As a native Detroiter, I was saddened by the city’s decision to declare bankruptcy this week. But I was not surprised. The move was inevitable.
 
Everyone in Detroit knew that without enormous, radical change, the city was dying. They have known this since at least the early 1980s. But that radical change never came.

The city’s population peaked at almost 2-million in 1950, during the boom times of the post-war era. It then had the highest median income of any city in the United States. These days, it ranks 66th out of the largest 68 cities in the nation. And the population of the city has sunk to just above 700,000.
 
Yet the city still acts as if it has 2-million residents. Despite drastic cuts since 2000, Detroit is still one of the most overstaffed cities in the United States. As of 2011, it had one city employee for every 55 residents — by far the highest ratio in the United States. Public services remained bloated, and the bureaucracy remained clogged with useless union workers who could not be fired.
 
From 1961 onward, Detroit became the crucible into which progressives poured every utopian idea imaginable. The city spent more per capita on education, welfare and infrastructure than almost any other urban center in the country during the sixties and seventies. The city passed tough regulations, allowing city leaders to manage which businesses could open in the city, and which could not. Large bureaucratic city service industries bloomed, usually controlled by local labor unions. It was essentially a state-controlled capitalist economy.
 
The cycle was kept alive because of the boom times in the auto industry. Then the gas crisis of the 1970s put an end to that, as General Motors, Ford, American Motors, and Chrysler all struggled with market changes.
 
Race issues became politically dominant. Mayor Coleman Young was considered a leading African American progressive when he became leader of Detroit in 1974. But from the start, he was one of the main race-baiters of the Democrat Party, and blamed many of the ills of the city on the rich, white upper class. (Among black leaders at the time, the claim was widespread that whites were conspiring to drown blacks in drugs, and thereby “keep the black man down.”)

In his inaugural address, the mayor stated, “I issue a warning to all those pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road [the traditional demarcation of 'Black' Detroit and the 'white' rich suburbs to the north]. And I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.”
 
Many mark it as the moment at which whites became uneasy in the city of Detroit, a sentiment that further stimulated the “white flight” that had begun with the race riots of 1967. This process ultimately drove much of the city’s intellectual and financial capital into the suburbs, and largely segregated the metropolitan area.
 
Almost nothing can be done in the city without union oversight
 
As the city started hemorrhaging money, how did it react? First, it increased local taxes up to the constitutional limit within Michigan: To this day, Detroit has the highest tax rates in the state. It increased union protections to the maximum; almost nothing can be done in the city without union oversight. And, as noted above, it refused to scale back city services, despite a bloated bureaucracy whose size could no longer match the small population.
 
Detroit is now a largely abandoned city. There are approximately 78,000 vacant structures. Approximately 38,000 are considered dangerous. The population will likely drop below 700,000 in the next census. Large swathes of the city are completely empty. (This has become so much of a problem that the city recently tried to relocate individuals in sparse areas in order to restructure city services in a way that made some fiscal sense. But many of the residents refused to move, even when given new homes.)