Chapter 4:A City Abandoned
The history of Detroit is the history of one of its avenues-the Woodward Avenue. This history is narrated in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1jUMDKTtbs&fbclid=IwAR0-FtrCKG_WItCFyvpZcBwHUPvPPocfjLlVmITS0YTdAmxqNnxC5qVTzRU
The white flight out of Detroit had started in the 1950s but it accelerated after the 1967 race riots. By 1980 over one million white residents had abandoned the city, leaving behind an impoverished city that was now majority black. The economic base of Detroit was decimated as wealth was in the hands of the whites. The tax base collapsed.
Since 1972, more than two-thirds of the businesses in Detroit have closed. Business losses have occurred in every industry, including manufacturing, retail trade, and personal and business services. Since 2000, the number of Detroiters with jobs has declined by more than 30 percent, doubling the city’s unemployment rate from 13.8 percent to 28.5 percent.
Current estimates put Detroit’s population at 689,000. Many of these residents have limited education and skills; the proportion of Detroiters with a bachelor’s degree is just 12.7 percent, less than half the national average. The share of Detroiters with a disability, 19.5 percent, is significantly above the national average of 12.1 percent. Given these disparities, it is not surprising that Detroit residents find it increasingly difficult to qualify for the dwindling number of jobs that are available. Between 2000 and 2013, median household income in Detroit declined by more than 11 percent in current dollars, equivalent to a decline of 34 percent when adjusted for inflation. In 2013, poverty rates in the city were well above both the corresponding values in 2000 and the current national average (U.S. Census Bureau 2015a). https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/detroit-and-the-property-tax-full_0.pdf
The loss of population, and especially the loss of wealthier, higher-income white families, probably doomed Detroit even if the auto industry had not melted down. Black median family income has always been less than 65% of white median family income — and sometimes much less. So as the racial balance changed, the city’s income and wealth declined and made its fiscal situation tougher and tougher.
It’s unrealistic to expect Detroit’s remaining 700,000 residents, more than one-third of whom have incomes below the poverty level and whose per capita income is only $14,000, to support a city and an infrastructure built for 1.8 million. https://www.epi.org/blog/detroit-pensions-racism-bankruptcy/
With the loss of the tax base, Detroit was unable to provide the quality of life of a functioning city. It could not fund its schools, maintain roads and essential infrastructure, provide adequate policing or health services. The city soon began to look like a third-world city with abandoned housing and shuttered factories, city lights not working, roads with potholes, and open lots with prairie grass fields.
Detroiters left behind were mostly uneducated and unskilled, years of discrimination in housing, employment and education had left them with few assets or sources of income. Detroit was like an adolescent with no education or skills abandoned by its parents without food, shelter or clothing. Many turned to a life of crime and drugs.
There is a high correlation between poverty rates and crime in the 20 largest cities in America
Detroit has the highest poverty and crime rate in this chart. Crime rates in Detroit started to rise as the jobs disappeared, unemployment and poverty increased.
Crime rates started climbing as automotive jobs began to leave Michigan. The crime rates kept rising up until the early 80s.
The proliferation of drugs and guns was the toxic mix that made Detroit the murder capital of the US. More on this in the next post.
