Krugman article on Detroit

[Sbee]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/o...e-new-greece.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

not sure if this has been posted yet but it's a good take on the bankruptcy. critics want to point the finger at someone and make them the bad guy but what really happened is that market forces sometimes marginalize parts of society. technology, globalization, free trade, etc have taken its toll on Detroit particularly hard and told a large segment of the population that their skills don't carry as much value as they used to.

 

[Michchamp]

good article.

"One consequence of this dysfunction has been a severe case of ?job sprawl? within the metropolitan area, with jobs fleeing the urban core even when employment in greater Detroit was still rising, and even as other cities were seeing something of a city-center revival."
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one other cause that everyone is carefully dancing around is the outright racism that lead to the those jobs moving to the burbs, and sprawling as far away from Detroit as possible.

as much as I always hated to admit it, and liked to consider racism, especially institutional racism, a southern problem, Detroit's history in this regard is just despicable.

And if people want to claim "it goes both ways" well, yeah, sure Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick def played the race card, but the bottom line is the Detroit suburbs were never the ones suffering from a lack of money, insane crime, underfunded schools, blight, pollution, or getting their own rights curtailed by "emergency managers" appointed by the Governor. One side had it much worse.

If you want to point the finger, it shouldn't be at the people who got screwed. and I say this as someone who grew up in the Detroit burbs, and grew up hearing how awful, corrupt and scary Detroit was on what was almost a daily basis.