Is Detroit fixable? How would you fix it?

[Stardust]

This argument that drug legalization is morally equivalent to telling teenagers that it's acceptable to use drugs is bizarre to me. It smacks to me of 1990, George Herbert Walker Bush, thin ties and hoop earrings, Tammy Faye Baker and grey suit coats. It is strange to me this line of 'reasoning', so-called, has any partisans left at all.

[Stardust]

Wholeheartedly agree.  But the council has the ongoing view that anytime somebody outside of Detroit tries to step in and help, that they're trying to take control away from the black population and have some kind of white takeover.

This is very true actually! A very wealthy businessman approached Detroit and offered to donate 10s of millions of dollars of his own money to help set up Charter Schools in the city. He was turned down because he was threatening "the black power structure" of the city.

I don't see why this is such a bad thing. I prefer, as a rule, local control to Federal control; but as a corollary to this I prefer local control to any other control. The same principle that argues against accepting Federal charity also suggests it's generally a bad thing for locales to become reliant on private charity. "Up by the bootstraps" ought to mean just that, as hard a road as that can be to walk sometimes.

[Stardust]

I don't see why this is such a bad thing. I prefer, as a rule, local control to Federal control; but as a corollary to this I prefer local control to any other control. The same principle that argues against accepting Federal charity also suggests it's generally a bad thing for locales to become reliant on private charity. "Up by the bootstraps" ought to mean just that, as hard a road as that can be to walk sometimes.

Wow that isn't very bright response. Detroit spends about $30k per student which is among the absolute highest among the country and only about a 1/4 of the students graduate on time. A wealthy man offers to donate a bunch of money to create a few more schools(and not change the existing schools at all) so that there may be a little more competition and the city refuses it on the grounds that it would "disrupt black power"*(more like our friends are administrators and are pocketing all of the money) is a joke. And your agreement with that decision is a joke.

My suggestion would simply be to eliminate that spending on education and be done with it, not try to plug the holes in funding for education with private donations that do nothing to fix the crux of the problem. Throwing money at the problem, no matter where the revenue comes from, does nothing to repair the absolutely broken public education system.

And I have no problem with 'black power', so long as that power isn't reliant on a State subsidy.

[Stardust]

Look lets first establish the fact that those that have pointed out that the problems lie in that Detroit's government is a corrupt group of people that care more about taking the money out of the city and giving it their friends in patronage jobs then trying to fix anything are spot on. As long as those corrupt people are in charge this is just an academic exercise because the things that would start to bring back the city are diametrically the opposite of what is ideal for a corrupt politician.

In other words, Detroit is a microcosm of any organized polity that has a government at its head. All governments are ruled by "a corrupt group of people that care more about taking the money out of [the polity they govern]". The point is to learn how to work within those confines to maximum effect, even if, nine times out of ten, doing so requires establishing institutions which run parallel with the official State.

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I absolutely agree with you here. One thing to take into consideration is that demolition projects cost money; you can't simply go in with a bulldozer and begin shellacking houses left and right, certainly not under the present regulatory regime. I'd have no problem with the city purchasing abandoned houses and selling them at far below market value.

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And this is where we depart. Instituting a law-and-order regime on the model of New Orleans is not only not going to salvage the local economy, it's going to depress the backbone of the community - which, like it or not, has got to be the local African-American community - even further. New Orleans did not 'boom' when Bratton was in office; quite the opposite, it underwent one of the longest periods of recession in Louisiana's history. And a lot of it had to do with the basic fact that public police corruption tends to undermine faith in local institutions.

It's not going to be what you want to hear, but it's going to be what you need to hear: Detroit's population has got to find their own salvation, so to speak. I cannot fathom for the life of me why we ought to oppose urban farming schemes, for instance, particularly if it means we can reduce Federal food subsidies that much further. Importing police chiefs who have a long and storied history of corruption in order to make the town 'feel' safer for outsiders is precisely the opposite of what needs to be done - decentralize, deregulate and desubsidize must be the order of the day.

[Stardust]

My suggestion would simply be to eliminate that spending on education and be done with it, not try to plug the holes in funding for education with private donations that do nothing to fix the crux of the problem. Throwing money at the problem, no matter where the revenue comes from, does nothing to repair the absolutely broken public education system.

And I have no problem with 'black power', so long as that power isn't reliant on a State subsidy.

Good answer! Again I don't think you or I exactly know the terms of the deal to begin with. Just pointing out that allowing for an alternative system to compete that doesn't have corrupt administrators siphoning off all of the money is probably a good thing.

One of the models I've been looking at recently is the (old) Black Panther Party. They largely opposed the welfare State, to the point that they'd harass local blacks who made it known they were on the dole. They ran local food pantries, local daycares, local classes; their most famous programme was Free Breakfast For Children. Party-line conservatives would balk, because that's what they'd do, but I'd welcome a return to that militancy among the African-American community if it meant a revitalization of that old charitably towards the idea of self-sufficiency.

[Stardust]

This is the only real issue on which we differ, then:

I generally agree with the fact that you have to decentralize, deregulate, and desubsidize, but as long as there is rampant crime there is no way most businesses are going to touch much of Detroit with a 10 foot poll. Your opinions of Bratton aside(he did very good in NYC and LA the 2 safest big cities in the US following his departures) you have to get the crime under control. Crime can depress asset prices and an economy a lot faster than any draconian taxes or regulations. And the city doesn't need to just 'feel' safer it needs to be actually safer and by a huge degree.

I don't think that simply attracting businesses to Detroit, which has always been the product of technocratic sloganeering, is going to do much to salvage the city. The problems are rooted in the structure of Detroit's society itself. And if business is going to play a part, I'd prefer those businesses, as much as possible, to spring up organically from the pre-existing stuff of Detroit's soil.

In order to attract businesses to a city, you have to have money to burn. They're going to want subsidies. They're going to want tax incentives. They're going to want to be catered to. And Detroit can't afford that. What it can afford is to support its local businesses as much as possible, by de-networking itself from the national economy to as great an extent as possible.

"Think globally, act locally" need not be a slogan purely of the liberals.