This evening along Detroit’s riverfront, hundreds of thousands will line up to watch the annual fireworks. Now in their 55th year, the fireworks come at a moment when the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is desperately trying to avert a more likely outcome for the city: the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
Gothamites might wish to pay attention. Though our cities are different in many ways — New York’s economy is more diverse, to name just one — there are broad lessons here about government, complacency and urban decline.
For amid the wreckage of modern Detroit, it’s easy to forget that it was once America’s most productive city. It was in Detroit that Henry Ford doubled wages for his workers even as he cut prices for his cars, and here that a new middle class would rise. These were the days when the Big Three were spoken of the way we now talk of Apple and Google.
So what happened? Primarily, the city spent beyond its means, placed its bets mostly on one big industry and in dealing with its inner city, looked to the government-knows-best schemes of the Great Society. At first, that led to white flight. Now we have black flight, to the point where Detroit has shrunk to its 1910 population.
Many of us often think that if a problem gets big enough, it will be addressed. That may be true for individuals, but not for government. In too many cities, the exodus of the productive only hardens the grip of the political machine that drove them out. So even amid the high crime, abandoned properties and unpaid taxes, Detroit remains aggressively unreformed.
New York is not close to that. But in the third-world harassment of our small businesses — and the blasé indifference to the wealth fleeing for tax-friendlier climes — we detect a whiff of the same complacency that killed Detroit.
The cliché about Rome is that it wasn’t built in a day. It’s more apt to say that, like Detroit, it wasn’t destroyed in a day. And the ruins we see are entirely man-made.