Despite Detroit's economic shortfalls, this
Freep editorial says Detroit Mayor Dave Bing needs to think about right-sizing the city now rather than later.
Excerpt:
Bing must set in motion some long-term fixes, or Detroit will lurch
from crisis to crisis. At the very least, he should order the city’s
planning department to begin studying neighborhood population and
economic development trends over the next 25 years. That information
will be needed before the city revises the master plan.
The city’s
fiscal emergency gives the mayor and city a teachable moment — a
telling example of why this process is necessary. Urban experts like
John Mogk of Wayne State University have pressed the issue of
consolidating population for more than a decade, and most city leaders
now understand that it is necessary.
Youngstown,
Ohio, a smaller city with similar problems, has given Detroit, and the
entire nation, a blueprint for how a city can creatively downsize by
consolidating neighborhoods and creating parks and
greenways.Right-sizing Detroit will take years. The city must start the
process now if it wants to sustain a quality-of-life that will
stabilize its population and tax base and avoid continual fiscal
emergencies.
Read the entire article
here.
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