Detroit: Totally screwed

Interesting dispatch from Detroit over at the Corner:

Detroit — In a scene reminiscent of Great Depression riots, Detroit’s Cobo Center — the city’s major convention center, in the downtown area — erupted in chaos yesterday as thousands rushed the hall hoping to get their piece of millions in federal stimulus dollars to pay rent and utility bills.
Desperate residents (police estimates ranged from 15,000 to 50,000) — in a city where housing values have plummeted to an average of $7,000 — kicked and clawed for applications, ripping them from one another’s hands. Many were trampled. Emergency medical personnel treated injured applicants, and sirens wailed as six people were removed by ambulance.

This comes after the story from a few weeks back where corpses were piling up because neither their relatives nor the city had the money to pay for their burial. And yes, they began to smell.

So here’s my (incendiary, inflammatory) question. Instead of propping up Detroit, why don’t we let it collapse and help the people there disperse to better locations? Let’s be honest: Those car jobs ain’t coming back, especially with the UAW’s grip on labor and the emergence of right to work states in the South. Those house prices aren’t rebounding from an average $7,000. Those vacant store fronts aren’t going to be filled with businesses any time soon. Why not shrink the city to a reasonable size and then stop worrying about it?

I’m reminded a little of the debate surrounding New Orleans after Katrina. In a way, though, Detroit’s even worse off than New Orleans was in 2005. There’s no harbor to an oil-rich gulf in Detroit. Who wants to go to Detroit to take a vacation? The weather’s even worse; I’ll take the occasional hurricane over Detroit’s winters. Will a radical move like this cause some human misery? Probably. But dispersing the city’s residents now is better than condemning another generation to living there with no prospects for a better life and no hope.