"Hey, just take these down off the wall so's we kin get a better look. Y'know, the lights not very good here, maybe set them up in the back of this truck...."

Many say taxes are not high enough in the US so Detroit could raise county and property taxes and save the art they don't want to sell. Detroit population should have a say in how to pay off the debt as well.

The corporations left for the suburbs, then overseas....

the workers followed the jobs, and now are stranded in the suburbs, trying to keep their homes, and miserably failing...

young people are scooping up abandoned shells of once-livable housing for $1000. and hoping they can get them insulated and plumbed before winter....and there still won't be a tax base, because so much of Detroit has been scavenged by looters...

Detroit covers 142.87 sq mi and was once home to nearly 2 million people (when I was born). It is now around 700,000. Detroit was neighborhoods of single family bungalows...now it's reverting to vacant lots.

The troubles really took off in 1969, the long hot summer. And nobody, NOBODY, tried to reverse the abandonment, not the State of Michigan, not the Federal Govt., not even the benighted city.

After 40 years, people in Detroit finally gave up waiting. They started urban farming, co-ops, small businesses. So the 1% had to move quickly to keep this prime real estate from filling up with feisty people....and bob's your uncle. Bankruptcy!

I think other cities have learned from Detroit. Baltimore continues to improve the neighborhoods all the time. San Francisco is another city that is always improving. I feel so bad for those in Detroit. Such a sad situation. If only one politician would have cared in the last 40 years, MAYBE something could have been done to reverse the trend.

even the Bayview, the heart of what's left of SF's African American community, found itself in the gentrifiers' crosshairs a few years ago when a light rail line came in.

Most of the Rust Belt and Eastern Seaboard big cities are still wrecks. One exception is NYC, which was bailed out by Ford. Back in the 70's. Shortly after the long, hot summer. Because the banksters wouldn't let it die.

San Fransisco is living off Silicon Valley; otherwise, it would have no reason to exist. (The Northeast and Midwest tech companies lost out to California and Oregon back in the 70's.)

What happened to Detroit was the Koch Bros. saw an opportunity, and attacked.

Detroit has an international border and a freshwater port to both the Atlantic and to the heartland of the Grain Belt and various ores and minerals. It has pipelines for energy.

It is high enough that Global Warming will not flood it. It's surrounded by fresh water in abundance and fertile soils and it's flat. It has infrastructure: especially roads, trains and that port. The climate is usually temperate, last winter excepting. There are a lot of highly-educated people STILL, eking out lives here, and hard workers.

The Kochs have bought a Right-to-Work-for Less Constitutional Amendment from our corrupt venture capitalist accountant/Governor and Teabagging legislature, a governor who also instituted the bankruptcy proceeding and put his pet lawyer in charge.

That's why nobody is coming to shore up Detroit, and never will. Koch has dibs on it.

I hope they die horrible deaths, right after they lose everything.

More trickle down please.