Is Detroit fixable? How would you fix it?

[pbrower2a]

1. Save Detroit's strong culture, including its artistic activity. Face it -- this is one place in which African-American culture blossomed. Play this up!

2. Save the buildings of great esthetic or historical value. Uniqueness ordinarily has merit. Insipid sprawl may provide a middle-class standard of comfort, but all in all it is ugly and banal. Uniqueness breaks boredom.

3. Clean up the environment. Detroit might be more livable if it isn't a zone of toxic waste dumps.

4. Raise educational standards. Detroit is not where I would relocate or establish a new high-tech business... but think of some of its potential attractiveness. "Silicon lakes"? Detroit at the least is a cheap place to live. With what one saves in housing costs alone in contrast to Silicon Valley one could afford to send the kids to private schools.

The Detroit Independent School District is a monstrosity. It gets huge amounts of money, but horrid results. It needs a thorough audit to take out the waste and fraud. I have heard of the numerous convention trips to Hawaii (that's the wrong place to go to see how education can work well -- try even rural Michigan instead. Do administrators want to enjoy fun in the sun or do they want to find out how to teach effectively? Do they really care about kids?)

Detroit pols got complacent when the automobile was the gravy train (pardon the pun!) to create good jobs and a solid tax base. It invested in highways that would take people out of the city to the suburbs instead of shoring up the educational system. Detroit needs to prepare itself for the next technological boom, and it needs to get some of the basics right so that some other place doesn't leave it behind again, as has been so for the last fifty years. 

[pbrower2a]

I guess I would annex the nearby suburbs, deliberately targeting the more affluent ones (Grosse Pointes, Ferndale, etc.) and use the subsequently increased tax revenue to buy up the abandoned buildings in the worst neighborhoods and replace them with livable housing. This would obviously have to move fairly slowly because there wouldn't be that much more revenue.

Obviously this would never happen.

That seem a very bad idea, as it only will result in people (with money) leaving those suburbs and leaving Detroit to administrate new collapsing neighbourhoods.
From what I have read about Detroit, the bad blood between the sururbs and the city are so ugly, that it would be a disaster to unite them, and would only result in people further away.

In fact my suggestion would be the other way around, Detroit should become smaller, cut off depopulated areas from Detroit, and offer the remaning population to relocate to other neighbourhood. This would lower the public expenses for Detroit and make it easier for police and fire departments.
Afterward I would offer the now empty areas to developers more or less for free. The result could be new sururbs closer to the city.

Yes, this.  The level of vitriol between the city and the suburbs means that any proposal that involves Detroit annexing more land will go very, very badly indeed.  Although seeing the Pointes swallowed up by Detroit would be pretty funny for a short time.  The Pointes have existed from the very beginning to keep the "riff-raff" out... imagine the reaction when they become the riff-raff!

Columbus (OH), Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York (to some extent), and Phoenix saved themselves from being like Detroit by annexing would-be suburbs. Contrast St. Louis. 

[pbrower2a]

One of the things they need to do first is repeal Michigan's "right-to-work" law.

care to explain your reasoning for us non-leftists?

"Right-to-Work" laws are derided by unions as "Right-to-Work-for-much-less", They are intended to eviscerate the power of unions to collect union dues that allow one of the best protections that workers have against management: collective bargaining.

Big Business would prefer to negotiate 'individually with workers on their merits', but that in practice means seeking the bargaining weakness of the employee. When one considers that large employers can often spy upon workers to see how they live and find out what is going on in personal lives, such implies that a husband whose wife just had a baby may be told:

"Congratulations on the baby! Of course, now that you have the baby you might recognize the merit of taking a voluntary pay cut so that your job can be more secure".     

If that ever happened one would need a union.

[pbrower2a]

I guess I would annex the nearby suburbs, deliberately targeting the more affluent ones (Grosse Pointes, Ferndale, etc.) and use the subsequently increased tax revenue to buy up the abandoned buildings in the worst neighborhoods and replace them with livable housing. This would obviously have to move fairly slowly because there wouldn't be that much more revenue.

Obviously this would never happen.

That seem a very bad idea, as it only will result in people (with money) leaving those suburbs and leaving Detroit to administrate new collapsing neighbourhoods.
From what I have read about Detroit, the bad blood between the sururbs and the city are so ugly, that it would be a disaster to unite them, and would only result in people further away.

In fact my suggestion would be the other way around, Detroit should become smaller, cut off depopulated areas from Detroit, and offer the remaning population to relocate to other neighbourhood. This would lower the public expenses for Detroit and make it easier for police and fire departments.
Afterward I would offer the now empty areas to developers more or less for free. The result could be new sururbs closer to the city.

Yes, this.  The level of vitriol between the city and the suburbs means that any proposal that involves Detroit annexing more land will go very, very badly indeed.  Although seeing the Pointes swallowed up by Detroit would be pretty funny for a short time.  The Pointes have existed from the very beginning to keep the "riff-raff" out... imagine the reaction when they become the riff-raff!

Columbus (OH), Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York (to some extent), and Phoenix saved themselves from being like Detroit by annexing would-be suburbs. Contrast St. Louis. 

But that's the past tense, you see - they annexed suburbs as or before cities spiraled out in the 60s-80s.  The damage that not working with the suburbs caused (cf. Minneapolis, which didn't annex land but became a part of the Met Council) has already been done in Detroit, and now the suburbs and the urban core, despite their interdependence, mutually despise each other.

But they need each other. A stronger economy in Detroit strengthens any Detroit suburb. Besides, suburbanites are much of the 'market' for the theater, sports teams, symphony, opera, museums, etc.

Detroit suburbs have not been doing particularly well, either. It's often easy to see that the urban fringe of the 1960s is still the urban fringe. Contrast Chicago or Cleveland -- or for that matter, Lansing.