This paragraph succinctly sums up why Detroit can't dig it else financially
Posted by
ty97
Jul 13 '13, 06:55
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"Orr has only to read his own Proposal for Creditors to see that Detroit is no longer a viable municipality. Since 1950, 1.2 million people have left Detroit � enough to constitute the 10th-largest city in the United States. (Detroit itself, with 684,799, is 18th.) Detroit is the poorest city in the United States: Its median household income of $27,862 is half the national average. Despite its population crash, Detroit is the same size it was in the �50s. So the police still need to patrol 140 square miles of streets, the public works department needs to pave those streets, and the water system still needs to maintain the network of pipes underneath. But there�s no way a city of 680,000 people who work as short-order cooks, home healthcare aides and daycare providers can support an infrastructure built for 1.8 million who worked as autoworkers, engineers and mechanics. (And that�s those who do work � the official unemployment rate is 18.6 percent, according to Orr�s report, although some estimates put it at 50 percent.) Property tax revenues have decreased 20 percent over the last five years � even though Detroit has some of the highest tax rates in Michigan: a 2.4 percent income tax rate and a 1.3 percent property tax rate. As Orr notes, �this tax burden is particularly severe because it is imposed on a population that has relatively low levels of per capita income.�"
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