Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to live separately, in its own city — with its own tax bases and philanthropies that support, at one extreme, excellent schools, resplendent parks, rapid-response security, efficient transportation and other first-rate services; or, at the opposite extreme, terrible schools, dilapidated parks, high crime and third-rate services.
Detroit is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in the midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its suburbs are among the richest in the nation.
Greater Detroit — which includes the suburbs — is among the nation’s top five financial centers and the top four centers of high-technology employment, and the second-biggest source of engineering and architectural talent. Not everyone is wealthy, to be sure, but the median household in the region earns close to $50,000 a year, and unemployment is no higher than the nation’s average.
The median household in Birmingham, Mich., close to the city of Detroit and within the same metropolitan area, earned more than $94,000 last year. In nearby Bloomfield Hills, the median was more than $150,000.
The median household income within the city of Detroit is around $26,000, and unemployment is staggeringly high. One out of three residents is in poverty.
From 2000 to 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of its population as the middle class and whites fled to the suburbs. That left it with depressed property values, abandoned neighborhoods, empty buildings, lousy schools, high crime and a dramatically shrinking tax base. More than half of its parks have closed in the last five years. Forty percent of its streetlights don’t work. Its population has fallen from a peak of 1.85 million in 1950 to about 700,000.
But metropolitan Detroit — Detroit and its suburbs — hasn’t shrunk. While the Detroit city population fell by 62 percent between 1950 and 2012, metropolitan Detroit grew by 42 percent. Detroit’s wealthy and most of its middle class moved from the city to the suburbs.
Much in modern America depends on where you draw boundaries, and who’s inside and who’s outside. Who is included in the social contract?
If “Detroit” is defined as the larger metropolitan area that includes its suburbs, it has enough money to provide all its residents with adequate if not good public services, without falling into bankruptcy. It would come down to a question of whether the more affluent areas of this “Detroit” were willing to subsidize the poor inner city through their tax dollars and help it rebound. That’s an awkward question that the more affluent areas would probably rather not have to face.
In an era of widening inequality, this is how wealthier Americans are quietly writing off the poor.
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