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Introduction
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Without a sufficient tax base in place, city services like fire and police protection have suffered in recent years, leading to an entrenched culture of violence as well as earning Detroit a reputation as one of America’s most dangerous cities. Streetlights burn out and are never replaced, potholes go unrepaired for months, and aging infrastructure is visible everywhere from rusty downtown bridges to the city’s shaky power grid, which contributed to widespread blackouts in 2014. Suburban flight and plummeting home values have left as many as 78,000 abandoned structures in the city, all of which are now prime targets for arsonists, leaving everything from single-family homes, former apartment blocks, commercial structures, and even public buildings in a landscape of urban decay.
Detroit’s long decline hit bottom in 2013, when the city filed for what remains the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, with estimated debts of more than $18 billion. According to the filing, the debt load included $3.5 billion in underfunded pension liabilities, $6.4 billion in obligations backed by enterprise revenue, roughly $6 billion in health care costs for retired workers, and more than $1.4 billion in pension-related bonds that the city had been using to support retirees when it couldn’t pay its bills, among many other creditors. The Detroit Institute of Arts even considered selling its collection of masterpieces—which includes pieces from Diego Rivera, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and many more and valued at more than $8 billion in total—to help pay the city’s massive debts. Fortunately for Detroit and its residents, an emergency manager was brought in by the state. The debt was restructured and the city successfully exited bankruptcy in December 2014.
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