that the city is broke and at risk of running completely out of money - a financial meltdown that could mean employees don’t get paid, retirees lose their pensions and residents endure even deeper cuts in municipal services.
If Detroit cannot avert disaster by reducing its debt payments, the only remaining option appears to be bankruptcy, a threat that looms large over Kevyn Orr’s urgent efforts to make deals with creditors and debt holders. Orr says he will have to seek concessions from those groups to keep the Motor City afloat.
“On a cash-flow basis, we don’t have it. We’re broke,” Orr said Monday at a news conference. He said the city can make payroll through the rest of the year, but that some other bills and obligations are not being paid or are being deferred.
“We can’t continue to do what we’ve been doing,” he said. “It’s probably a little worse than I expected. It’s severe. I mean it’s dire.”
The city and the state both should be put in receivership. Detroit, D.C. The state people should likewise be sacked for allowing the city to decay so badly.
Of course, Detroit has been deteriorating for at least 35-40 years. I remember being there in 1987 or so, and on the tourist trolley ride you could actually look all the way through the big office buildings surrounding Greektown as the interiors had been sacked and destroyed: not exactly a welcoming sight for prospective investors. Even around the Joe Louis Arena not far from the pathetic walled garden of the embarrassingly named Renaissance center you could walk around during lunch hour and be the only one on the street – “king of the corner” as in the Estleman novel.
Oh yeah, just found this gem in the wikipedia history timeline:
1979–1980 Saddam Hussein makes large donations to a Detroit church and receives a key to the city.
