Detroitification
2020-09-13
Seattle, and other major cities, are going to turn into Detroit in the near future, unless something is done about it.
How Detroit Happened
Detroit used to be the auto manufacturing center of the country. It hosted companies that provided long-term skilled labor jobs, complete with social mobility and excellent benefits. Workers could expect to buy a nice house for their family, have a trade they could be proud of, and retire happy knowing that the company did right by them.
This dream was short-lived, only lasting around 30 years. By the 80s, US automakers were in serious trouble - more efficient cars were needed to cope with gas shortages and onerous emissions requirements, Japanese competitors had closed the technological gap and were out-competing the US; American motor companies were struggling.
In response, they outsourced their jobs overseas. They turned their back on their ostensibly highly-valued workforce. Detroit went into a decline that continues today.
What Happened to Detroit
The Detroit race riots need no introduction, requiring military intervention to halt. Over a thousand were recorded wounded, about 50 killed. Black citizens took out their discontent with city leadership on the visible arm of the city; the police, and storefronts. Looting, burning, murder, assault, rape, wholesale anarchy in the Hollywood sense. Detroit became, for a time, a complete battleground between racists and government forces. This strongly drove away white residents, who saw little reason to stay in a declining city that couldn’t keep a lid on violence.
The racism of the rioters was unquestionably a cause of "white flight", but if that’s what made them think about leaving, Milliken is what sealed the city’s fate. Milliken v. Bradley held that school districts in other cities were not required to take kids from outside their district. Which would… defeat the point of districting in the first place. The result was that Detroit could not hand kids off to other districts to sap their resources - it had to pay for its own schools for its own residents. In a further twist of laughably bad judgement, the City argued (successfully) that it needed to use bussing to "de-segregate" the schools. In short, this meant the city taking kids from one school and distributing them to a different school, based on their race, rather than location. It spread out white kids such that no school had a white majority. It should not be a particular surprise that, after the black population had just brought the deadliest and costliest riots in the history of the country to Detroit streets, that white parents feared for their children’s lives and futures - exacerbating their willingness to leave a dying city behind.
This process ended somewhere in the 90s, but 30 years later, Detroit is still a ruined mess. Forbes did quite a decent job at listing the continued causes, but I’d like to summarize and extrapolate a bit.
First, Detroit was a blue city. At the time, this meant that it had extremely high taxes, high municipal spending, and took great effort to control the people and businesses within it. In the good years, with companies bringing home ever-more bacon, this was forgivable. However, Detroit’s leadership did not cope with falling tax revenues and population by cutting spending or considering a future for the city - instead successive administrations simply increased the tax rate to make up for lost revenue, overtaxed their residents, and got worse at hiding their corruption.
So businesses left, then racism and violence pushed away most residents, and the city continues its downward spiral by having city leadership that seems to not care about how bad the city gets - as long as they line their pockets and press releases.
How is this similar to today?
I live in the Seattle area, so I’m going to talk chiefly about Seattle, as it’s what I know intimately. We already have extensive corruption, the investigation for which is way too extensive to get into here (but start with this article if you want to). Suffice to say the City Council and mayor participate in buying votes, kickbacks to "charities" that disappear afterwards, and farming signatures for state initiatives. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a smaller scale version of what Detroit was found to be doing.
More pertinently, we have unconstitutional governor-mandated lockdowns and fashion requirements that the city enthusiastically enforces. This has led to the largest companies in the city to have their workers work from home - begging the question why they need expensive Seattle commercial real estate in the first place. Many, if not most, of the profitable businesses in Seattle are white-collar jobs. They do not handle raw materials, finish goods, or provide any kind of physical product - they just move bits around in computers. There’s no reason for them to be in proximity to each other, and there never has been.
The lockdowns have provided the "push" that companies needed to evacuate the city, and they’re doing it in droves. While some continue to open offices in nearby cities (Bellevue being noteworthy for hosting companies like Expedia, Amazon, Valve, F5, and other large tech companies), many workers (including your truly) are starting to seriously consider never going into an office again - either out of ignorance about virology, or simply convenience.
And, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the race riots - while CHAZ was a visible tumor of this movement, daily marches and riots continue to this day. Burning, assaults, looting, intimidation of residents in their homes at night, and repeated attempted murders (such as trying to burn a police building down and sealing the door with quick-crete) are still happening.
These are the three ingredients that seem to result in a city’s death - businesses leaving, workers leaving, racists causing violence in the street, and corruption. I call this mixture "Detroitification", but i’m sure an enterprising soul will find a better word for what happens to Seattle.
How can it be stopped?
Cities have been obsolete for around a decade, possibly longer. Unless there is a strong industrial sector, a city full of white collar workers has no real need to exist. The question is not how to preserve the city in amber, but how to control and adapt to a shrinking of the city, rather than growth of the city.
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of models for how to do this. Cities tend to run themselves into the ground, struggling to spend their way out of a natural decline in business and population. A complete collapse tends to be the realistic end result, and stopping that is… probably not feasible.
The most obvious thing is a need to discard corruption. Corruption is only "benign" if a city is growing too fast for the leeches to suck it dry - but in the case that a city shrinks, corruption becomes painfully obvious and a clear hindrance to doing what needs to be done. In Seattle’s case, the mayor and most of the Council need to be replaced - not with another socialist sympathizer, but with a problem-solver willing to coordinate the city around downsizing. A reduction is pointless social programs, onerous regulations, and a willingness to defeat the rapidly increasing crime (a lot of which goes un-prosecuted, due to a DA that refuses to press charges against drug-addicted or homeless criminals). If spending is to be increased, it will need to come from borrowing, which is a recipe for bankrupcy. Falling recipts will mean that margins for making payments against outstanding debt will become harder to maintain, and this is dangerous. Very likely creditors will need to accept renogotiation, which will itself cost money.
It’s unlikely that the city will do any of this, it will probably continue to raise taxes, borrow heavily, pander to criminal and terrorist elements, and ultimately collapse under the weight of its own democratic leadership.
