Let's Invest in Detroit: A Marshall Plan for America's Cities

By: Kevin Boyle

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Forty-five years ago the great civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph called on the federal government to launch a Marshall Plan for American cities. He asked for a $185 billion in federal spending over ten years' time. With that investment, he argued, the unemployment could be put to work, crumbling neighborhoods rebuilt, schools improved, the lives of the poor transformed.

Of course conditions were better then. The unemployment rate was far lower, city schools weren't as devastated, neighborhoods not as blighted, the gap between rich and poor not as great. So the cost would be higher now. But let's just go with Randolph's figure. Adjusted for inflation, $185 billion translates into $1.3 trillion today. According to government estimates, the war in Iraq -- America's erstwhile response to the terror of 9/11 -- will cost the county at least $4 trillion once all the bills are paid. For a third of that sum -- a third -- the country could finally put Randolph's plan into place.

It's an easy idea to dismiss. The federal government is itself on an austerity binge, at least when it comes to social spending. And we know that government programs don't work, that they only make problems worse, that it's best to let the free market works it magic, that the poor we will always with us. It's ludicrous to imagine that the county might want to save cities like Detroit.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-...b_1137372.html

What kills me is the right-wing whackos send out these emails comparing hiroshima and detroit, neglecting to acknowledge how much the US and Japan have spent to rebuild Hiroshima [[and how much japan spends, in general, on urban renewal)

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Originally Posted by rb336

What kills me is the right-wing whackos send out these emails comparing hiroshima and detroit, neglecting to acknowledge how much the US and Japan have spent to rebuild Hiroshima [[and how much japan spends, in general, on urban renewal)

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What kills me is when people cry out for more federal dollars for new urban programs while slinging the standard guilt trip "It's time this country gave a damn" but without even acknowledging the current level of federal spending on urban programs and assessing whether cities are really getting any bang for those bucks.

Let's take that proposal for $1.3 trillion of additional spending on new urban programs over the next ten years. That breaks down to $130 billion per year in new spending. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development currently spends half that amount each year on urban programs [source]. The federal government even has to borrow $25 billion of the $62.5 billion HUD spends annually on urban programs, yet supposedly "this country doesn't give a damn."

Is HUD spending our tax dollars effectively? Can some of those dollars be diverted instead to fund more urgent needs? Should our grandkids be responsible for paying back the $2 billion the US borrows each year so that HUD can give developers $5 billion worth of low income housing tax credits each year?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked and answered first instead of changing the subject to national defense spending or "right-wing whackos".

That's already been tried. It was called Johnson's Model City Program. It helped Detroit become what it is today.

Let's put Detroit's Model Cities spending into current-day perspective. According to this source, Detroit received and spent $450 million worth of Model Cities federal funding to re-vitalize a nine square mile section of the city - an amount that is the equivalent of $3.2 billion dollars in 2011.

Getting back to the cry for more urban "investment", over the past 34 months, the federal government has awarded $1.015 billion to be spent on projects in the city of Detroit by public and private entities, yet apparently they need to spend even more money in cities here and elsewhere, because "It's time this country gave a damn."

Instead of demanding more "investment" from the federal government, maybe it's time to start asking what the current levels of federal "investment" have actually provided. But of course, I realize that's not how it works in the minds of those who demand more and bigger federal programs at the local level, since they only measure "compassion" by the amount of tax dollars sent their way and no amount can ever be enough to satisfy them.

Detroit doesn't spend the monies it gets properly.

http://loop21.com/life/detroit-loses...ng-fast-enough

When THAT much $$ changes THAT many hands, especially in a poor city, you are bound to see a lot of fuck ups.

There are a lot of simlarities between Johnson's great society and sending dollars overseas. Both spurred incredible corruption. If you can figure out why, I am willing to bet that you could solve the federal deficit in a few years!

Detroit is not unique in people taking advantage of the system. What it it unique in is being an enourmous one hosre town who was never able to becdiversified.

People clearly disagree about this, but $60 billion/year isn't a lot of money spread over the whole US. That number is probably a bit too high [[2011 HUD budget ended up being between $40 and $50 billion depending upon how you count), but it is also important to recognize that most of that money doesn't have anything to do with improving cities; more than half is for housing programs of one kind or another, mostly rent subsidies. Although this is helpful to the people who get them, arguably it is less helpful to the cities.

More importantly, there is a key word in "Marshall Plan", and that is "plan". The nation has no real vision of how to improve life in the impoverished parts of cities [[or rural areas for that matter) and spending more money on unsystematic programs isn't likely to accomplish much. As Ed Glaeser has suggested, it might make more sense for urban policy to focus on helping people [[very likely by encouraging and assisting them to leave areas of limited opportunity) than to focus on helping cities as institutions [[e.g. don't throw good money after bad in Detroit, but rather encourage the people to leave for better places.). I don't completely agree with that, but certainly it should focus on something other than treading water, which is what the current policies amount to. Getting past that is what additional money could accomplish, but it isn't going to accomplish it without realistic and well-defined goals.

The Los Angeles redevelopment association is well funded [[roughly $680 million for FY2010), well-regulated and fed with a steady stream of eminent-domain acquired properties, and they manage to get almost nothing done:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/0...-nothing-in-la

You can see similar patterns in NYC. Redevelopment programs work much better when run on a small scale - aiding individual business owners in redeveloping storefronts and factories for new uses.

The problem is that it's difficult to get political support for this kind of development. Politicians want big projects they can grant to their political allies, helping Joe Shmoe build a hamburger bar doesn't help globex megacorp development inc, even though it makes a neighborhood a nicer place to live.

The author has it wrong. We shouldn't come up with massive programs to build up cities. What we need are emergency czars to come in and gut spending, cut services and lay our cities to waste. Why would anybody want to live in a city when you can have a drive-in vinyl-sided mansion in Sterling Heights?

As long as you keep paying people to have kids that they can't support themselves and feeding them into a public school system that is mostly little more than a babysitting service at best, Detroit will continue to be a wasteland. Any more "urban renewal" will just be good money after bad spent to keep downtown looking habitable to urban-adventurous singles and couples with no kids. The building block of our society is the mostly functional family and that's one thing Detroit ain't got and can't attract in significant enough numbers to make a difference.

After living in Detroit for most of my adult life and then moving out after having kids, I can't imagine raising my kids in any area of the city. If you want to help Detroit, stop subsidizing the things you want LESS of.

The few glimmers of hope that I see are areas with immigrant families such as that in Southwest Detroit where you actually get two parents to show up at parent/teacher conferences at the local public school. Many two-parent households are actually working and investing in their neighborhoods in SW Detroit. I fear it's too little too late though. To see the opposite of this, take a drive around Chene Street around Warren.

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Originally Posted by Detroitnerd

The author has it wrong. We shouldn't come up with massive programs to build up cities. What we need are emergency czars to come in and gut spending, cut services and lay our cities to waste. Why would anybody want to live in a city when you can have a drive-in vinyl-sided mansion in Sterling Heights?

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Yeah, vinyl and acrylic stucco are an aphrodisiac. Brown brick and wood trim are totally not where it's at.