Detroit Facts in 2013

25 Facts About The Fall Of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city. Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 "Superfund" hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

Where can Detroit Go from Here?

• Unemployment in the Detroit has almost tripled over the last 13 years, currently sitting at 16.3% – more than double the national average of 7.6%.

How ...?

• If you call a cop almost anywhere in America, the wait is an average of 11 minutes. In the Motor City, you’ll wait almost an hour (58 min average response time).

• Since 1950, more people have left Detroit than currently live there. To be specific, at one point Detroit had 1.8 million people — today, the estimate is around 700,000. To wrap your head around that fact, consider that more than 1.1 million people left Detroit. In other words, the entire population of Dallas would have to get up and move away, leaving a ghost town.

• The city has an unsustainable ratio of workers to retirees (who are owed some very generous benefits for decades) – approximately 10,000 workers and 20,000 retirees.

• The murder rate is 11 times higher than in NYC, and violent crime happens in the city at a level more than five times the national average.

2009 video about Detroit.

Detroit in RUINS!

"In a nutshell, Detroit sucks."

• Public education:
  • $11,100 spent per child for a single year. National average was $9600 per student.
  • Detroit public education graduation rate was 25 percent.
  • "... a student of Detroit has a higher chance of ending up in prison than graduation high school."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Cities_Program

The Model Cities Program was an element of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty.

Detroit was one of the largest Model Cities projects. Mayor Jerome P Cavanaugh (Mayor 1962—69) was the only elected official to serve on Johnson's task force. Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which used $490 million to try to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a model city.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/why-motor-city-is-stalled/

All Detroit’s mayors since 1962 were Democrats who were eager to micromanage. And spend. Detroit has the only utility tax in Michigan, and its income tax is the third-highest of any big city in America (only Philadelphia and Louisville take more, and they aren’t doing great, either).

Detroit’s automakers got billions in federal bailouts.

The Detroit News revealed that Detroit in 2011 had around twice as many municipal employees per capita as cities with comparable populations. The city water and sewer department employed a “horseshoer” even though it keeps no horses.

Detroit has 47 union.

Politicians on Detroit’s city council aren’t even willing to sell off vacant lots the city owns, or even a portion of the billions of dollars in art in its government-subsidized museum (including the original “Howdy Doody” puppet).

A member of the British Parliament writes that Detroit is like the fictional city of Starnesville in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” – a car-manufacturing city that became a ghost town after experimenting with socialism. In the novel, Starnesville’s demise is the first sign that the entire society is approaching collapse.

Andrew Rodney, a documentary filmmaker from Detroit, says many bad, big-government ideas that have plagued the U.S. were tried out first in Detroit. “It’s the first city to experience a lot of the planning that went into a lot of cities.”

Home loan subsidies, public housing, stadium subsidies, a $350 million project called “Renaissance Center” (the city ended up selling it for just $50 million), an automated People Mover system that not many people feel moved to use (it moves people in only one direction), endless favors to unions – if a government idea has failed anywhere in America, there’s a good chance it failed in Detroit first.

And if you criticized them for it, politicians like former Mayor Coleman Young called you a racist. “To attack Detroit is to attack black,” Young said. That tends to shut critics up.

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