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[SPEAKER_05]: up to the $6,500.
[k3Xg1illaRI_SPEAKER_15]: In terms of the case itself? Expenses? Yeah. That type of thing?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[k3Xg1illaRI_SPEAKER_15]: Under medical expenses, which I guess would fall under medical cost, but the way that's always been worded is other. I suspect it would fall under something that's not necessarily medical cost, but a copay, something to that effect. Out-of-pocket expenses will usually fall under other as well.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. On the motion by Councilor Dello Russo, seconded by Councilor Knight. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Clerk]: Councilor Dello Russo? Yes. Councilor Falco? No. Councilor Knight? Yes. Councilor Caraviello? Yes. Vice-President Moniz? Yes. Councilor Scott Falco? Yes. President Calviro?
[Richard Caraviello]: Yes. Formally, for the affirmative, a three absent motion passes. 17-723, request for an expenditure from our department. Claims offer $1,000. Dear President and members of Honorable City Council, Stephanie Burke, client name, Deidre Alessio versus City of Medford. Could you please give us a synopsis of the case, please?
[k3Xg1illaRI_SPEAKER_15]: Certainly. Thank you, Mr. President, members of the City Council. Again, my name is Kimberly Scanlon, the Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Medford. The claimant in this case is requesting compensation for injuries due to a street fact at or about 161 College Avenue, namely a pothole. As a result, she fractured her elbow and sustained a concussion. She was treated at Massachusetts General Hospital, and because her medical bills are in excess of $7,000, again, under the statute, I am requesting $5,000, which is the cap.
[Richard Caraviello]: On the motion by Councilor Dello Russo, seconded by Councilor Knight, Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Clerk]: Councilor Dello Russo? Yes. Yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yes. Uh, for the affirmative, uh, three absent motion passes. Mr. Clark, could you please go in and inform the other three members? They have two minutes to come in or the meeting will be adjourned.
[k3Xg1illaRI_SPEAKER_15]: Thank you, Mr. President. Members of the city council.
[Richard Caraviello]: Um, I cannot take those Mr. Dello Russo because the person that has made those requests is not here. So Mr. Clark, if you, uh, we'll take a two minute recess. Motion, you got five minutes, you had 10 minutes. Motion to resume the meeting. All those in favor? Motion passes. 17, suspension of the rules offered by Councilor Lungo-Koehns, seconded by Councilor Marks. All those in favor? Motion passes. Councilor Lungo-Koehns.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you, President Caraviello. I first could just ask that you mark Councilor Marks, Councilor Falco, and I present for this meeting. We were over at the Zoning Board of Appeals meeting. The Zoning Board of Appeals is gonna be gracious enough to let any city councilor that wants to speak on the matter of Medford Street and Broadway, a development that we've received a number of complaints on this week. They're gonna allow us to speak in the next several minutes. Okay, if we can get done quickly, you over there. We would, I would like, I would ask, respectfully ask that we take a break, a 20 minute recess.
[Richard Caraviello]: On the motion by Councilor Lungo-Koehn to take a 20 minute recess to attend the Board of Appeals hearing, seconded by? Seconded. Seconded by Council Member Falco. All those in favor? Aye. Mr. Clerk, the chair is in doubt. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. Oh, excuse me, Councilor Knight.
[Adam Knight]: Mr. President, looking at the papers that are remaining here, I think that if we put our heads down and just focus on what's going on, we'll be able to get out of here before 10 minutes is over. I think we only have all the items on our agenda have been disposed of. The only items that we have here are a couple of under suspension items that Councilor Marks has put forward relative to some public, uh, public safety concerns that he has in the neighborhood from knocking on doors or from his, from his parks.
[Richard Caraviello]: Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Clerk]: No. Moves this page to take 17-726. Reading the prayer book.
[Richard Caraviello]: 17 7 to 6 17 7 to 6 offered by Council occurring be it resolved that the council vote to push the October 31st 31st meeting from 7 p.m. to an 8 p.m.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: start roll call vote please I believe We didn't wanna push the meeting to a Monday or Wednesday.
[Richard Caraviello]: Can I just interject one second? Yes. I was informed by the clerk that there is a National Grid hearing that evening at seven that he has already sent out a notification for.
[mgC3PACaQmc_SPEAKER_72]: Okay.
[Richard Caraviello]: So I just wanna let you know that, so. All right. On the motion by Councilor Lungo-Koehn. All those in favor. Motion to adjourn. Motion two is that we have no for the paper of the business. We're all done with them. We just did the last two. We're all done with them. The records of the meeting.
