That chasm you hear yawning and see getting wider is the split between the rich and everyone else. It's bad for America, but it comes home to roost when we see particular communities fall apart, and the conditions of life for everyday people get worse and worse. Just take a look at Detroit.
Detroit is no longer a functional community. It is in economic collapse, it can no longer provide the basic services that Americans take for granted, its fiscal condition is catastrophic and it is about to lose the democratic right to govern itself.
It is both useful and futile to apply blame. First, because everyone shares responsibility from the federal government, to the state government, to the elected leadership of the city, to the business and labor communities.
Second, because blame won't tell you how to get out of this mess.
And, most importantly, after we review the bad decisions, the dishonesty and the widespread indifference toward the growing number of urban collapses, we will have to face a much harder problem. It may be that the concept of cities as vibrant, diverse and livable communities is no longer sustainable. We may be at the end of that road.
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At the heart of that bleak conclusion is a growing awareness that the economic model that America created for its cities no longer works. For two centuries, our cities were economic hubs, set at transportation crossroads, hosting factories, providing employment for immigrants from overseas and people from less developed regions of America. Vibrant neighborhoods were created by families rich and poor alike, as the American middle class came of age in Chicago, New York, Syracuse, Buffalo and their sister cities. And Detroit.
The infrastructure that allowed this to happen was both physical and social. Subways and roads were built, but so were schools and parks. Our streets and homes were made safe by police, fire and sanitation workers. All that was paid for by property taxes, paid by homeowners to be sure, but also by the factories — Otis Elevator in Yonkers, Carrier in Syracuse, the auto companies in Detroit, meatpackers in Chicago.
For all kinds of big reasons, they're all gone. And they're not coming back.
And at the same time, cities remain magnets for the striving families of new immigrants, and for the poor who remain unable to move up economically. While many middle-class folks moved to suburbs, cities became home to the rich, and the poor. And however much more President Barack Obama can get from the rich for federal coffers, there's not a huge flow of property taxes in city coffers from the remaining rich, New York City and Los Angeles aside.
The model itself is broken. And no amount of control boards, service cuts and property tax increases will fix it.
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Some of the consequences are truly grotesque. In Detroit for example, some sectors of the private economy — large corporations and high-end small business — seem to be booming, a few hundred yards from neighborhoods where you can buy a respectable home for $25,000, but no one does.
All the corrosive consequences of racial injustice and segregation are seen and felt. Schools become social service providers, and there aren't enough cops or firefighters to protect people. Parks close. And the downward spiral continues.
Lest we feel insulated from those realities, remember that Detroit can happen here.
For anyone with eyes to see, the signs are there. Our big upstate cities are trying to get our attention. Smaller cities, counties, and school districts are careening toward the cliff, where bankruptcy and control boards await.
When it happens, it may not be as intense, we may have assets that Detroit had lost, we may have leadership better able to find a way out. But we're at a kind of crossroads.
Something is coming to New York, and we best look it in the face, now. Detroit may be the canary in the coal mine, the bird that dies to warn us to get out or change our ways.
Or it may be the next reality TV show, with winners and losers that vanish in the ether when we turn off the TV.
Help.
Richard Brodsky is a former state assemblyman from Westchester County. He is now a fellow at the Demos think tank in New York City and at the Wagner School at New York University.