The last person to leave Detroit won't have to turn out the lights. The city has been in darkness for decades.
Forty per cent of the street lights are out because of broken bulbs, neglect and copper thieves. Last year, the mayor unveiled a plan to save money by cutting out lighting in less-populated areas. "We're not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas," said the city's chief operating officer.
I'm old enough to remember when Detroit was a great American city. Today, it can't deliver basic services. Firefighters can't use the ladders on their trucks because they haven't been inspected in years. Police take nearly an hour to respond to the most serious emergency calls. People know not to call 911 if they have a heart attack – they'll probably be dead before the ambulance arrives.
People who could get out have already done so. The population has plunged from 1.8 million to 700,000 since the 1950s, and large parts of the city have reverted to the wild. Some houses are worth less than the cost of demolition, so some people who decide to leave simply walk away. "The city is past being a city now; it's gone," resident Kendrick Benguche told The New York Times.
Who or what killed Detroit? The conventional narrative is the collapse of the auto industry, exacerbated by white flight, which gutted the tax base and sent the city into a death spiral. But other cities' economies have collapsed, and they've come back. The answer, in Detroit's case, is decades of mismanagement, incompetence and looting that went ignored by anyone who could do anything about it. As commentator Walter Russell Mead, who has been brilliant on this subject, has written, the people who ran Detroit were largely indistinguishable from a criminal enterprise.
The biggest (but by no means the only) villain in the piece is former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted this spring of racketeering, extortion, bribery, fraud and enough other stuff to keep him in jail for the next 15 or 20 years. He was once thought to be among the most promising young African-Americans in public life, along with Barack Obama. But once in office, he presided over a reign of municipal corruption that was breathtaking even by the standards of Tammany Hall or Chicago's Big Bill Thompson (who was paid off by Al Capone). He accused his critics of racism. He was enabled by an entrenched Democratic machine that has run Detroit for decades.
The people who've been hurt the worst are Detroit's poor, who have been deprived of decent schools and other services. As city officials enriched themselves, they spent Detroit into the poorhouse. Their cronies were alleged to have ransacked the pension fund, bought off the unions and promised city employees pensions and retirement benefits they will never get. For the past few years, the city has borrowed heavily just to meet its operating costs. But city officials and union leaders have repeatedly told the public that anybody who questioned the deteriorating state of the city's finances was alarmist, anti-union and anti-Democrat.
"I was planning on retiring in October, but now I'm not sure," one city worker, who repairs potholes, told The Wall Street Journal. His uncertainty is well founded. Detroit owes an astonishing $3.5-billion on its pension funds, and may only be able to make good on 10 cents on the dollar.
Yet, as Mr. Mead notes, not everyone's a loser. Although pensioners and school children may be out of luck, Wall Street has profited handsomely. Since 2005, the city has forked over $475-million in fees to the banks to refinance its debt. "We have no lights, no buses, poor streets and now we're paying millions of dollars a year on our debt," David Sole, a retired municipal worker, told Bloomberg.
In March, the state hired an emergency manager, bankruptcy expert Kevyn Orr, to stop the free fall. "The city's operations have become dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restrictions, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifference or corruption," he reported in May. Reliably, union officials accused him of exaggerating in a bid to take control of the city and seize its assets.
This week, Mr. Orr declared that the city had run out of time, and Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy. The city faces as much as $20-billion in debts and liabilities. Bankruptcy became inevitable after Mr. Obama's administration declined to bail the city out.
The disasters that befell Detroit are an epic story. Yet, until now, they have been all but ignored in the national news media. The reflex reaction is to blame racial division and white flight; a recent piece at Salon.com was originally headlined White People Killed Detroit, until wiser heads prevailed.
In fact, it wasn't white people or black people who killed Detroit – it was corruption, misrule and Democratic-machine politics. But apart from local media (the Detroit Free Press has been on the case for years), no one cared. Maybe they didn't want to make a city that is 90-per-cent black look bad. Or maybe they thought the only bad guys in American public life are Republicans and rapacious corporations. And that's a shame, because, as Mr. Mead so eloquently argues, "corrupt big-city machines may be the most important single civil-rights issue in America today."
The road through bankruptcy will be long and tortuous – the city's right to file for bankruptcy is already being hotly contested in the courts. But amid the gloom, there is at least a glimmer of good news. Mr. Orr has pledged to get the lights back on, no matter what.