Kevyn Orr, Detroit emergency manager and top city government official, On July 18, he presented to the courts the bankruptcy petition of the famous autocity. Gone are sixty years of decline during which the quintessential automobile city has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and inhabitants.
The magnitude of the debt is estimated at $ 18 to $ 20.000 billion, and the federal government headed by Barack Obama is not expected to take over. It may be refinanced by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, although this is not certain either. What is more likely is that Motown I've finally hit rock bottom
For most fans, the situation in which Detroit finds itself is not a surprise, since for years we have witnessed its gradual collapse through the media. The images of the city, assimilated to those of the abandoned Packard factory, have been around the world and constitute an eloquent testimony to the ephemerality of human creation.
Detroit had just 260.000 residents when, in 1900, it became a hub of industrial development. It was a kind of Silicon Valley of the automobile in which brands emerged by the dozen - in 1907 they did so no more and no less than 82 - and where technological innovation little by little would give rise to the best cars before 1945.
And the fact is that the world of competition was taken over by European machines, but the streets of big cities ... that was something else. American brands, concentrated under the umbrella of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, made the most comfortable, fast, and technologically advanced automobiles of their time.
These conglomerates supplied the first mass market in history, a way of life that would only reach the Old Continent from the 1910s. Between 1950 and 92 the Yankee population grew from 150 to XNUMX million inhabitants, and all those who became heads of the family sooner or later wanted a car supplied by one of the Big Three from Detroit.
For its part, the population of the city, stimulated by the opportunities offered by the buoyant automobile industry, grew to 1.6 million inhabitants in 1930, to 1.8 in 1950, the year in which it reached its greatest population. Given the purely working-class nature of the production chains and the hard work that was carried out in them, the workers organized themselves into unions, negotiating favorable salary and working conditions.
Living in Detroit and being an employee of one of the Big Three was, in the early 1960s, having fulfilled the American dream. Humble human beings, through their effort and perseverance at work, had earned the right to enter the middle class and to enjoy a sufficiently comfortable lifestyle that included a house with a garden, a television and two cars. Twenty years later, hourly wages were still 32% higher than the national average.
Not everything was progress, it is true, there being a significant racial segregation that led to the bloodless and well-known riots of 1967. Faced with the city's fame, a large number of black people had come from the south to settle and prosper like the others. , and today, weighed down by the covert racism that still survives in American society, it is the only one that remains.
between heaven and hell
Having a safe market led General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to believe that they could pass their wage costs on to the final consumer. But this panorama progressively changed with the arrival of Japanese cars that, although at the end of the sixties they did not seem to be a threat, with the economic crisis of the seventies they began to gain ground alarmingly. The other Big Three, Toyota, Nissan and Honda, would give a sort of checkmate to General Motors and Chrysler when the latter declared bankruptcy in 2009, having yielded approximately half of the US market to vehicle brands from the country of the sun. nascent.
The loss of competitiveness began in the immediate postwar period and inertia has practically dragged it down to the present day; coupled with prolonged political mismanagement and corporate relocation would cause Detroit to begin to bleed until losing approximately half of its population. Currently about 700.000 people live in Motown, of which 82% are black and poorly educated. Per capita income is $ 15.200 per year, extremely low for the country.
The white population soon moved to the outskirts, where the quality of life was better, turning, voluntarily or involuntarily, the city into a ghetto. To a large extent, the auto industry also flew in search of foreign states and territories where unions were less powerful. Since 2000 alone, Detroit has lost about 250.000 residents.
And yet, its extension is still 360 km2, more or less the same as sixty years ago. The maintenance cost is simply unaffordable and, therefore, 40% of urban lighting does not work and there are more than 78.000 abandoned buildings. The average time to attend an emergency is 58 minutes, and the unemployment figure is 16% and the crime rate has skyrocketed. These are just some statistical indicators of an urban situation that we could classify as disastrous.
The plan for the recovery of the autocity is the usual one nowadays, being its foundation the cuts in public services, in pensions and in the debt contracted with investors in municipal bonds. Also, its reconversion, as other American cities with problems have carried out, towards a viable economic sector, probably technological, services or financial that has nothing to do with the automobile industry. Finally, you need to reconfigure your space.
From The Escudería We wish the best to the new Detroit while we ask you not to forget your memorable past.
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