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Walking to meet friends for a drink at Fleming's Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar in bustling downtown Birmingham, Michigan, Cindy Boudreau said she never goes into Detroit except for an occasional Red Wings hockey game. She doesn't see the point, especially now that the city is bankrupt.
For many Americans, the best medicine for a bankrupt, dilapidated, shrivelling Detroit would seem to be a good dose of the wrecking ball. The place is an unsightly and unmanageable mess, a shadow of the size and stature it once was.
But from Matt Cullen's perspective, a man who has seen the best and now the worst of Detroit, the right prescription for the city is development. Lots of it. Billions of dollars worth of buildings and infrastructure.
coupons national car rental "We would rather stay in the suburbs," Boudreau, a 66-year-old retired real-estate manager, said in an interview about a block from a park where children played on an Astroturf-covered mound. "We've got all we want here."
Boudreau's view exemplifies a generations-long divide between Detroit, where the per-capita income is US$15,261, and suburbs such as Birmingham, where it's US$67,580. Detroit's record US$18-billion bankruptcy case raises questions about how affluence can co-exist with poverty, coupons national car rental and whether urban areas with hollow cores can thrive.
Cities in Oakland County, which abuts Detroit, constitute what amounts to a parallel community that is whiter, richer and more Republican. L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive for 20 years, argues that Oakland can function apart from a failed Detroit — that Michigan's prosperity no longer depends on its largest city. Republican Governor Rick Snyder says the entire state's future is bound together.
"That's the debate that we really need," said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, an Ann Arbor nonprofit working coupons national car rental to improve the economy. "What's Detroit going to be? Is it going to be connected to the region or not? Is it going to be vibrant, and if it is, what's the role of the suburbs?"
Detroit became the fourth-largest U.S. city by 1950 with the growth of the auto industry, as what are now General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC churned out cars. Since then, 1 million coupons national car rental have left for places such as Oakland County, whose population more than tripled to 1.2 million.
Even so, Oakland's population growth has slowed and increased by less 1% between 2000 and 2010, Census data show. Population in the Detroit metropolitan statistical area declined by 3.5% to 4.3 million during that time, and per-capita income in the metro area also slipped relative to other areas with 1 million or more people, Glazer coupons national car rental said.
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The county is the state's wealthiest, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics. Cities such Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, where auto executives and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lived, are about 20 miles (32 kilometres) from Detroit's vast tracts of decay.
Oakland County's debt is rated Aaa by Moody's Investors Service and AAA by Standard Poor's, both the highest. It stayed that way even during the recession as the county lost 60,000 jobs in 2009 alone, following the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, said Patterson.
The 74-year-old administrator said he'll make a pitch to the rating companies, at meetings in August, that the county has a "standalone economy." Its credit shouldn't be punished because it has distanced itself from Detroit, he said, such as by adopting three-year budgeting, shifting employee pensions to 401(k)-style accounts coupons national car rental and diversifying the economy.
"We can show that we're not at risk and there's no reason to treat us like you would treat Detroit," he said. "In the old days they'd say, 'As Detroit goes, so goes Michigan.'" That, he said, is no longer so: "As Oakland County goes, so goes Michigan."
"For Michigan to be a great state again, we need Detroit to be on a positive path to being a great city again," coupons national car rental Snyder said July 26 in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York. "There's been a change in the last two or three years with respect to the perception and the agreement that we're all in this together, and we need to work on this together."
While the county has been well run, suburbs don't attract young people the way a healthy coupons national car rental city does, and a failed Detroit will drag down surrounding communities, said Matt Cullen, president and chief executive officer of Rock Ventures. The Detroit-based umbrella for Quicken Loans and other entities run by city native Dan Gilbert has acquired more than 30 buildings coupons national car rental and brought more than 9,200 employees there since 2010.
Detroit leaders, in turn, have inveighed against the suburbs over the years, and while that "us-against-them" mentality won elections, it didn't help the region prosper, said Saunteel Jenkins, president of Detroit's city council.
Part of the division coupons national car rental is based on race, with blacks now accounting for almost 83% of Detroit's population after decades of white flight, said Kevin Howley, owner of an Oakland County management-turnaround firm who ran against Patterson last year. Isolationism "has hurt everybody," Howley, 53, said.
The disparity between rich and poor increased during the past decade as Detroit "got hammered" during the longest recession since the 1930s, said Kurt Metzger, director of Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit organization that tracks social, economic and environmental indicators.
Patterson said Oakland coupons national car rental County and other suburban areas have been "a pretty good neighbour." He said that state taxes from the suburbs wind up helping Detroit, as well as levies for the Detroit Institute of Arts and Cobo Center downtown.
Pontiac, the county seat, is run by an emergency manager who has reduced spending to avoid bankruptcy. Some school districts and areas bordering the city also face distress, said Dave Woodward, a county coupons national car rental commissioner and former Democratic Party chairman.
The auto industry's upheaval affected the entire region, though Detroit was more vulnerable after decades of a declining tax base, said Lyke Thompson, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University in the city. Almost all research shows city and suburbs are inextricably linked, he said.
Susie Sparks, watching her children play at Booth Park in Birmingham, said she made a conscious choice a year ago to start visiting Detroit again after mostly staying away when her first child was born 18 years ago.
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