Gentrification is a policy choice

Not as fun as it used to be for some anyway.

“Having to kick people out takes all the fun out of owning a house.”

Oren Goldenberg, a 31-year-old filmmaker based in Detroit, could have bought a $500 house at the Wayne County tax auction this fall-- but having to evict a homeowner turned him off.

Goldenberg had been burned before. He had made a previous purchase in the yearly tax foreclosure auction. His coup turned less appealing as he was confronted with the reality of removing the owner and then-occupant from her home. Goldenberg sold the house it back to its occupant for the bargain price of $7,000 – twice what he had paid for it, but half what she had owed in property taxes.

Now Goldenberg won’t consider an already-occupied house. “It goes into this long-term narrative of Detroit is vacant and empty and there’s no one here. So when you look at it and you think oh my god, we’re going to develop this area, no one thinks that you might be pushing people out.”

 No matter, it's the policy.  Detroit has decided the way to move forward is to first move all the poors out.

Detroit – — Wayne County has begun tax foreclosure proceedings on nearly 75,000 properties, a record number that includes thousands of delinquent accounts that officials have ignored for years.

Treasury workers last month began posting notices on the properties that the county plans to auction in fall 2015 if owners don't pay taxes or agree to payment plans. In Detroit alone, 62,000 properties owing $326.4 million in taxes, interest and fees are set to be foreclosed.

More than half of those Detroit homes — 37,000 — are occupied, according to Motor City Mapping data analyzed by Loveland Technologies. That has folks such as Sharon Weatherly fearing she eventually could be out on the street.

You don't clear out 37,000 households by accident.  This is not just "the free market at work." It is the consequence of deliberate policy where we foreclose on some for going delinquent on property taxes... but offer "incentives" to (meaning we don't collect taxes from) others.

Detroit is 83 percent African-American, and 38 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. But the older, blacker Detroit starkly contrasts with a whiter, wealthier new Detroit that's been wooed in by tax breaks and living incentives—which gives these evictions a heavily racial subtext.

 And it's not just Detroit.  Remember all the superstar Mayors in America's rapidly "revitalizing" cities get together and compare notes. 

In an exchange of ideas similar to what took place when former Detroit Mayor Dave Bing toured New Orleans three years ago, Mayor Mitch Landrieu planned an on-the-ground viewing of the Motor City's deteriorating housing stock for this weekend.

After speaking at the Mackinac Policy Conference Friday, Landrieu said that he hoped to offer advice to Detroit after his administration's blight strategy led to the mitigation in one way or another of roughly 10,000 blighted properties in New Orleans' historic neighborhoods, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. 

Green dots for thee but not for me

Not sure Detroit is a fully analogous situation to New Orleans. But just to add to the Sandy story from earlier, no one is suggesting that New York could learn any "lessons" from our experience with the green dot strategy.

The arguments heard in Detroit in recent years echo those that were made here at the time: The New Orleans population had been contracting long before Katrina and would certainly be much smaller afterward; even the billions of dollars in federal recovery aid would be insufficient to rebuild the whole city; those who came back would be stranded in parts of town lacking services like police protection and streetlights. 

New Orleans’s population, around 370,000, is less than 60 percent of what it was 50 years ago, when the city’s footprint was smaller. When New Orleans was still mostly vacated after Katrina, many here doubted the population would even recover this much and questioned the possibility of rebuilding over such a large area.

“You can’t bring it all back at one time,” said Mr. Canizaro, now keeping a lower profile. “We didn’t have the resources.”

Those who lived in the neighborhoods that were at stake in the plan were staying on couches and in guest bedrooms in Atlanta, Houston and Nashville, and focusing intently on how to get home. Decision makers may see a disaster as “an opportunity to finally get things right,” said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, but during those times, “everyone else craves normalcy.”

Again, I don't think Detroit's situation is a very good comparison with New Orleans. I don't know that "shrinking the footprint" is the right idea for Detroit either. It sounds like a bad idea, but I don't know enough to say. The difference with our situation, though,  is between shutting down largely abandoned neighborhoods and telling disaster victims they aren't welcome back because our "decision makers" want to "get it right" whatever that might mean.

Maybe they should try making a Hospitality Zone

City of Detroit files for bankruptcy.

Bad bad news.

Orr's spokesman Bill Nowling said, "Pension boards, insurers, it's clear that if you're suing us, your response is 'no.' We still have other creditors we continue to have meetings with, other stakeholders who are trying to find a solution here, because they recognize that, at the end of the day, we have to have a city that can provide basic services to its 700,000 residents."

This week, the city's two pension funds (which have claims to $9.2 billion in unfunded pension and retiree health care liabilities) filed suit in state court to prevent Orr from slashing retiree benefits as part of a bankruptcy restructuring.

Ambac Assurance Guaranty, which insures some of the city's general obligation bonds, has also objected to Orr's plan to treat those bonds as "unsecured," meaning they're not tied directly to a revenue stream and would receive pennies on the dollar of their value. Ambac, and other creditors, have threatened to file suit.

Sources agree that Orr's deal with creditors, widely reported to be Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG, to pay a $344-million swap with a $255-million debtor-in-possession loan, is instrumental in the timing of the bankruptcy filing.

Who gets paid first? Municipal retirees or Bank of America.  Can't wait to see how that works out.  Would it help if they opened a Booty's?

Well, sure

It only makes sense that the state that's already applying something like this model in order to remove its citizens's right to local self government is perfectly fine with using it to balkanize public education according to social status the way we do in New Orleans as well.

As difficult as it is to stay one step ahead in the awfulness sweepstakes, the Louisiana Legislature is doing is certainly trying.