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Did Detroit Just Die?

The City of Detroit has gone bankrupt. From the Times: For Detroit, the filing comes as a painful reminder of a city’s rise and fall. Founded more than 300 years ago, the city expanded at a stunning rate in the first half of the 20th century with the arrival of the automobile industry, and then shrank […]

The City of Detroit has gone bankrupt. From the Times:

For Detroit, the filing comes as a painful reminder of a city’s rise and fall.

Founded more than 300 years ago, the city expanded at a stunning rate in the first half of the 20th century with the arrival of the automobile industry, and then shrank away in recent decades at a similarly remarkable pace. A city of 1.8 million in 1950, it is now home to 700,000 people, as well as to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, vacant lots and unlit streets.

From here, there is no road map for Detroit’s recovery, not least of all because municipal bankruptcies are rare.

More:

Other major cities, including New York and Cleveland in the 1970s and Philadelphia two decades later, have teetered near the edge of financial ruin, but ultimately found solutions other than federal court. Detroit’s struggle, experts say, is particularly dire because it is not limited to a single event or one failed financial deal, like the troubled sewer system largely responsible for Jefferson County’s downfall.

Instead, numerous factors over many years have brought Detroit to this point, including a shrunken tax base but still a huge, 139-square-mile city to maintain; overwhelming health care and pension costs; repeated efforts to manage mounting debts with still more borrowing; annual deficits in the city’s operating budget since 2008; and city services crippled by aged computer systems, poor record-keeping and widespread dysfunction.

All of that makes bankruptcy — a process that could take months, if not years, and is itself expected to be costly — particularly complex.

“It’s not enough to say, let’s reduce debt,” said James E. Spiotto, an expert in municipal bankruptcy at the law firm of Chapman and Cutler in Chicago. “At the end of the day, you need a real recovery plan. Otherwise you’re just going to repeat the whole thing over again.”

Thoughts? If you live in Detroit, what do you think? Are you planning to move? Is there reason for hope? If you don’t live in Detroit, would you consider moving there? If so, why?

UPDATE: A reader commented:

If it were possible to go back to 1950 and tell the city’s civic boosters that Detroit would be bankrupt within the lives of their grandchildren, I wonder if they could even conceive of the possibility.

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