Ideas for a City of Greater Detroit
I was just toying with an online mapping program, and, just for kicks, plotted out a circle with a 21-mile radius centered on Eight Mile and Wyoming. Counterclockwise, it comes ashore roughly north of Selfridge, arcs up over where the farms meet the subdivisions, bisects Stony Creek, swoops down over Wateford, encompassing Oakland County Airport, covers Commerce, runs almost north-south along Chubb Road, arcs back while still covering Canton, covers all of DTW, and cuts across Trenton and Grosse Ile before crossing into Canada.
What if we were to say, for the sake of argument, that the city of Detroit were to be the City of Greater Detroit?
What would the area be? Would it be smaller than Jacksonville, Fla.? Larger than New York City's five boroughs?
What would the population of this semicircle be? Would it put Detroit back in the Top Ten of American cities?
What would the per capita wealth be?
Has any city police force or fire department covered an area this large?
What if, instead of 100-odd communities all raising taxes to pay for their various police departments, fire departments, zoning boards, school boards, etc., we were to have one large supercity. How much money could we save?
I know this sort of topic invites discussion of the hard realities that make something like this politically impossible now. But just a bit of blue-sky thinking goes a long way.
More thoughts on amalgamation
Amalgamation is what created what we now think of as New York City, which was briefly referred to as Greater New York at the time of its creation in 1898. In more recent times that process has been used heavily in the province of Ontario. I think, unarguably, it eliminates a lot of duplication and inefficiency but it is rarely popular at the time. After a pretty short time, people seem to get used to it.
In Michigan, as I said, though, the state constitution doesn't allow for it. The only way to pursue such an eminently sensible process would be to amend the constitution, and in order to do that you have to have the backing of a lot of the local politicians whose jobs would go away, so good luck.
In a con-con it might have been a productive discussion but the voters of Michigan for some reason think our state is structured correctly [[which astonishes me) and therefore they voted down the constitutional convention.
We may have to start thinking about armed revolt, here, gang :) Or at least duplicate whatever's been done in Tunisia and Egypt. But I'm willing to give the new guy a chance, briefly, first. Let's see if the Nerd In Chief can get the ship somewhat righted.