In a column that reflects the anguish and frustration of a native Detroiter losing patience with his hometown, Stephen Henderson writes in the Free Press that Detroit is failing its middle-class residents.
He ticks off a story of a friend who recently lost her car, then her rental car, to thieves in Lafayette Park, the Detroit Public Schools' rising deficit and the cave-in by state legislators on the bill against the scrapping that is eviscerating Detroit neighborhoods, then writes:
When it’s this hard for people who have choices about where they live to keep their property safe, or get their kids educated (not to mention the high costs from elevated taxes and outrageous insurance rates), it’s impossible for a city to thrive or rebuild around them.
I write a lot about the momentum we’ve got going in downtown and Midtown. And I’ve written several times about the disconnect between that resurgence and the city’s poorest residents — those who live in neighborhoods that are increasingly isolated, starved for services and jobs and opportunity.
But middle-class families are the glue between those two extremes. They’re the lifeblood of any community — the ones who pay most of the taxes, whose kids populate and normalize the schools. They’re also the ones whose mobility makes it possible to run for something better if Detroit fails them.
Families won’t, and in some cases, can’t, put up with this stuff. They don’t have to stay — and they haven’t. The option to live elsewhere, even places that are only marginally safer with public schools that are incrementally better, is just too overwhelming.
