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Just a hundred owners from new :o
I've read a number of ideas for what could/should be done with Detroit now that it's declared bankrupcy, ranging from stabbing it with a $444 million ice-hockey stadium to creating a "free city" owned by tech companies and unis and dedicated to supercharging research into pretty much everything useful.
What would you do with your very own Detroit?
I would dissolve its charter which would put it under county control. The hockey stadium is a state thing.
Snake Plissken it. But with the nations homeless instead of criminals. So much housing and infrastructure to support a population that doesn't exist. So create the population, wall off mobility and treat it like a huge social experiment.
Hmm...I'd start with some kind of organized/incentivized Homesteading program.
1) Banks agree to discharge any liens or foreclosure claims so the city could raze uninhabitable houses, clearing out huge clusters of land.
2) City sells land deeds really cheap (excluding RE developers, landlords, banks, financial speculators) with a limit per person or family to prevent land hoarding or monopolies.
3) New landowners who set up any kind of community organization (co-op food/farming, artist enclaves, IT entrepreneurs, neighborhood schools, Child Care, Volunteer Fire Dept, etc.) wouldn't have to pay property taxes for 10 years (or something similar).
4) But they'd also have to create and maintain their own new roads, file standard surveyor maps with common leeways, and new building construction with City Hall. That way they'd still have Postal service, Census reports, and be part of voting districts.
I think that would attract a boat load of creative people with 'vision', who want to live and work in a new kind of 'territory'...with the opportunity to build a place from scratch, without needing a ton of money first, or a gazillion pages of red tape. It would be experimental, for sure...especially when it comes to using existing Detroit public services like police, courts, hospitals, schools.
#1 is problematic from the get-go, because Banks have asset-class "investors" who've been fighting their CDO losses for the last few years, clogging up courts and delaying the housing re-set and recovery. :hmm:
Why would any sane person get a "free house" in an area with high crime rates, awful public services, terrible schools, no jobs, and a generally terrible atmosphere?
I had thought about posting "make it a giant homeless shelter. Oh wait, it already is."Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
My bad, I thought this was one of those open-ended conceptual type threads. :bored: I didn't say anything about a "free house", just expanding on creative things already happening there. Your ideas are much better. Oh, wait. :donkey:Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Hottest trade on Wall Street: Detroit bonds
Hedge funds have their eyes fixed on Detroit.
Detroit's bonds have become the hottest trade on Wall Street, since the Motor City filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy two weeks ago.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/29/inve...nds/index.html
Interesting hypothetical. Were I able to control the situation with near-dictatorial powers, I would-
1) Turn Detroit into a massive "free trade zone". As in, wipe out most previous local ordinances (except regarding criminal behavior) and replace them with clean, simple laws that make it easy to start and maintain a business. Institute a flat tax on business profits with limited deductions.
2) Ban public sector unions. State employees can be at will employees.
3) Give bondholders (including pension funds) an "equity stake" in this experimental Hong Kong wannabe. It could be structured as a sort of annuity. Detroit will reserve a portion of its budget for debt repayment, and credits will have a stake proportional to how much they owe Detroit. Those who don't want long-term cashflow are welcome to cash-out at pennies on the dollar.
[/end hypothetical]
In the real world, here's the Detroit we have.
Quote:
OPINION | July 29, 2013, 7:05 p.m. ET
Bill Nojay: Lessons From a Front-Row Seat for Detroit's Dysfunction
Running the city's transportation department was like being in the boiler room of the Titanic.
By BILL NOJAY
Since Detroit declared bankruptcy on July 18, the city's crippling problems with corruption, unfunded benefits and pension liabilities have gotten the bulk of airtime. But equally at fault for its fiscal demise are the city's management structure and union and civil-service rules that hamstring efforts to make municipal services more efficient. I would know: I had a front-row seat for this dysfunction.
Last year, I served as chief operating officer of the Detroit Department of Transportation. I was hired as a contractor for the position, and in my eight months on the job I got a vivid sense of the city's dysfunction. Almost every day, a problem would arise, a solution would be found—but implementing the fix would prove impossible.
