When I was arguing with someone about sprawl in declining “legacy cities,” I ran into the following argument (loosely paraphrased): “The reason places like Detroit are declining isn’t because of sprawl but because of municipal corruption and mismanagement. Fix that instead of worrying about suburbia.”
At first glance, this argument seems appealing: after all, one former mayor of Detroit is in prison, and Detroit’s low level of public services is certainly highly suspicious.
Nevertheless, I am not sure the argument is provable, because there is no easy way to quantify mismanagement; thus, there is no objective way to verify that Detroit is any more mismanaged than more prosperous cities.
There appears to be little evidence that Detroit is unusually corrupt: more affluent cities and suburbs have had equally scandalous governments. For example, Atlanta has gained population for two decades in a row, despite having a mayor who served prison time for tax evasion and a major scandal in its public schools (involving over 100 teachers and principals who rewrote students’ incorrect answers on standardized tests).
Fast-growing suburbs have also had questionable leadership: Orange County, California declared bankruptcy in 1994 because of some foolish investment decisions and has a former sheriff who in 2009 collected over $200,000 in pension payments despite a felony conviction.
Detroit’s decline also should not be blamed on fiscal liberalism: although Detroit’s spending level in 2011 ($5,437 per capita in direct expenditures) exceeded the national urban average, it spent about the same amount as Atlanta ($5,408) and less than Nashville (just over $6,200) or San Francisco (which spent over $11,000 per resident) (NOTE: more details are available in this database).
It seems to me more likely that Detroit’s inadequate public services and fiscal problems are a result rather than a cause of its decline. When a community has an extremely poor population, it will, other things being equal, spend more money on poverty-related social services and have a weaker tax base. So, other things being equal, a resident of a low-income city such as Detroit will pay more and get less from government than a resident of a more middle-income city or a rich suburb. Similarly, a poor city should, other things being equal, have worse political leadership than a richer one, for the simple reason that when most of a city’s middle class has fled to suburbia, its electoral talent pool should be smaller.
Some commentators have made the decline of Detroit a partisan issue, blaming Detroit’s problems on 50 years of Democratic mayors. But this argument might confuse cause and effect: a city that loses its middle class will usually lose most of its Republicans, thus creating one-party rule. In fact, Detroit is an excellent example of this political shift: Detroit had Republican mayors from 1950 to 1962, who (like many Democratic mayors) bulldozed much of the city to build expressways to suburbia, thus facilitating Republican migration into the suburbs and destroying their own political base.
(cross-posted from Planetizen.com)
Your post about the “causes” and “effects” of Detroit’s decline are interesting and insightful. I think it is also fair to say that there are many feedback loops that create “chicken-and-egg” situations whereby some effects become causes that magnify or amplify the rise or decline of communities.
The decline of cities and the rise of suburbs characterize sprawl. And sprawl can be both environmentally and fiscally unsustainable. So finding a key factor to reverse this dynamic is critical to making progress.
Communities become prosperous through the enterprise of their residents and the creation of public infrastructure. Increasing population, prosperity and public infrastructure cause land prices to rise. Owners of prime downtown sites not only have a monopoly on these sites, but they feel that over time these sites will only get more valuable. Thus, they may increase rents (reflecting anticipated future land value increases) while allowing their buildings to deteriorate. This creates an incentive for both residents and businesses to flee. The extension of roads and utilities to nearby farmland makes that flight possible, opening up cheap farmland for development. If downtown landlords overplay their hand, the suburban locations become the up-and-coming communities while the central city withers away.
Of course, suburban locations are subject to the same dynamics as land speculators will soon control prime sites there as well. And thus, development gets pushed further and further away from the central city.
The private appropriation of publicly-created land value is a key cause for the decline of cities and the creation of sprawl. As mentioned above, this is unsustainable both environmentally and fiscally (due to the duplication of expensive infrastructure) unsustainable.
There is an intervention that has been shown to be effective. Some communities have reduced the cost of constructing, improving and maintaining buildings by reducing the property tax rate applied to privately-created building values. This makes buildings cheaper for residents and businesses. Simultaneously, they have reduced profit from land speculation by increasing the property tax rate applied to publicly-created land values. By reducing the speculative demand for land, this helps keep land prices more affordable as well. Because a tax on land cannot be avoided, it motivates the owners of prime sites to develop these sites intensively in order to bring in income from which to pay the tax. Thus, it creates an incentive for infill development rather than sprawl.
Combining effective infrastructure user fees with “value capture” as described above can help rejuvenate central cities while keeping them more affordable for the residents and businesses who need to be there. Allowing property users (residents and businesses) to prosper is the key to keeping cities healthy and sustainable. For more info, see “Funding Infrastructure for Growth, Sustainability and Equity” at http://media.wix.com/ugd/ddda66_d46304b5437c178e2f092319a6f30364.pdf
“Detroit had Republican mayors from 1950 to 1962, who (like many Democratic mayors) bulldozed much of the city to build expressways to suburbia, thus facilitating Republican migration into the suburbs and destroying their own political base.”
Having grown up in Michigan, I know that no mayor of Detroit ever did this or had the power to do this, rather they were a State-Federal project.
The chicken and egg comment above is rather on the money, too. Detroit was not always poor or its population poor, in fact for decades the family incomes in Detroit were well above the national average. Social mobility, race riots, white flight, Arab Oil Embargo, Japanese imports, southern state low corporate tax rate, corporate flight, black flight, political extortion, racketeering and corruption… well there’s 50 years boiled down to a paragraph.
I thank Big Bill for pointing out the imprecision in my language, since it is indeed the case that expressways are usually state/federal projects; however, expressways are more likely to be built in places where local public officials support them (as big-city mayors generally did in the mid-20th century).