YES, MOTOWN IS DOWN
(…but will it be for the count?)

Detroit has just filed for bankruptcy, 18 Billion dollars worth of bankruptcy…which is a lot of zeroes…and might get it listed in the Guiness Book of records as the largest bankruptcy ever filed for a city…anywhere.

Of course it isn’t the first city to go bankrupt. Not so many years ago New York City, the Big Apple itself, went belly up., and many other around the country as well. Detroit is different only in the size of its bankruptcy.

Most of these kinds of bankruptcies come about from a convergence of factors such as outright mismanagement of public revenues, and decades long shortsighted fiscal planning and policies relying mainly on debt piled onto debt to cover for that. Compounding these factors is a lack of diversity in the business and industrial matrix upon which they have depended. Without that diversity, once a core industry declines, jobs fade, populations leave for greener pastures, all, eroding their tax base almost into a state of rigor mortis.

In Detroit’s case…all of these factors, not to mention a few heavy doses of corruption, brought it to its present sorry state.

So, yes, Motown is down…but will it be for the count? Much will depend on how well those charged with resurrecting it again understand what makes and keeps any city…viable. That is, cities are dynamic not static entities and to maintain viability they need to continuously adjust, perhaps even reinvent, the economic basis for their existence, which means, in Detroit’s case, focusing on how to create a new diversified business and commercial matrix rather than following the old formula of dependence on a single major industry.

Thus Detroit’s situation should be viewed as a golden opportunity to now take all that currently abandoned and derelict real estate surrounding its urban high-rise core, and reconfigure it into an array of self-contained districts or neighborhoods formed into a collective conglomerate as a new city on the southern end of those “straits”(from the French origin of its name meaning that) connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie; and, if that’s done in small incremental steps rather than with grandiose redevelopment schemes…that just might happen.

CENTURION