As it emerges from Chapter 9, Detroit’s debt load has fallen from $18 billion to about $11 billion. It believes it will, at the end of the process, have $1.7 billion to repair the city. However, that amount has to stretch through 2023. The sum is modest given the challenges to repair huge portions of a city that covers 138 square miles. As a matter of fact, it should be considered inadequate from the first day it becomes available.
As a modest sign of what Detroit faces, about 40% of its streetlights and alley lights are broken or do not work. That figure totals about 35,000. While these streetlights may only take millions of dollars to repair, they are the tip of an extraordinarily large iceberg.
According to an analysis by the Detroit Free Press, the city has extraordinary needs for better public safety, streetlights, public transportation, parks and recreation, trash collection, tax collection, new technology, water and sewers, and blight removal. Detroit faces more than a list of these problems. It has two other challenges that it may be unable to hurdle.
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The first of these is the logistics of solving these nine problems. The problems have to be identified, but the much harder part may be finding solutions. Which Detroit parks should be closed? In neighborhoods with few people? That leaves open the question of whether it is fair to subordinate based on population. The same can be said of police access. Probably this will be weighted toward the parts of the city with the highest concentration of people.
The second problem is even greater. Detroit has fewer than 700,000 residents, down from 1.5 million in 1950. The diaspora of car company workers to other places in the United States and overseas has left Detroit with a tax-paying population that is not only low in number, but poor. The ranks of businesses located in Detroit has also atrophied. That is another large piece of the tax base that is gone.
The 35,000 streetlight count is only one sign of the uphill battle. But it is no more and probably less than much larger challenges.
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