DETROIT IS LIKE a canvas of chaotic art, a Gerard Richter or Pollock, standing starkly out against the blank white room that surrounds it. You find yourself drawn in, compelled to stop and gaze at it. Whether it’s ruin porn or the saga of Kwame or now our new state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager, it’s hard to look away.
The national press has duly documented this most recent drama, how Governor Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Financial Manager to studiously go through the city’s books and find a way to stave off bankruptcy. Orr is like some old man in a ramshackle rooming house desperately digging through every drawer to find change for the fare as the sound of the last bus barreling down the street shakes the whole stucture. It isn’t pretty.
Recently, Mr. Orr made the surprising suggestion the city pay its debts off by selling various treasures from the Detroit Institute of Arts. The thought being that an auction of a few pieces by Van Gogh, Matisse, Bruegel and Copleys might be enough to satisfy our hungry creditors. I’m sure he had a good reason for suggesting such a thing (after all, city services can’t really be cut much deeper. As the excellent documentary “Burn” points out, this is a city where the Fire Commissioner vacuums his own office). Still, the logic behind Mr. Orr’s tactic escapes me. Since a variety of legal constraints exclude the possibility of any works being sold, all his proposal did was make a lot of very serious people extremely upset. Perhaps that was his goal, who knows. I sincerely believe he has good intentions. As opposed to many here who view him and his mission with suspicion – many were angry at him before he even began –I wish him every success and I do not envy him his task.
His is an exceedingly difficult job. This week he is going into negotiations with the various institutions that own Detroit’s city bonds, institutions that include various large banks.
If he were to ask me, I would offer one very simple solution: Ask the banks to pay back the banks. Maybe not all of the debt, but they could cover a good chunk of it and without even having to write a check.
I am not talking about a loan; we are poor as church mice with nothing to mortgage really (except for perhaps José Valverde’s contract; seriously, we’ll give that to you cheap). Also, I am not asking for a favor or a kindness or an act of benevolence. And I am not talking about class war; no, nothing fancy like that. But there is a logic to why they should help us out, and it goes like this:
Over the past decade, the banks have evicted many, many people in Detroit from their homes.
These were people who either did or did not deserve to be evicted. Perhaps they did not deserve loans in the first place. I am not interested in going over any of that at this time; mine is a very a different point.
For what is interesting is what happened next:
After these evictions occurred, the banks did not foreclose the homes. They simply let the houses rot.
In other words, as opposed to following the due diligence of a functioning system, wherein these banks would have gone through the legal process of actually foreclosing the home, earning back the home’s title, and then paying the taxes on the property until the property was sold to a new owner, they did nothing. They simply walked away.
So, for starters, they owe taxes on those homes. Not just a few homes; thousands of homes. That’s lot of taxes. When you’re done adding everything that’s owed, it’s probably worth more than a few Chagalls.
Then there’s this: by letting those homes rot, these banks caused the depreciation of all the other homes in all those neighborhoods, block after block, along nearly every avenue, street and boulevard. Each one of these abandoned homes pulls the value of all those other buildings down.
These banks were like the shark in Copley’s famous painting (at the Detroit Institute of Arts, of course), attacking the vulnerable drowning figure in the water. The victims were honest and hard working, and their homes were suddenly worth less. What followed was predictable: a shrinking tax base, the city unable to pay its bills, cut services. So now the police don’t show up, the firemen are understaffed, people are less safe, people move away, more homes stand empty, and the banks didn’t know or didn’t care. Having made the money they were going to make, they simply swam on.
DETROIT IS LIKE a canvas of chaotic art, a Gerard Richter or Pollock, standing starkly out against the blank white room that surrounds it. You find yourself drawn in, compelled to stop and gaze at it. Whether it’s ruin porn or the saga of Kwame or now our new state-appointed Emergency Financial Manager, it’s hard to look away.
The national press has duly documented this most recent drama, how Governor Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Financial Manager to studiously go through the city’s books and find a way to stave off bankruptcy. Orr is like some old man in a ramshackle rooming house desperately digging through every drawer to find change for the fare as the sound of the last bus barreling down the street shakes the whole stucture. It isn’t pretty.
Recently, Mr. Orr made the surprising suggestion the city pay its debts off by selling various treasures from the Detroit Institute of Arts. The thought being that an auction of a few pieces by Van Gogh, Matisse, Bruegel and Copleys might be enough to satisfy our hungry creditors. I’m sure he had a good reason for suggesting such a thing (after all, city services can’t really be cut much deeper. As the excellent documentary “Burn” points out, this is a city where the Fire Commissioner vacuums his own office). Still, the logic behind Mr. Orr’s tactic escapes me. Since a variety of legal constraints exclude the possibility of any works being sold, all his proposal did was make a lot of very serious people extremely upset. Perhaps that was his goal, who knows. I sincerely believe he has good intentions. As opposed to many here who view him and his mission with suspicion – many were angry at him before he even began –I wish him every success and I do not envy him his task.
His is an exceedingly difficult job. This week he is going into negotiations with the various institutions that own Detroit’s city bonds, institutions that include various large banks.
If he were to ask me, I would offer one very simple solution: Ask the banks to pay back the banks. Maybe not all of the debt, but they could cover a good chunk of it and without even having to write a check.
I am not talking about a loan; we are poor as church mice with nothing to mortgage really (except for perhaps José Valverde’s contract; seriously, we’ll give that to you cheap). Also, I am not asking for a favor or a kindness or an act of benevolence. And I am not talking about class war; no, nothing fancy like that. But there is a logic to why they should help us out, and it goes like this:
Over the past decade, the banks have evicted many, many people in Detroit from their homes.
These were people who either did or did not deserve to be evicted. Perhaps they did not deserve loans in the first place. I am not interested in going over any of that at this time; mine is a very a different point.
For what is interesting is what happened next:
After these evictions occurred, the banks did not foreclose the homes. They simply let the houses rot.
In other words, as opposed to following the due diligence of a functioning system, wherein these banks would have gone through the legal process of actually foreclosing the home, earning back the home’s title, and then paying the taxes on the property until the property was sold to a new owner, they did nothing. They simply walked away.
So, for starters, they owe taxes on those homes. Not just a few homes; thousands of homes. That’s lot of taxes. When you’re done adding everything that’s owed, it’s probably worth more than a few Chagalls.
Then there’s this: by letting those homes rot, these banks caused the depreciation of all the other homes in all those neighborhoods, block after block, along nearly every avenue, street and boulevard. Each one of these abandoned homes pulls the value of all those other buildings down.
These banks were like the shark in Copley’s famous painting (at the Detroit Institute of Arts, of course), attacking the vulnerable drowning figure in the water. The victims were honest and hard working, and their homes were suddenly worth less. What followed was predictable: a shrinking tax base, the city unable to pay its bills, cut services. So now the police don’t show up, the firemen are understaffed, people are less safe, people move away, more homes stand empty, and the banks didn’t know or didn’t care. Having made the money they were going to make, they simply swam on.
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