[Clerk]: We're past two.
[Richard Caraviello]: What was the resolution of that? 17-726. There's already a hearing scheduled for 7 o'clock that evening with National Grid, and the clerk has already sent out notifications, so that could not happen. Motion to table by Councilor Knight, seconded by Councilor Dello Russo. All those in favor? Aye. Motion passes. Reckons of October 17th will pass to Councilor Lungo-Koehn, which we will table as she has gone. Motion by Councilor Knight to table, seconded by Councilor Dello Russo. All those in favor? Aye. Motion to adjourn by Councilor Knight, seconded by Councilor Schapelle. All those in favor? Motion passes. Meeting is adjourned.
[SPEAKER_08]: America and moving to Detroit because they heard it was a city with an insatiable demand for labor. And so Detroit became a magnet for folks from Poland, from Italy, from many parts of southern and eastern Europe during the period of the great global immigration.
[SPEAKER_13]: And how did these different communities, both from inside the United States and from abroad, how did they settle and live together, or perhaps apart?
[SPEAKER_08]: The biggest collision between different types of Detroiters ended up being the black-white division. That is, many of the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, you could say, made peace with each other relatively quickly. They lived in the same neighborhoods. Many of them were Roman Catholics. They attended church together. They worked together in factories. They drank together in bars. African-Americans, on the other hand, were very quickly and rigidly segregated in Detroit's housing market. Housing segregation meant that, by and large, folks weren't interacting across the racial divide on a daily basis. They were living in different neighborhoods. Their children were going to different schools. They were going to different religious congregations. And so Detroit begins to emerge already by the 1920s and intensifying into the 20th century as a city with a very clear black-white divide.
[SPEAKER_13]: Detroit's auto industry evolved through the early 20th century, as did its population. In World War II, the city's peoples and factories contributed enormously to the war effort. And by 1950, the population was approaching almost 2 million, an incredibly steep growth in just a few decades. But as well as producing cars and other products, the factories of Detroit also hosted countless creative individuals. We'll talk about Motown in a moment, but perhaps lesser well-known are the poets and writers who experienced the car industry growing up. Anna, can you introduce us to a couple of them? Philip Levine, for example?
[SPEAKER_01]: Philip Levine is the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in Detroit. He began working in factories as a teenager and returned to them after graduating from college in 1950. He hated it. He found the work very exhausting and tiresome. He had a literary sensibility. He worried that he was wasting his energies on a lot of this very difficult manual labor when what he really wanted to do was to be working on his poetry. But in time, the working life in Detroit would become the great subject of his life. And he went on to publish a number of poetry collections, perhaps most well known, a book called What Work Is. He won the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, he was a U.S. Poet Laureate, and always he kept coming back to his time in the Detroit factories as one of the most significant subjects of his life. And Dudley Randall? I love Dudley Randall. He was many things. He was a poet, he was the founder of the groundbreaking Broadside Press, an independent publishing company that put out the work of African American poets at a time when almost nobody else was. But he got his start, as many young men did, working in factories.
[SPEAKER_13]: And Herb, speaking of creative people who worked in the factories, you're now a scholar and an author of more than 20 books, but in earlier years you too worked in manufacturing in Detroit.
[SPEAKER_10]: no doubt about it, all over the place. But I spent at least four or five months, you know, at Dodge, Maine in Hamtramck. And I was what you call a swing worker. If someone didn't show up to do their job, then that was my assignment. And consequently, I moved all over the plant, from the wet deck to assembly to rolling the cars off. So, all of these opportunities put me in touch with many, many of the workers there. And later on, I was going to see these workers, some of them at Wayne State University, because they told me, say, hey, schoolboy. They used to call me schoolboy there, because I always had a book in my hand. And they say, schoolboy, you want to get out of here as soon as you can.
[SPEAKER_13]: It wasn't only writers who were shaped by Detroit. So were the city's musicians. Perhaps the city's most famous cultural export is music. In 1959, a man called Barry Gordy founded a company that would become known as Motown. This is one of its early hits, Please, Mr. Postman, by the Marvelettes.
[SPEAKER_04]: There must be some work today, for my boyfriend's so far away.
[SPEAKER_13]: Stephen, can you tell us a bit about what Motown was and who Berry Gordy was?
