Time on the Death of Detroit

Time magazine is the latest to jump on the bandwagon of MSM outlets who have reported on the "death of Detroit." A few sobering statistics first:

By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit's treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services. The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers' union to reject a philanthropist's offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit, the unemployment rate is 28.9%. That's worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.

Sobering images:

The neighborhood where I lived as a child, where for decades orderly rows of sturdy brick homes lined each block, is now the urban equivalent of a boxer's mouth, more gaps than teeth. Some of the surviving houses look as if the wrecker's ball is the only thing that could relieve their pain. On the adjacent business streets, commercial activity is so palpably absent you'd think a neutron bomb had been detonated — except the burned-out storefronts and bricked-over windows suggest that something physically destructive happened as well.

Who to blame: White racists? Coleman Young? John Dingell? The UAW? I'm tired for the "white racists" being the most culpable for the blame when it's now been two generations plus on horrible, racist Detroit governance, the backwards auto industry, family breakdown and the whining welfare state, a culture of blame that everyone else is culpable of breaking down the city except its residents, and the country's worst education system.

It's so easy to find blame. So hard to make the decisions to change.