Chicago Tribune > median price of a home in Detroit was $7,500
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Detroit’s outlook falls along with home prices
Motor City on the brink of bankruptcy, but still 15 people want to be mayor
By Tim Jones
January 29, 2009
DETROIT — It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.
The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.
Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it’s seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.
Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people.
“We’re always fighting ourselves out of a hole,” said Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans.
Despite the depth of the hole, Evans is running for mayor. In fact, he is one of 15 people who have raised their hands to be mayor of Detroit and fill the remaining months in office of the former mayor who now wears a green jumpsuit and resides in Evans’ spartan house of justice, the Wayne County Jail.
Detroit has long been the snide remark and punch line to derogatory urban humor, and the conviction last fall of two-term Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for lying about an extramarital affair with his chief of staff reinforced suspicions that Detroit is beyond help, let alone self-governance. But as the domestic auto industry, the city’s principal private-sector employer and founding corporate father, seeks a financial bailout from Washington, formerly whispered remarks about the prospect of the nation’s 11th-largest city being the first major American city to go bankrupt are now publicly discussed.
If the Obama administration is looking for a city to test new ideas for chronic urban problems, it can look to Detroit, a northern New Orleans without the French Quarter. While bedrock poverty in the Crescent City was violently laid bare by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Detroit has been quietly slipping into social and economic crisis for 40 years. One-third of the population lives in poverty, and almost 50 percent of children are in poverty, according to data from the Detroit-Area Community Indicators System. Median household income has dropped 24 percent since 2000, according to the Census Bureau.
New York bond-rating houses this month lowered the city’s bond rating to junk status, a lowly assessment shared by New Orleans and few others.
On a positive note, Detroit’s homicide rate dropped 14 percent last year. That prompted mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas to tell the Detroit News recently, “I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn’t anyone left to kill.”
Detroit voters will choose two candidates in a Feb. 24 primary who will face off in May. In the meantime, the city faces a projected budget deficit of at least $300 million, with no clear view on how to erase it. “If we don’t get it right, we could be headed for a state takeover or receivership,” warned Dave Bing, a mayoral candidate best known for draining jump shots for the Detroit Pistons back in the 1960s and ’70s. At 64, Bing, a successful businessman, is running as the candidate of integrity in a city that, under Kilpatrick, had little.
Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr., who assumed the mayor’s office by virtue of his being president of the City Council, promised he is “not going to let [receivership] happen.”
Detroit, which has lost half its population in the past 50 years, is deceptively large, covering 139 square miles. Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston could, as a group, fit inside the city’s boundaries. There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters. Much of the neighborhood economy revolves around rib joints, hot dog stands and liquor stores. The candidates travel around this sprawling city, some invoking the nostalgic era of Big Three dominance and vowing that Detroit can be great again.
Groups of them attend nearly unworkable faux debate forums about how they will solve the city’s troubles, with responses to last no more than 60 seconds. Given the complexity of problems that defy sound-bite answers, their proposed solutions range from the predictable to the wacky:
More cops on the street.
Make high school graduation mandatory.
Grow your own food.
Bulldoze large stretches of the city and turn them into wind farms.
Procreate like there’s no tomorrow.
Kilpatrick’s election in 2001 lured Henry Hassan back to Detroit from Minnesota. Hassan, who opened a restaurant on the city’s northwest side, said he was quickly disillusioned.
“You remember the riots in ‘67?” Hassan said, referring to the cataclysmic five days that left 43 dead and more than 2,000 buildings burned down. “It’s a little worse than that right now. … We need somebody to come in and care for the city more than they care for themselves.”
The problem is more than a $300 million budget shortfall, said John Mogk, a professor at Wayne State University Law School.
“A thousand people are leaving the city every month,” Mogk said, “and the city does not have the financial resources and the economic base to solve its own problems.”
To be sure, progress has been made downtown: two new sports stadiums, a reinvigorated neighborhood around Wayne State and new lofts and casinos. But unlike Pittsburgh, which successfully reinvented itself after the decline of Big Steel, Detroit displays only islands of prosperity amid a dismal landscape. Neighborhoods have suffered, and foreclosures have aggravated the long-festering ill of abandoned homes.
“A lack of vision has held us back,” said Nicholas Hood III, another mayoral candidate. “The auto industry was so dominant—too dominant—and we never prodded ourselves and the business community to a more expansive vision.”
To the surprise of many in this overwhelmingly black city (82 percent), only 53 percent of registered voters turned out for November’s presidential election, which featured the first African-American nominee. It wasn’t long ago that a Democrat couldn’t carry Michigan without a big turnout in Detroit. As it turned out, Detroit’s votes didn’t matter in the election.
“Detroit will never be the great industrial center again,” said Kevin Boyle, a Detroit native and author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.”
“What will it look like?” Boyle said. “I don’t know.”
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