(L to R): Yolanda, Erin, Joshua, Gwendolyn and Levon Peoples, Sr.

Democracy has been restored to the people in the city of Detroit, according to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes. This month, Rhodes approved Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s plan that will keep the city under oversight for the next 13 years. Detroit’s bankruptcy— the magnitude of financial distress and disinvestment, the dissolution of pension obligations and conflicting views on how to deal with the city’s financial outlook — represents new legal and societal implications. The official end date for the bankruptcy was Dec. 8.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is unprecedented in many ways, and the state and federal power exercised in the process remains mostly untested. 

The media has chosen a comeback narrative for the city— news of investment, a burgeoning small business class and younger, mostly White people, relocating to downtown and a few other neighborhoods.

For some, Detroit’s future is encouraging; for others, the economic outlook of the majority of the city’s residents is still bleak. The bankruptcy did not solve many of Detroit’s core problems including a double-digit unemployment rate, an infant mortality rate that compares with developing countries, a median household income of under $25,000, the fact that 60 percent of the city’s children live in poverty. Most recently, FBI crime stats indicated Detroit is the nation’s most violent city. 

Yolanda Peoples, 47, is a second-generation Detroiter. Her children, Erin, 18 and Joshua, 11 keep her invested in the city. Her family’s story is one that is not unique to Detroit. Her parents, Levon, Sr. and Gwendolyn Peoples, a retired autoworker and teacher, respectively, have weathered the changing times in this embattled city.

They say they aren’t buying the comeback narrative. 

“No one wants to hear what I have to say,” said Peoples. “You can’t burn the field and then say we’re going to immediately start planting and everything is going to be great. No. You have to give that soil time to replace its nutrients, and then replant.”

Peoples is referring to an oft-repeated sentiment among Detroiters that the emergency manager led-bankruptcy runs counter to democracy and its ethos of participation and local input. Peoples isn’t sure if she is part of the city’s comeback and her main concern for her family continues to be access to (quality) public education, good jobs and good healthcare. 

“I pay $3,000 every six months for car insurance. My uncle who lives in Irish Hills (a town in southern Michigan) has two cars, a boat and a pontoon. He pays less than me for all of that. How do you explain this? If (someone) is making $10 an hour, and their rent— because they can’t afford to own a home— is $600-700 a month, (they) have kids and have to eat, (they) have to put gas in the car to get back and forth to work (because there’s no rapid transit), (they) don’t have money for car insurance, not even at the LA Insurance weekly rate,” Peoples said.

Detroiters often negotiate an unanswerable calculus for living in the city. City residents pay the highest tax and insurance rates in the state; one state legislator called the insurance rates in the city a second tax. Additionally, the older housing stock necessitates many repairs and has unusually high utility costs. 

It is expensive to be a Detroiter, said Peoples, who doesn’t believe the bankruptcy will help her or her family. 

“(Detroit) is not better for people like me— just average working people who work regular jobs everyday. We are worse off than we were before. I don’t see the bankruptcy making things better,” she said. “(Many families) are down to the bare minimum… What do I need in order to survive?”

Peoples, who works in human resources, said she is part of the lower-middle class, which no longer exists. “I make the same amount of money, but everything around me has increased in price.”

Kevyn Orr’s plan for Detroit includes $1.4 billion extra for city services. Orr and Gov. Rick Snyder say this investment will make Detroit a better place to live, but the governor— who appointed Orr and instituted an emergency manager-led bankruptcy instead of a restructuring led by the city’s elected officials— has not insisted on or pushed for any state level policy, including a look at insurance rate reductions or other policies that could help the city. 

Through the years, Detroit policymakers have called for better urban policy— stabilizing the region by refusing to incentivize sprawl; truncating the privileges of wealthier residents who are able to escape struggling cities; and ceasing to isolate the problems of cities within local boundaries, leaving the most vulnerable to manage impossible financial realities. 

Economist and Wayne State Law Professor Peter Hammer has been a critic of the bankruptcy because Orr’s plan has not dealt with what he perceives as the city and region’s most serious and ongoing concerns.

“(The plan) never addresses issues of race, racism, regionalism, segregation or foreclosure. And poverty is only mentioned once,” said Hammer in an earlier report. 

Second-generation Detroiter Yolanda Peoples, with her children, Erin and Joshua, and her mother, Gwendolyn.

MINIMAL CITY REMAINS

Hammer has also criticized Gov. Snyder and Orr’s insistence on stripping the city of assets and re-imaging Detroit as an entity that provides only minimal city services. 

“The perverse logic of fiscal austerity is creating dozens of second-class ‘minimal cities.’ The move to transition Detroit away from serving as a city, to a slimmed-down version with little to no municipal services, is part of the bankruptcy Plan of Adjustment that the city is pursuing, on a par with what the World Bank and International Monetary Fund pursued with Structural Adjustment Programs in much of the developing world. What we know from these SAPs is they sucked the life out of countries forced to receive them,” said Hammer. “The same will happen with Detroit, especially given how out-of-touch managers are with the city’s history and context.”

In the restructuring, Detroit’s most significant assets— Belle Isle, the Detroit Institute of Art, the enterprise-Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, among others— will be transferred to the region, state or nonprofit entities. Other assets, such as the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and select city parking structures, will be transferred to creditors. Economist Julianne Malveaux has called this one of the largest wealth transfers in the nation’s history. 

The loss of assets will leave the city to manage what Gov. Snyder and Kevyn Orr have defined as core city services— police, fire, lighting, trash collection and other basic functions. When Gov. Snyder announced his decision to place an emergency manager over the city, he promised the move would improve the lives of average Detroiters and city services. Both he and Orr specifically referenced turning on Detroit’s malfunctioning streetlights. 

