I have received a lot of 'What's happening to Detroit' emails from friends, family and the curious who don't follow Detroit events closely. I'd bet you are to. Hence my question.

After the third time I decided I need a boilerplate response, to paste into future emails, and wrote use the following.
Regarding Detroit, and since I get asked about it a lot lately, here is a little explainer that I wrote previously. It's a bit long but actually its fairly brief compared to the immensity of the problem.

The City of Detroit has been bankrupt for a long time, like the Road Runner coyote who has run off the cliff and stays suspended, until he looks down.

You may notice I said "City of" Detroit. The City of Detroit today is less than 20% of the entire population of the one hundred plus communities that comprise Metro Detroit. Its population has declined from nearly 2 million largely middle class residents to under 700,000 largely impoverished residents.

The remainder of the 5 million plus Metro Detroit is doing somewhere between okay and great. It includes the [what once was] 3rd richest county in the US and covers a couple of thousand square miles.

A combination of factors, with racism and globalization at its core, evolved a city left with poverty and unemployment rates of nearly 50%.

A resulting rise in crime, blight, diminished public services, corrupt politicians, higher insurance rates and taxes drove out the middle class, first the white and then the black, leaving the City of Detroit as the landfill for Metro Detroit's problems.

A seemingly unfixable situation exists. Hundreds of thousands of Metro Detroit’s poor who cannot pay taxes yet have great problems requiring taxes are concentrated in the City of Detroit.

Added to that there is a large City of Detroit pension-recipient group that was awarded generous pensions when the city was better off and had a huge workforce. Few of the pensioners remain in the city and last year a third of the budget left the city to pay that obligation while public services tanked. By 2020 it was estimated that pension obligations alone would consume over 60% of the budget.

Police, fire-fighters and public servants have suffered layoffs and wage and benefits cuts resulting in loss of morale and decline in productivity. They often leave at the first opportunity. So the poor City essentially provides free training for the surrounding communities. It goes on and on… a downward spiral that led to the inevitable official bankruptcy.

Detroit Metropolitan union with the sharing of the good and bad is the long-term solution. But many powerful surrounding communities find it too convenient to keep 'them' away and use Detroit to mask their failures with look-at-how-bad-it-is-there deflections. The City of Detroit is 85% African-American, the surround is the opposite ratio.

They have not yet suffered enough from spillover crime, damage to regional brand and product identity, the domino effect of flight and blight that is in full force in the depopulating inner ring suburbs, damage to bond ratings and other ills of division that plague the entire region.

The person with tuberculosis in the next cubicle is yet not their problem.

No matter how well an un-elected outside financial manager may balance the books and make the City of Detroit solvent our core division, where the City is stuck bearing Metro Detroit’s burdens, will continue to impede progress and Detroit's crisis will recur.