Detroit, the city where I was born and raised, is a very special shoot-yourself-in-the-foot story. When I was born, the city had 2 million residents. It now has less than .8 million. When I was born, it had trolleys running regularly down every major street. Those trolleys were replaced with buses that no longer service those same major streets on a regular basis. They still go down those streets, but not for the distance of the trolleys, nor the frequency. Regular train service as far out as Port Huron went away with the trolleys. Jitney services, and private bus lines are illegal, while taxi cabs are limited in numbers restricted by the city.
After the race riots of 1967, there was a great demand for gated communities. Gated communities were made illegal, and kept illegal.
The Housing and Urban Development department gave Detroit $60 million for low income housing. They asked for the money back because the city couldn't figure out how to spend it, and was keeping horrible books on the previous HUD money they had been given. The Community Redevelopment Act put a lot of welfare and low-income families into houses they could make the payments on (heavily subsidized) but couldn't maintain (repairs and etc.).
They increased property and school taxes (as the districts were consolidated, then student pop. dropped from 250,000 to about 100,000 now) to the highest in the state, and added an income tax for good measure on residents and non-residents.
They had forced bussing of students, so if they lived across the street from a school with too many other white students, a white student would have to take a bus for an hour to an inner city school to balance things out. I saw that happen with my own eyes. That started the exodus for education, commonly called "white flight" in earnest.
Despite the highest revenue possible, police force levels were cut to the lowest officer/citizen ratio in the area. Detroit has historically (for the last thirty years) been in the top five for murders and arsons. Detroit has about 40,000 abandoned houses waiting to demolished. The city owns roughly 70,000 properties it has seized for taxes, or condemned for urban renewal. Despite revenue sharing rules with the state that give it a larger percentage of revenue than any other city, it runs a $300 million deficit for this year. Usually the city pays out $50 million a year or so for lawsuits. Federal oversight of the police and jails has been mandated by the courts, and the city pays the bill for that.
The politicians are so corrupt that former mayor Coleman Young and his relatives provided protection to drug dealers from the FBI and DEA. Police Chief William Hart stole $2 million. The last mayor got out of the county jail today, where he served 3 months on felony convictions for perjury and assaulting an officer. He still has $1 million in restitution to pay for the perjury charges. His former chief of staff just started her jail sentence. The former mayor, the current city council president, and various relatives and friends are under federal investigation for accepting bribes. The briber has already pleaded guilty. And the list goes on and on.