The transfer of assets to creditors did not reach Detroit’s largest group of creditors— city worker retirees. Tens of thousands of current city workers and retirees will have their pensions/benefits cut. They will no longer receive cost of living increases. Police and fire retirees, who are not eligible for social security, must now pay for increases to healthcare premiums. Some retirees say they pay up to $1,000 a month for their healthcare. They are also reeling after clawbacks to their annuities, which initially offered a guaranteed interest rate. Some of the funds didn’t achieve as expected, so those who retired between 2003-2013 are having additional cuts of anywhere from $25,000 and more.

ON THE BACKS OF RETIREES

“(People) don’t realize a big chunk of this comeback is off the back of the pensioners and city workers,” said retired EMT worker Jerry Hunter, who says at one point the work benefits were “well worth putting your life on the line.

“I don’t know one medic whose personality hasn’t changed, who isn’t carrying around ghosts with them.”

Hunter worked for the city for 21 years and lost nearly $30,000 in the clawback, which will be taken out of his pension. “Our blood and sweat” allowed the bankruptcy to happen, said Hunter, who believes the retirees’ story has gone largely untold. 

Peoples also believes few understand the reality of living in Detroit and that the people who have made the plan could not understand what Detroit really needs, and this new streamlined approach to government will harm Detroit. She pointed out how the emergency manager policy has not been successful in the schools. 

50 KIDS IN A CLASS

Joshua Peoples is in the sixth grade at Spain Elementary/Middle School. He attends Spain because the schools in his East Jefferson neighborhood have been closed. The morning commute is approximately 30 minutes. Joshua said there are 50 kids in his academic classes. 

In addition to the room being “too hot” and there not being enough space to walk around with so many kids in the class, the youngest Peoples says it’s hard to focus because it’s really loud.

“You can barely hear anything. In sixth grade you’re supposed to have separate classes for every subject, but they laid off so many teachers that we don’t have enough teachers to have separate classes, so we only have two different classes,” he said.

Joshua said that unlike when his older sister attended Spain, students now have fewer choices.

Erin Peoples, a graduate of DPS’ Detroit School of Arts, learned how to swim when she attended Spain, which prepared her for her job she has now as a lifeguard at Hamtramck High School.

“The pool is not open. We don’t have a band teacher anymore and we don’t have a computer teacher anymore. So we have debate instead of band and computers,” Joshua said.

The Peoples family fights hard, however, to make sure Erin and Joshua are not collateral damage in Detroit’s public education system— driving them to church programs, museums and the main library branch, because their local library has severely restricted its hours of operation. 

With the bankruptcy settled and Orr on his way out of town, Peoples said there have been no improvement in services, especially lights in her neighborhood, yet. “Coming home from picking up Erin from work (recently) it was totally dark, it was raining, you couldn’t see the lines (on the road)… ,” Peoples said. “If she had to catch the bus early in the morning … I wouldn’t let her go, because she would be standing there in the dark — no protection, no nothing.”

THE POVERTY QUESTION

There are a growing segment of policymakers and thinkers who say that Michigan must think about Detroit’s poverty problem. 

In a New Yorker article, authored by Detroiter Thomas Sugrue, professor and urban historian, Sugrue predicted: “The Detroit that emerges from bankruptcy will have a lot fewer (working-class) Black residents, and a lot less hope.”

Sugrue has argued that trickle-down urbanism — will not work in Detroit. 

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, he said a lot of the plans to revitalize Detroit are targeting … people with means, hipsters, creative types, professionals. 

“It’s a pretty commonplace assumption that if you gentrify neighborhoods, if you bring new investment to downtown, its benefits will trickle down to the majority of the city’s population,” he said. “Detroit is an overwhelmingly working-class and poor city. The thrust of the most energetic policy right now isn’t targeting that population whose fate is critical to the city’s future.”

Sugrue said that while there are benefits from new investment, including job creation, increased tax revenue and safety in the city, the kinds of jobs that are being created by a lot of the downtown redevelopment are for folks who have significant education, skills and means already. 

NEED STABLE, SECURE JOBS

“They’re not … creating stable secure jobs for … working-class folks in particular. (They’re not) bringing back the jobs that are essential to the city’s future stability and possible growth,” Sugrue said.

However, Gwendolyn Peoples said even with the challenges— emergency management, bankruptcy, poor city services, rising crime, etc.— because of her daughter and their family’s efforts to provide them with broad exposure, her grandchildren will have opportunities in life. “So it doesn’t matter where we are. If we’re in a hole, we’ll dig our way out, and we’ll find things to do and places to go.” 

Gov. Snyder has appointed members to the Financial Review Committee that will make all the financial decisions for the city over the next several years. Mayor Mike Duggan and Council President Brenda Jones or persons of their respective choosing will serve on the nine-member board. The FRC will function as an emergency manager — having all power to make the major decisions regarding the city, and no accountability. 

In the meantime, Peoples said if there is to be any type of comeback, there has to be something in it for everyone— not only the consultants who profited over $200 million dollars on the bankruptcy case, or the transplants who disproportionately benefit from work incentives or grants and non-profit funding, or the billionaire businessmen who receive corporate welfare, tax cuts, and pay little or nothing for public land. 

“Everybody, the people who grew up here, the people who moved here later in life, the people who moved back here from someplace else after their children were grown… everybody doesn’t have access to the same things,” said Peoples. 

So, there’s an after after-the-bankruptcy for most of us, she said. 

-DJC Story 6 from the MI citizen