Solving the cycle of crime in Detroit-A play in three acts. Choreographed by 70 years of history, narrated by me and performed by memorable characters from Detroit's history-from Henry Ford, Coleman Young, Kwame Kilpatrick to Mike Duggan, and many others. Bob Pearlman, Scott Behiel here is the playbill for the first two acts (you can follow the details in earlier posts).
Act 1: How did Detroit go from the richest city in the world to the poorest and a crime-infested city in the US in 70 short years. Here are 10 contributing factors in the time sequence (almost) in which they happened:
1. White flight from approx 1950s to 1990s (accelerated in 1967)
2. Jobs migrating out of Detroit
3. Declining tax base and population (from 1.8 million residents to 700,000)
4. Drugs, guns, and gangs
5. Two Detroits-highly segregated
6. Policing-tension between cops and residents
7. Unintended consequences of government actions
8. Poor city governance.
9. "Ghettoization" of Detroit
10. Two generations of blacks who were born into and grew up in third-world conditions.
The details of each of these "plots" is in earlier posts, with links to sources. There is no "blame game" only the facts.
Act 2: The problem of Crime in Detroit is hyper-local, it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. The poorest neighborhoods have the following characteristics
1. Poverty rate above 40% (Ghetto condition)
2. Unemployment in some case approaching 60%
3. 30% to 50% 25+ year old have less than HS education
4. 60% of children live in poverty
5. High crime rates and high incarceration rates.
and Scott Behiel I am going to address head-on the issues that the two of you believe to be the root causes of the decline of Detroit. Bob insists that it is the Unions (he emphasizes it in all caps) and absent fathers. Scott believes that it is due to bad management and failed liberal policies. I will address these issues in the following order:
1. Unions
2. Absent fathers
3. Mismanagement (by the Democratic mayors)
4. Liberal public policies.
Union: The impact of Union (UAW) is best illustrated by Ford's River Rouge plant, which in 1930s was the biggest industrial complex in the world and a showcase for assembly line technique for mass production of automobiles. From its peak labor force of 90,000 around 1930, the number of workers there declined to 30,000 by 1960 and only about 6,000 by 1990. This decline was mainly due to automation.
The spread of the auto industry outward from Detroit proper in the 1950s was the beginning of a process that extended much further afield. Auto plants and the parts suppliers associated with the industry were relocated to the southern U.S., and to Canada and Mexico. The major auto plants left in Detroit were closed down, and their workers increasingly left behind. When the auto industry's facilities moved out, there were dramatically adverse economic ripple effects on the city. The neighborhood businesses that had catered to auto workers shut down. This direct and indirect economic contraction caused the city to lose property taxes, wage taxes, and population (and thus consumer demand). The closed auto plants were also often abandoned in a period before strong environmental regulation, causing the sites to become so-called "brownfields," unattractive to potential replacement businesses because of the pollution hangover from decades of industrial production. The pattern of the deteriorating city by the mid-1960s was visibly associated with the largely departed auto industry. The neighborhoods with the most closed stores, vacant houses, and abandoned lots were in what had formerly been the most heavily populated parts of the city, adjacent to the now-closed older major auto plants.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the auto industry suffered setbacks that further impacted Detroit. The industry encountered the rise of OPEC and the resulting sharp increase in gasoline prices. It faced new and intense international competition, particularly from Italian, Japanese and German makers. Chrysler avoided bankruptcy in the late 1970s only with the aid of a federal bailout. GM and Ford also struggled financially. The industry fought to regain its competitive footing but did so in very substantial part by introducing cost-cutting techniques focused on automation and thus reduction of labor cost and the number of workers. It also relocated ever more of its manufacturing to lower-cost states in the U.S. and to low-income countries. Detroit's residents thus had access to fewer and fewer well-paying, secure auto manufacturing jobs.
Yes, UAW was one factor of many-automation, Japanese auto imports, outsourcing and NAFTA were others. UAW was NOT the main reason for the Rouge River plant's reduction in labor from 90,000 to 6,000.
https://www.thehenryford.org/.../history-and.../fords-rouge/
Back to "fighting" crime in Detroit. Recap: My research has identified the following 10 factors that have contributed to Detroit's decline from the richest city in America to the crime capital of America.
1. White flight from approx 1950s to 1990s (accelerated in 1967)
2. Jobs migrating out of Detroit
3. Declining tax base and population (from 1.8 million residents to 700,000)
4. Drugs, guns, and gangs
5. Two Detroits-highly segregated
6. Policing-tension between cops and residents
7. Unintended consequences of government actions
8. Poor city governance.
9. "Ghettoization" of Detroit
10. Two generations of blacks who were born into and grew up in third-world conditions--family fabric and structure destroyed
I took a detour to address Bob Pearlman's focus on Unions as the root cause for the loss of jobs and the breakdown of the family structure as the root cause of crime. In several posts and animated discussion with Bob last week, my analysis showed that unions were a factor in job losses but not the KEY factor (Bob disagrees). My analysis agreed with Bob's thesis that the breakdown in the family structure has created a fertile environment for crime. There is much more on this that I am still researching and will speak to.
Today, I will focus on Scott Behiel's belief that Detroit's decline is due to failed liberal policies (Federal, State and City) and poor management by the c Democratic mayors.
I will address Coleman Young's role as mayor from 1974 to 1994. Young was the first black mayor of Detroit. He became mayor of the city when the whites were leaving the city in droves. The graph below shows the loss of the white population from a high of 80% to a low of 10%. More
Coleman Young as the first black mayor was unable or unwilling to build a coalition of the white and the black leaders of Detroit. The blacks were eager, after years of segregation, to wrest control of the city from the whites. The whites were willing to work with Mayor Young provided he maintained the status quo, that is, slow desegregation of the city, keep blacks out of the white neighborhoods, keep the schools segregated, etc. Mayor Young was not accepting of the status quo. This accelerated the white migration to the suburbs. With that went jobs, businesses, and the economic base of Detroit. Detroit lost its economic vibrancy. The poverty rates began to rise in Detroit. Detroit became an impoverished city. It did not have to be this way. In retrospect, Mayor Young's belief that he (blacks) could go it alone was a hope that did not pan out.
In addition, Mayor Young became focused on righting the wrongs of the police department in using excessive force against black communities. He cut the police force and made separate lists of white and black police officers who had to leave. This left the police officers handicapped in fighting crime and drug gangs who were on the rise.
Perhaps the biggest failure was that Mayor Young did not or could not attract new businesses to Detroit to replace lost jobs.
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