The Great Recession unleashed a wave of fiscal stress in the USA, with austerity measures such as spending cuts, service reductions and privatisation predictably taking centre stage. Decades of federal withdrawal from urban policy and funding, combined with state retrenchment, have contributed to a landscape of urban fiscal stress exacerbated by the prolonged effects of […]
Jamie Peck, Geography professor at The University of British Columbia, has written quite a bit about neoliberalism, what he calls “austerity urbanism” and the ongoing saga of Detroit’s finances. He has an insightful blog post on how terms like bailout, responsibility, and federalism are serving to seal Detroit’s fate as a sinking ship, forced to […]
While we wait for the federal judge to rule on Detroit’s petition for bankruptcy, a Demos report enters the fray: WASHINGTON — A New York-based think tank released a report today questioning Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s assertion that the city’s long-term debt is responsible for its fiscal problems, or that pension contributions are at […]
The Detroit slide into bankruptcy is like describing an elephant: hard to know where to start. The narratives circulating about Detroit are all fascinating, sometimes irritatingly (but predictably) simplistic but I think the reporting has improved with time, as reporters are forced to look for new angles. Here’s the New York Times’ latest piece: Detroit’s […]
The post I wish I had time to write: how easily people can imagine taking away a retiree’s pension, how small those pensions usually are, and how controversial the assessment of Detroit’s (and everyone else’s) actual pension problem is (for starters, Morningstar says Detroit followed industry practice for its pension plan right up until the […]