DETROIT — In this column last week, I took a look at Detroit’s much-celebrated comeback since its bankruptcy a decade ago. The good news is that there’s absolutely no doubt that the city’s downtown is in better shape than in many, many years.
Thousands of people from outside Detroit stream into the city for entertainment, restaurants or major league sports. Hundreds more pour in on Saturday mornings to shop at the city’s huge Eastern Market, which has been going strong for over a century.
Detroit is solvent, and is basking in a new era of good feeling. But as John Mogk, a law professor and longtime expert on the city told me, Detroit may be a nice place to visit, but fewer and fewer live there. The city’s population is barely a third of what it once was.
And for those who live there, things are likely to get worse. Despite appearances, Detroit is still in trouble. Everyone agrees that stopping the flight to the suburbs and attracting new residents is key to arresting the city’s decline. But year after year, administration after administration has failed. So-called “white flight” ended years ago. Now, hundreds of thousands of African-American residents have fled and are fleeing still.
That’s largely because most of the neighborhoods continue to decay and decline, despite major efforts by Mike Duggan, the strongest and politically savviest mayor the city has had in decades.
But can the Motor City ever again become a place where middle-class families want to live? The answer, Professor Mogk believes is yes — if those in state and city government are willing to make some tough and gutsy decisions.
First, he would abolish personal property taxes on homes. “This would have many positive effects. Middle-class homeowners would have much more incentive to stay in the city, and those looking for homes would have an incentive to move into Detroit.”
But what about the lost revenue? In fact, he said, the city, which has an annual budget of $2.6 billion, only collects about $50 million from residential property taxes. That’s in part because the millage is extremely high, and many people can’t pay them.
That leads to foreclosures, abandoned houses, and more headaches and no revenue for the city. If the state were to replace the lost revenue and those taxes could be abolished, “it would stabilize neighborhoods, and there would be far fewer foreclosures.”
He believes the city also badly needs another tool it once had: The right to use eminent domain to acquire land to attract business and industry. That’s what Detroit did to assemble the land needed for the two auto plants still operating in the city at the time of the bankruptcy, General Motors’ Poletown and Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue assembly plants.
But in 2004, a Michigan Supreme Court ruled that using eminent domain for other than public works violated Michigan’s Constitution. That has effectively prevented the city from assembling the amount of land it would need, say, to attract an Amazon headquarters. “I would strongly support an effort to get a constitutional amendment to change that,” Mogk said.
But he hasn’t been able to find anyone very interested, even if protections were built in to make sure to protect residents.
Unless those two things happen, he fears the quality of life for the vast majority of Detroiters will decline, and even the boom in the city’s downtown and midtown areas may not last. “Mike Duggan is an experienced and capable administrator,” said Mogk, who has been chairing task forces to try to help Detroit for half a century. “The likelihood is that his successor will not be as capable.”
Even if they are, he added, Duggan, who earlier ran the Detroit Medical Center and much of Wayne County government, “has developed a close relationship of trust and cooperation” with the billionaires, like the Ilitch family and Dan Gilbert, who have invested in the city, admittedly in return for massive public subsidies.
Nobody knows how long the 64-year-old Duggan will want to be mayor. Detroit has no term limits, and he’s in the middle of his third four year term. But when he does leave, “It’s unlikely this type of relationship and commitment will be continued,” the professor said.
Detroit has many other problems, such as a public school system that seems finally to be improving, but is still among the worst in the state. Despite efforts at reform, car insurance costs more than twice what it does in nearby suburbs. There is also no truly reliable mass transit system in what they still call the Motor City.
True enough, the city has benefited some from the downtown revival, but the irony, he said, is that it’s the suburbs that have benefited far more from “an enhanced world image, new urban entertainment venues and professional jobs.”
But unless the city can once again attract the middle class to its neighborhoods, “the continuing reality is that the city as a whole will continue to slowly decline,” regardless of how glitzy downtown looks.
I asked John Mogk how far he thought the city’s population, once nearly two million, could fall. He initially guessed it might bottom at about 500,000, then revised that. “Unless salvageable neighborhoods can be revitalized, there’s no telling how far the population will fall.”
After all, far more than a million already have left. If that isn’t horrifying, I don’t know what is.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
