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"I think it (the fiscal disaster) was inevitable because the politicians in Detroit were always knocking the can forward, not confronting the issues, buying off public employees by increasing their pensions," said Daniel Okrent, a Detroit native who wrote a Time magazine cover story on the city in 2009. "They were always kind of confronting the impending crisis by trying to make it the next guy's crisis." Racial strife also infected the city. Sugrue, the Pennsylvania professor, said some of the tensions surfaced long before the city's infamous 1967 riots. Two decades earlier, between 1945 and 1965, he said, there were more than 200 violent racial incidents of whites attacking blacks in Detroit and almost all stemmed from the first or second black families moving into an all-white neighborhood. The migration of blacks into Detroit, which helped power its economic rise, was followed by an exodus of white residents for the suburbs. In the last decade alone
-- from 2000 to 2010 -- Detroit lost about a quarter-million residents. The city's current population of roughly 700,000 is about 83 percent black. "Unlike cities such as Chicago or Philadelphia, where segregation produced disinvestment in certain neighborhoods, the nature of segregation in Detroit meant that the entire city suffered disinvestment," Douglas Massey, a sociology and public affairs professor at Princeton, said in an email. What's left is a Detroit defined by a barren landscape of deserted neighborhoods and abandoned buildings that overwhelms the very recent rebound in parts of downtown. The consequences of that population loss and segregation extend beyond the declining property values and erosion of the city's tax base. The result is an isolated city. "The racial divisions between the city and the suburbs until very recently remained very hard and fast, creating an us vs. them mentality," Sugrue said. "There's very little political will ... by suburbanites and other parts of the state to provide financial support." Indeed, it was the state's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who ultimately pushed control of the overwhelmingly Democratic city's decrepit finances into the hands of an emergency manager and signed off from the state capital in Lansing to his recommendation that Detroit file for bankruptcy. There appears to be little appetite there for a bailout. "Cities are less powerful in the federal government and state capitals that they were 40 years ago," Sugrue said. For those directly impacted by the collapse, watching the deterioration of Detroit in recent years has been agonizing. "The neighborhood is so different -- the street lights go off, there's more violence and gunfire, the elementary school I went to is closed and boarded up," said Sareta Cheathem, a filmmaker and screenwriter who has lived in Detroit all her 42 years. "I remember as a child winning the
'beautiful block' awards . just to see the decay is something that bothers me." Cheathem said her 92-year-old neighbor was robbed last year and thieves have tried to break into her home and garage. "My heart won't let me leave," she said, later adding, "One more attack and I'm out." As for the bankruptcy filing, Cheathem said that has been "gutwrenching" and leaves her wondering "Is it going to get worse? Can it get any worse?" Or will it signal the beginning of Detroit's turnaround and comeback? Boyle, the history professor, has reservations about what is actually possible in a place that's fallen so far. "I don't think it'll ever come back to the city it once was," he said. "The bankruptcy is not in itself a solution. It will presumably clear the debt. Something will have to happen for it not to repeat this pattern five or 10 years from now. Hopefully this will make life livable in this city. I think it's doable. But I'm not sure there's the will to do it."
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