My personal take is that we need to first be able to figure out what the issues actually are. Figure out what went wrong and fix them.
In Michigan all we need to do is look at Detroit. My take on that is we go back to just after WWII. Detroit was a great city, we have the auto industry booming and Detroit was the center of the world.
Then because of the baby boom and auto's being everywhere, and roads being built everywhere the middle class no longer had to live in close proximity to everything and started to move further and further away from the city.
But a significant snag in Detroit (and Cleveland) vs cities like New York or Chicago, is that the tax codes in Detroit are set as an area. Other major cities had the power to expand their tax region beyond their borders. So people would move just outside the border and no longer have to pay into the system they were using. So the city coffers started to drop, and services started to feel the squeeze.
But at the same time apartment vacancies started to increase as people moved out. The people that owned the apartment buildings where being destroyed by the people all leaving and needed to find new people to live in their buildings. So to entice people to move in they turned to the south where there was a lot of racial tension and advertised to them to move up and work in the auto industry (which was very open to hiring black people).
So you start to replace a high wage (and high tax base) middle class white people that had been building wealth for a while, with a very poor (and virtually non existent tax base) class of black people that had zero wealth. So all the tax revenues where fleeing the city and being replaced with the issues of poverty (not black people, go to any poor neighborhood in the world and you will see drugs, theft, crime, ect, doesn't matter what the race of the people are).
Here is my leap.
You then have white people that are not as well off as the people that were moving out staying behind and seeing their city falling into ruins. The roads falling apart, trash building up, poor people everywhere, drug increase, crime increase, ect. And walking home they no longer see the friendly white faces that where there before, instead you see the desperate look of the poor pasted on black faces. It is only logical that the most visible change will be the one that gets the blame. So it gets put onto the black neighbor, instead of the economic reasons that the city borders should have been redrawn to include the royal oaks, st. claire shores, gross isle, birmingham, melvindale, talyor, garden city, ect. In order to continue to have a prosperous city.
Then the cycle of poverty that exploded into the Detroit riots would never have had to happen.
Ok, so that may be a small stretch, but you live here. If you think back to all the stories you heard growing up here does this train of thinking not fit? I don't know how many times I have heard from older people in my family say something along the lines of he is a good black guy, but most of them I don't like. It is because they got to know the person and it took the racial profile off of them, but the generalization was still there for every other black person. And I don't know about you but for every person in my family that has been mildly successful there are about 5 that are bums.
So if that is the case, that all the things that get put onto a racial issues instead should be put into a poverty issue, then we have a good starting off point.
We are continuing to sprawl across our country and our resources are really being pushed to the brink. For a town in the country who has a few hundred kids, those schools still take several million dollars to build and operate. And that is money that could have been consolidated with other schools in a city.
It may not be too realistic. But what I think would be best is to consolidate as a group our economic centers. Like if you live in the country and work in Ann Arbor you should drive your children to school in Ann Arbor instead of having to have a bus system get your child and bring them to a small school, all of which is very inefficient. But this will take schools and force them to adapt to our needs as a service economy (and no longer be designed around an agricultural society). They should be a almost 24 hour service, so that your children are in the school while you are at work.
I just thought of how nice it would be that when our kids are done with their school day they are done. They would not have to worry about homework or studying (there would be exceptions, but if they are in school the same amount of time we work, they would be able to get everything done) when they get home. And as a society we could ensure that a parent is home when they are.
Once we have a more educated and consolidated workforce, businesses would prosper, we would prosper, and our children would become better educated, and they would be able to better improve everything in the next generations.
The pressure should be put onto the education system to adapt to our needs. Having a 4 month gap in year is utterly nonsense in this day and age. One of the biggest benefits I think that would take place in the cities is that it would help to stop criminals from having entire summers to get their hooks into our kids due to being outside all day everyday because you have nothing at home and nothing you need to be worrying about.
