Detroit Is Eating Its Own Corpse

03 Feb, 2015 by Dave Blount

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Detroit was held forward as a Model City, the archetype for liberal Great Society ideology applied to municipal governance — the results of which were stratospheric unemployment and property taxes. Put those two together and you get this:

Michigan in 1999 changed the way its local governments deal with people who fail to pay their property taxes, replacing a system of tax liens with foreclosure. Yet the number of foreclosures did not reach what advocates here view as a crisis level until years later, when the national recession hastened the city’s problems with blighted properties and population decline. By last year, at least 70,000 foreclosures had taken place here since 2009, not for unpaid mortgages but for failure to pay property taxes.

Of the 62,000 city properties subject to foreclosure this year, more than half are believed to be occupied; nearly 13,000 are probably vacant lots. Some portion of the properties facing foreclosure were also eligible for it a year ago or more, but officials had delayed pursuing them in part because the numbers had grown too large for county workers to handle so many proceedings.

The last Detroiters will be living in igloos — until the same Big Government that destroyed their city starts taxing those too and throws them out for not being able to pay.

The city would already be completely uninhabitable if it were not kept half-alive by state and federal subsidies. As the Detroit model is increasingly applied to the country as a whole, eventually there will be no one to loot to pay for these subsidies. The result will be total economic collapse, an explicit objective of the Cloward–Piven leftism personified by Obama. The idea is that this will lead to communism.

In 1960, just before it contracted a terminal case of liberalism that sent it into the Democrat Death Spiral, Detroit had the highest per capita income in the USA.