Hey, What About Me?

A lot of big news in the last couple of days.  OBL finally caught and justice administered by Navy Seals and a quick burial at sea, US Intelligence pouring over a trove of captured documents. US Army Corps of Engineers treats Illinois to a night time display while destroying a Mississippi River levee to save Cairo,IL from flooding. Canadian Conservatives win big and the BQ separatists seem to be reduced to a non-issue.

And from Detroit, the cry is raised, "Hey, What About Me?"  OK, not quite literally, but that's the sense of it. 

Mayor Dave Bing is trying to rejuvenate the city, and had offered abandoned homes for sale to policemen for $1,000 to get them to move back.  What good would that do? Well, it would help eliminate some vacant homes, hopefully start to stabilize neighborhoods, and put the properties back on the tax rolls for just a few things.  Cities don't just happen 'downtown' or in the Greektowns or at the casinos, or the sports arenas.  Their roots are in the neighborhoods.  And Detroit has some pretty bad neighborhoods.  Many look more like a war zone than anything else.

So now we have citizens saying, "Great, but what about me? What will you do for me? Lower my taxes?"  This sense of entitlement is the root of a lot of problems in big cities and in America. Yes, Detroit has a close to obscene tax rate (65 mils). Some folks in the really nice areas like Boston-Edision or Indian Village pay a lot of money ($7,000 happens a lot in those areas).  But in the other neighborhoods, that's not the case. 

I checked my childhood neighborhood (Delray in SW Detroit).  A lot of those folks are paying between $450-$900/yr of taxes.  Nicer areas in NW Detroit can pay up to around $3,000/yr.  It depends on the value of your house. My quick check is neither exhaustive nor qualitative, but I didn't se one single property that had a taxable value (TV) the same as the State Equalized Value (SEV), they were all sustantially lower on the TV.

Folks, it took DECADES for Detroit to get into its current predicament. It may take another DECADE to see momentum build in a turnaround.  Do what you can do to make it a better place. Band together with neighbors, clean up the trash, encourage police to return to the city and you'll start to see better emergency response times and things turn around.  It won't happen overnight. But if you give up except to fight the little bright spots like this program, it may never happen. And in the meantime, your neighbors that have the ability to move to the suburbs will do so.