Detroit Bankruptcy Underscores Rift Between City, Suburbs

[ErikJ]

Detroit Bankruptcy Underscores Rift Between City, Suburbs

By Mark Niquette - Jul 29, 2013, Bloomberg

Walking to meet friends for a drink at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar in bustling downtown Birmingham, Michigan, Cindy Boudreau said she never goes into Detroit except for an occasional Red Wings hockey game. She doesn’t see the point, especially now that the city is bankrupt.

“We would rather stay in the suburbs,” Boudreau, a 66-year-old retired real-estate manager, said in an interview about a block from a park where children played on an Astroturf-covered mound. “We’ve got all we want here.”

Boudreau’s view exemplifies a generations-long divide between Detroit, where the per-capita income is $15,261, and suburbs such as Birmingham, where it’s $67,580. Detroit’s record $18 billion bankruptcy case raises questions about how affluence can co-exist with poverty, and whether urban areas with hollow cores can thrive.

Cities in Oakland County, which abuts Detroit, constitute what amounts to a parallel community that is whiter, richer and more Republican. L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive for 20 years, argues that Oakland can function apart from a failed Detroit -- that Michigan’s prosperity no longer depends on its largest city. Republican Governor Rick Snyder says the entire state’s future is bound together.

Urban Island

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-07-29/detroit-bankruptcy-underscores-rift-between-city-and-its-suburbs.html

[KamaAina]

1. Suburbanites have been known to exhume their relatives' bodies

and rebury them outside Detroit. So that they don't have to go into Detroit to drop off some flowers. Srsly.

[KurtNYC]

2. I think Detroit is unique and extreme.

This article doesn't discuss the New Urbanism of the 1990s and how many cities have attracted affluent families FROM the suburbs in the last 20 years.

It also doesn't discuss something sadly ironic: Detroit made it's fortune selling the cars that enabled people to live in the suburbs while working in the city.

GM, Firestone, Phillips Oil and Standard Oil bought the light rail systems in Los Angeles, Newark, Baltimore, Oakland, San Diego and New York and destroyed them in order to cripple mass transit in cities full of potential car buyers. Some were replaced with bus lines. In other words, GM crippled cities to sell more cars.

[ErikJ]

3. Right, its ironic but understandable.

THe city that build cars for the country would be the first to die from them.

[KurtNYC]

4. Some of the manufacturing of automobiles has moved to Canada

And I think the big attraction for employers there is the health care (and lower costs for it). The same corporations who bemoan government programs here go to Canada for (better) government programs (!)

I think the next phase for cities will be a post-gasoline phase. Cities will be compared based on how easily residents can get around WITHOUT cars. The suburbs will be at a huge disadvantage if and when gasoline goes to $10+ gallon because they were designed and built for nuclear war (redundant and disbursed) and for 39-cent a gallon and 12 MPG cars.

[ErikJ]

5. Yes, the RWers are now blaming it on the unions. They have unions in Canada too

but universal health care which saves them $1000 per car manufactured there than in the US!.