A program to rebuild, not downsize Detroit

[Hannah Bell]

The public hearings being held over the next week on proposals to downsize Detroit are a fraud. Under the guise of consulting with the people, Mayor David Bing is moving ahead with plans made behind closed doors by top bankers and corporate CEOs to cut off services and shut down entire neighborhoods...

Mayor Bing speaks for the business elite, not the people of Detroit. He served for 20 years on the board of directors of DTE Energy, which wants to drastically shrink the area in which it must provide utility services to the poor, because these services generate little profit. He built his business, Bing Steel, as a contractor for the giant auto companies, which see no reason to pay taxes for public services in a city that they have destroyed through plant closures and mass layoffs.

The shrinking of Detroit is already well underway. Bing and Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, working with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have shut down dozens of schools, citing budget deficits. The devastating wave of fires last week shows that entire parts of the city have already been abandoned, while vital services, such as fire protection, are not available to wide layers of the population.

Now, city officials are planning to shut down as much as 40 square miles of Detroit, more than one quarter of the land surface, and compel residents living in those areas to move. Whether this takes the form of legal buyouts and evictions, as in Poletown, or starving areas of services until residents leave “voluntarily,” the effect is the same... As City Council President Pro Tem Gary Brown told the Detroit News, “This is going to come down to me to one basic issue...identify the winners and the losers. Some neighborhoods are not going to be viable, and we are going to find ways to give incentives to move people out.” The “winners” will be the wealthy layers of the population, while the “losers” will be the vast majority of working people, already experiencing a 50 percent real unemployment rate and a poverty rate of over 30 percent.

Instead of shrinking Detroit to the level that the corporations can afford, the alternative is to reject the profit system. Working people must fight for a program that starts, not with corporate profits, but with our rights to jobs, decent housing, and the full range of public services needed for modern life—health, education, utilities, public transportation, access to culture. This will require seizing the wealth of the giant corporations and banks, instead of the homes of working people.

Working people need their own organizations to mobilize a fight back.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/dart-s16.shtml

[dkf]

1. To think I was appalled when I saw they were doing this in China.

Wow. Just wow.

[backwoodsbob]

2. out of curiousity

do you live in Detroit?

[Hannah Bell]

3. Out of curiousity...do you think everyone who lives in Detroit supports this plan?

Because I assure you, you're wrong.

[backwoodsbob]

5. that wasn't my question

do you live there or not?Because I lived there for 21 years before I moved back to Virginia to escape it 7 years ago.

Do you REALLY want to put your knowledge of the situation there against mine?

[Historic NY]

4. Hey they could alway form there own village....

[TBF]

6. K&R nt

[Gaedel]

7. I grew up in Detroit

I lived in Detroit back when 1,800,000 people lived within the city limits. There might be 800,000 or less there now. Go to a Google Map aerial view of Detroit and go down to the block level. There are areas of the city where there might be one or two houses on a block which once had twenty or more houses. My old high school had over four thousand students. According to the school board site, it now has about 1,600. The school system infrastructure has remained while the student population has plummeted.

No, Hannah, everybody in the city does not agree with Mayor Bing's plan. It is very controversial and certainly, the "devil is in the details".

IF (big if) the city will buy vacant houses on streets where most of the houses remain and offer an equivalent or better house to a person in a semi-deserted area on a one-for-one trade, that would be a fair way to do it. Then they could clear out the houses that stand by ones and twos in the more devastated areas of the city.

Like I said, innovative and well-meaning idea by Mayor Bing, but the devil is in the details and I do not have much confidence in the track record of the Detroit city government.