Detroit Bankruptcy & the Absence of Urban Policy

Detroit, Michigan, once the thriving city is said to have entered bankruptcy. Why is this happening, and what are the implications of this event for the future of other American cities, the United States of America, and human relations?

The failure of Detroit is the failure of a seriously studied and implemented urban policy. When America's rural/agricultural community was on the brink of failure, the Congress intervened with subsidies and economic programs that kept this community from failure and rampant policy.The absence of urban policy is directly correlated with the black crime, profiling and the like that is fallout of the Travon Martin case. And I do not mean "welfare."

Senator Levin boasts about the new, wonderful things happening in Detroit. "Young people are moving back into Downtown Detroit (gentrification) Condos are at a premium, and economic development is returning." Yet there remains thousands of "blighted" homes that the Governor says will be torn down." Of course, these are the black areas of Detroit poverty.

As we have seen in the past, the urban poor, black, white, or otherwise, are displaced to a suburban ring around the new gentrified center of Detroit. Examples abound, my hometown of San Bernardino, California clearly exemplifies the incipient direction leading to the ultimate decline and fall of America from world leadership and the realization of assertions from those on the right declaring the U.S. a "banana republic." I am afraid that their assertions need be heeded. And, while a do nothing Congress sits on its collective ass, preoccupied with petty partisan squabbles and politically motivated investigations, the country's cities and their infrastructures are falling apart. Just this week found citizens of suburban Georgetown filling bathtubs, children's wading pools and, anything that will hold water--an aged water main burst. 

It is not to far off in the distant future that those effected by growing poverty, homelessness, absences of health policy will discover that their conditions are not exclusive to people of color and that poverty is an equal opportunity condition. At that point the likelihood of unity will be realized and widespread unrest becomes a possibility. "A little revolution is good for the preservation of democracy," Thomas Jefferson.