We began staff meetings each morning by learning which vendors had cut us off for lack of payment, including suppliers of essential items like motor oil or brake pads. Bus engines that the transportation department had sent out to be overhauled were sidelined for months when vendors refused to ship them back because the city hadn't paid for the repair. There were days when 20% of our scheduled runs did not go out because of a lack of road-ready buses.
The obvious solution for a cash-tight operation is to triage vendor payments to ensure that absolutely essential items are always there. But in Detroit, no one inside the transportation department could direct payments to the most important vendors. A bureaucrat working miles away in City Hall, not responsible to the transportation department (and, frankly, not responsible to anyone we could identify), decided who got paid and who didn't. That meant vendors supplying noncritical items were often paid even as public buses were sidelined.
A major expense for Detroit is the cost of lawsuits filed against the city for various alleged injuries on municipal property. At the transportation department, there were hundreds of claims arising from bus accidents alone. How many of those claims were fraudulent? How many were settled (with the cost of settlement and legal fees posted against DDOT's budget) at unnecessarily high cost?
It was impossible to know, since the city's law department handled all litigation and settled cases without consulting the DDOT staff. It was the law department's policy to settle virtually all claims—which meant that the transportation department became easy prey for personal-injury lawyers bringing cases with little or no merit, costing the city millions.
In the DDOT we tried to hire our own lawyers to fight these claims. But we were blocked by city charter provisions prohibiting any city department from hiring outside counsel without the approval of the Detroit City Council. When we inquired with the mayor's office we were told that the union representing the law department—in Detroit, even the lawyers are unionized—would block any such approval.
Disability and workers' comp claims were routinely paid with no investigation into their validity. More than 80% of the transportation department's 1,400 employees were certified for family medical-leave absences—meaning they could call in for a day off without prior notice, often leaving buses without drivers or mechanics. Management's only recourse to get the work done was to pay the remaining employees overtime, at time-and-a-half rates. DDOT's overtime costs were running over $20 million a year.
Then there was the obstructionism of the City Council. While I was at the DDOT, roughly 10% of bus-fare collection boxes were broken. In another city, getting a contract to buy spare parts to repair these boxes would be routine. The City Council publicly expressed outrage that we didn't fix the fare boxes, since the city was losing an estimated $5 million a year in uncollected fares.
But the reason we couldn't fix the fare boxes was that the contract for the necessary spare parts had been sitting, untouched, in the City Council's offices for nine months. Due to past corruption, virtually every contract had to be approved by the council, resulting in months-long delays. Micromanagement by the council was endemic; I once sat for five hours waiting to discuss a minor transportation matter while City Council members debated whether to authorize the demolition of individual vacant and vandalized houses, one by one. There are over 40,000 vacant houses in Detroit.
Union and civil-service rules made it virtually impossible to fire anyone. A six-step disciplinary process provided job protection to anyone with a pulse, regardless of poor performance or bad behavior. Even the time-honored management technique of moving someone up or sideways where he would do less harm didn't work in Detroit: Job descriptions and qualification requirements were so strict it was impossible for management to rearrange the organization chart. I was a manager with virtually no authority over personnel.
When the federal government got involved, it only made things worse. A federal lawsuit charging that the DDOT did not fully comply with the law in accommodating disabled riders had dragged on for years because of idealistic but painfully naïve Justice Department attorneys seeking regulatory perfection. I felt like a guy in the boiler room of the Titanic, desperately bailing to keep the ship afloat for a few more hours while the DOJ attorneys complained from their first-class cabin that their champagne wasn't properly chilled.
Detroit's other municipal departments had similar challenges. I would often compare notes with managers trying to run the city's street lights, recreation programs, police departments and smaller offices. All of us faced similar gridlock.
The last thing Detroit needs is a bailout. What it needs is to sweep away a city charter that protects only bureaucrats, civil-service rules that straightjacket municipal departments, and obsolete union contracts. A bailout would just keep the dysfunction in place. Time to start over.
Mr. Nojay, a Republican, is a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 133rd District in upstate New York.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...748612116.html
Detroit is an example of what happens when liberals and labor unions gain near total control.