Here in Metro Detroit, we're very easily impressionable and impressed. Our "Political Class" (who have offered no big ideas or led us to breakthroughs in urban governance) promise to deliver the bare minimum, and occasionally, will do a bit of song and dance with tortured numbers to create statistics that conveniently make themselves look good.
After which, the loyal lapdogs in the establishment news media will reward them with unrelenting praise and accept their findings uncritically, since, if they were to actually be interested in dissecting the numbers provided by the politicians, they would lose access to them and, subsequently, lose their livelihoods.
Unfortunately for you, our dear audience, this isn't just some sarcastically sardonic thought experiment. Instead, we have a fresh example of manufactured success by the news media covering Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's latest talking point when it comes to the city's population growth.
As of this writing, the mayor (who's coincidentally running for governor and just so happens to be in need of victories to campaign on) has cited the fact that, apparently, Detroit's population has grown for a second year in a row, which, he's currently arguing, represents his "good stewardship" as Mayor since he was elected a little over a decade ago.
Due to the much needed cynical attitude needed to debunk a Mayor with the massive PR machine that Duggan has, this might already be waived away as just some incoherent negativity being spewed by an anonymous blog, but, you, dear audience, know that when you come to read Black Label Media, you read us to get to the truth, no matter how it's presented, so, let's actually get down to making some concrete arguments:
Can this "news" of population growth be used as a launching pad for Duggan's attempt to win himself the governor's mansion? The short answer is: probably not. Yet, before we discuss Duggan's political calculations, we have to travel back in time and analyze a little known organization that gained access to the ear of the mayor during the city's turbulent times in bankruptcy (this analysis is essential to understand Duggan's moves, I promise). and became so influential, that it essentially privatized a crucial aspect of the city's governing powers when it came to making up a Master Plan for Detroit's future.
This is so profoundly important because even a freshman in your run of the mill urban studies class could tell you that a city's Master Plan is essentially a document that codifies how a city plans to grow, what economy it'll have, decides what type of people will live where, and etc. This little known group that usurped the city's zoning power is none other than Detroit Future City.
The name, in retrospect, seems like a darkly ironic title, because instead of envisioning an advanced, futuristic city, the organization's plans for Detroit see it as being mostly an empty urban prairie and what few residential neighborhoods would exist in their plan, would be isolated within an emptier city. This is probably why Detroit Future City has delisted their so-called "strategic framework" from their website because the leaders knew that it's proposals would be unpopular in the wake of people in the city scrutinizing anyone who voiced their support for the organization during the mayoral election.
Again, this criticism when analyzed by our detractors, might seem like childish propaganda. After all, one hundred thousand Detroiters were consulted when the strategic framework was being written. Not only that, put third party regional organizations such as SEMCOG predict the slow to stagnant population growth into the distant future.
These potential criticisms, however, are exceedingly easy to give a rebuttal to: Detroit Future City has so far refused to take into account the potential of climate migration as the South gets hotter, fires burn and water dries up on the West Coast, and more frequent hurricanes become a fact of life for people living on the East Coast, on top of potential migrants getting pushed out of expensive metros with a severe housing crisis.
I trust that the people who frequent Black Label Detroit have a firm grasp of their critical thinking capabilities, so, I want all of you to ask yourselves a question: Who benefits from destroying the urban fabric of the city in favor of a poor excuse for wilderness? The Capitalists who own land in the city. Creating artificial scarcity is the very reason why home values have jumped while residents lose their homes and are forced to become renters.
On top of that, there's a reason why all the supposed "consultation" happened that Detroit Future City did during the bankruptcy when the city could barely provide it's residents any services, residents were desperate to be heard, they took advantage of their plight and made them dedicate their time and energy to something that would keep the city stagnant instead of giving residents a blueprint of what the city would look like if it invested in it's infrastructural "bones" to prepare for growth in the future rather than implementing austerity urbanism and giving public dollars away to billionaires that'll last for generations.
The various goals of the various vulture Capitalists didn't just want economic domination over the city, they also wanted to establish political domination too. That's why this publication would like to raise the alarm to anyone and everyone interested in a brighter future for the city of Detroit and warn all of you that the Capitalists, aided by organizations like Detroit Future City, wish to split the city into several different municipalities or, make Detroit into it's own county.
Now, that might seem a stupid and alarmist thing to say, but, this publication swears to you, dear reader, that this is in fact true. The first politician to suggest this type of "solution" was a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate back in 2018, bug, obscure weirdos say dumb bullshit all the time. Unfortunately, there is a very powerful lobbyist group that has control over the internet's largest forum dedicated to discussing all things related to Metro Detroit, and that's the Detroit Chamber of Commerce. I won't directly link it because I'm building up a database that shows how they've been manipulating conversations going on in their forum, but, Black Label Detroit promises you that, when we went on their forum to suggest that Metro Detroit combine into a single entity, they instead, offered the rebuttal that "disencorporating" parts of the city would as the "real solution" to the city's problems.
Hopefully almost everyone who reads this publication would know just how dumb and destructive those ideas would be if they were ever implemented, but, as I alluded to, a full report of their reach will be discussed at a later time.
To bring this tale full-circle, Detroit Future City is nothing other than a Trojan Horse that is being used to implement the necessary changes to the city's government that would facilitate the break up of the city of Detroit. This assertion is supported by the CEO of Detroit Future City saying:
“It’s less important to me that we grow year over year by tens of thousands of people as much as it’s important to me we’re growing places where you can grow your income,”
They want to build beachheads of economic activity so that these struggling hoods don't immediately file for bankruptcy once they get unshackled from Detroit's government.
To bring everything back where we started, we now know that even if the city's population is actually growing organically, a couple thousand new residents don't mean much if the city doesn't articulate a legally binding document stating just how many people the city of Detroit should have. This point must be emphasized because, before it was scrubbed from the internet during his failed Land Value Tax push, Mike Duggan suggested that any new Master Plan that the city adopts will not be legally binding, so, essentially, Duggan is perfectly fine with Detroit Future City running the show.
So, the path ahead for local Radicals is crystal clear, we must agitate for a Master Plan that seems the city with drastically more residents than it had during it's previous peak in the 40s. This plan must account for a level of growth that Metro Detroit as a whole has never experienced in over a hundred years. Finally, once in government, we must cut ties with any & every institution that only offers the public austerity urbanism and promotes a scarcity mindset. There is no need for an entity like Detroit Future City, and the metro area would be better off if they voluntarily stood down.
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