What is going on in Detroit – the motor city? What has happened to Michigan’s largest city and at one time the fourth largest city in America? I hear that it has gone bankrupt. It can’t pay its bills and that large tracts of the city are effectively no go areas without utilities, public services and education. Large areas are without hope.
Apparently it is as much as $20 billion in debt. Its population has shrunk from 1.8 million to around 700,000 and there are tens of thousands of empty house, vacant plots and unlit streets.
Ted Dabrowski, VP of Policy at Illinois Policy Institute has written, ‘Two weeks ago I took in the demise of Detroit with my own eyes. I was fortunate to be with my colleague, Detroit native Paul Kersey. As we embarked on the trip, he told me “Detroit is a story that must be told.” He was right.
I’d seen the photos and knew the history, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw: Each razed lot and burnt out home represented a family’s dashed hopes and shattered future. Outside the small, but lively, downtown were parts of what is now 130 square miles of sadness.
Ethnic neighbourhoods no longer exist. Culture and arts are gone. There is no retail. Only one movie theatre is left for nearly 700,000 people. As one city analyst told me, “Detroit is no longer a sustainable city.” I’ve seen destitution in my many years of living in and traveling the developing world, but it was surreal to see it in America.’
I don’t understand how this can happen. Viewing it through my European eyes it just doesn’t make sense. I have seen deprivation and poverty in this country but have heard of nothing on this scale. What has happened in the most powerful and richest country on earth? It is as if there is a failed state within a state.
In the land of the free there is the greatest of freedoms, the freedom to fail.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 