With crippling debt and internal problems, last week the city of Detroit filed Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest city ever to do so. The debt is estimated to be between $18 and $20 billion by Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr. The declaration is the last straw of the city’s dire financial straits and struggling population problems, where it has lost more than half of its residents in the past 65 years, reducing from 1.8 million to 700,000.
Being the first city of this size to file for bankruptcy, there is no precedent for Detroit to follow. No city before it has been in this much financial trouble. And now the Motor City has to drag itself from the brink of collapse once again.
Detroit is at rock bottom, and now’s not the time to break out the “We are Detroit” T-shirts because the city is in real trouble and needs actual help. But, luckily, at rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.
To bring itself back to prominence is going to be no simple task, and it’s going to take the industry leaders of Detroit to help save it. The city needs investors to come to it and build something new that will want to make people come back to the city to work.
It needs people such as Little Caesars Pizza, Detroit Tigers and Detroit Red Wings owner and Detroit-native Mike Ilitch, who has invested millions of dollars into the city and is trying to build a new arena in downtown Detroit for the Red Wings. Or like Cleveland Cavaliers and Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, who moved the headquarters of Quicken Loans to Detroit and has purchased many abandoned buildings in the city to try to revitalize its urban core.
If Detroit can get people like this to the city, it might help convince college graduates to reconsider going to Detroit to work. Young professionals are the backbone of a populous city and help make it drive, so to speak. There’s little incentive for them to go right now but if a new investor or company makes its way to Detroit, then maybe that excitement will get people back to Detroit and make it the once-thriving city it was during its hayday.
Young professionals will not consider moving their lives to a city that can’t get its stuff together. When Detroit is able to show it can get industry to come and stay, then they’ll consider coming to the city.
Industry is what’s going to bring Detroit out of its pit of despair. Gov. Rick Snyder, who was elected in 2010 with a strong emphasis on the economy and using his business prowess to help Detroit, needs to prove he is able to do that and use his influence in the business world to bring workers to the city.
There’s no telling what Detroit’s going to look like in 20, or even 10 years. But what it does have is hope. Hope that something good will come out of declaring bankruptcy and it can come out a much stronger and more vibrant city.
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