Neighborhood, region, globe

I recently wrote about John Gallagher's book, Reimagining Detroit. He has now written a second, Revolution Detroit. Last Sunday's Free Press (where Gallagher is a journalist) had a summary of the book as an editorial. A couple things he wrote about:

Simply cutting city government expenses won't work. The books can only be balanced through "grossly inadequate public services, deferred maintenance and replacement of infrastructure and capital stock, and disproportionately high local taxes," as Alan Mallach and Eric Scorsone of the Center for Community Progress put it. Gallagher adds, "We cannot pick up somewhere close to 90% of a city's jobs, population and tax base, move it to the suburbs, and expect what's left behind to function normally. It doesn't work anymore. It cannot work." He adds, "Blaming teachers and municipal unions is a side show."

So what's a city to do? Break some city services away from the city. Send some "upstream" to the regional level, such as a regional transit authority (which looks like it is being done). Send others "downstream" to neighborhood level groups, which know the needs of the neighborhood. Gallagher discusses University Circle, Inc in Cleveland as an example of how this could work. Overall the emphasis shifts from federal-state-local to neighborhood-regional-global.

For those who don't keep up on Detroit news: the City Council protested Gov. Rick Snyder's appointment of an Emergency Manager, asking for more time to work on last year's consent agreement with the state. But they've already missed many deadlines in that document. Mayor Dave Bing said he would rather work with an EM than challenge the appointment. Snyder thought about it for a day or two and made his appointment of an EM official.