[SPEAKER_09]: Sure, so Motown is a record company or was a record company that was started by Berry Gordy in Detroit. It was a very small company at first and of course grew to be one of the largest record companies in America, if not the world, Barry Gordy sort of saw an opportunity in the idea of black music produced and created by black people, but that could appeal to people of all races. So there were very catchy sort of cutesy lines in some of the songs and in the music that were very catchy to people who were not African-American. At the same time, Motown gave birth to black music that took on many of the issues of that day. If you think of Marvin Gaye, for instance, in his seminal album, What's Going On, a piece of work that absolutely cries out with sort of anguish and despair about the black condition, about the Vietnam War, about all kinds of things that were going on, that comes out of Motown. And there are lots of other examples of that as well. So it's this sort of coalescing of pop music, but also music with a message and coming from an African American perspective that could only happen, I think, in Detroit and only have come from Detroit.
[SPEAKER_13]: And during its heyday in the 60s and into the 70s, Motown was incredibly efficient, turning out huge numbers of performers and hits, as though it took some inspiration from the efficient production model found in the city's car factories, a musical assembly line of sorts. Anna, we've heard about Berry Gordy, but there were important women behind Motown too, weren't there? Can you tell us about a couple of them, briefly?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure. One of them is Esther Gordy Edwards, who is Barry's sister, an entrepreneur in her own right who became a top executive at Motown. She's credited with the Motortown Review, which popularized Motown music across the United States by sending the artists on tour. They traveled by bus. She also is credited with a lot of the overseas outreach of Motown to make sure that it was reaching audiences around the world. And another big contributor was Maxine Powell. She was basically Motown's charm school teacher. A lot of the folks who were performing in these Motown hits, I mean, they were local kids in Detroit. They would spend a couple hours a day with Maxine, and she would teach them the kind of manners and etiquette so that they could move with ease to get their music out there.
[SPEAKER_13]: If the 60s in Detroit was an exciting time for music, it was also a time of change and unrest. For years, the city had been a hive of homegrown labor activity, as trades union activists and workers clubbed together to campaign for better conditions, notably during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the 1960s, Detroit also drew the attention of activists from outside the city who were pushing for change, African-American leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Herb, Dr. King came to town in 1963, didn't he? Why was that? Why was this visit important for him and for the city?
[SPEAKER_10]: The whole civil rights movement had some resonance in the city of Detroit and we had a number of activists and civic leaders who identified with that and felt a need to help that movement out, to raise finances and what have you for it. So one of the ideas that was promoted at that time was to get a fundraiser for Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement in general. And to promote that, they invited Dr. King to come to Detroit and participate in the Walk to Freedom. And so when he came to Detroit in 1963 and spoke at Cobo Arena at that time, he had an opportunity to kind of do a rehearsal on I Have a Dream speech that became so absolutely famous later on.
[SPEAKER_13]: Stephen, what's your perspective on this? What do you see as the challenges and problems faced by African Americans that was driving this activism in Detroit at the time?
[SPEAKER_09]: You had several things that set all of this up in the years and maybe the decade before the late 1960s. One was the destruction of the neighborhood called Black Bottom and the adjacent neighborhood called Paradise Valley, which were an African-American residential neighborhood and a business and entertainment district. They were the only places really that African-Americans could live or work or entertain themselves. And their destruction sent African-Americans sort of scattering through the city to other places to try to find places to live and work. where they bumped up against a lot of other cultures. And the sort of tensions that grew up around that proximity, the inability of African Americans to really fulfill the promise of good jobs and decent housing were, I think, more prominent and more in people's faces. And so you have this sort of tension building up. You also had the election. in the early 1960s of a mayor named Jerry Kavanaugh, who promised a lot of advancement and opportunity for African Americans, but didn't really deliver on it. I mean, so you sort of have this perfect storm of promise, but then sort of frustration with the fact that it's not happening through the normal democratic processes. And so by 1967, the city is something of a powder keg.
[SPEAKER_13]: You set the scene for the key date which is July 1967 when Detroit saw five days of violent urban unrest.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hundreds of buildings gutted by fire and fallen rubble spilled over into the streets. Governor Romney in his telegram to President
[SPEAKER_13]: Michigan Governor George Romney deployed the National Guard and President Lyndon Johnson sent in troops. By the end of it all, 43 people were dead, the majority of whom were African-American. Many people were injured, thousands were arrested, buildings were burned, stores were looted. Thomas, what was the immediate trigger for this? What's seen as the catalyst?
[SPEAKER_08]: The immediate trigger was the police raid of a so-called blind pig, which was an illegal after-hours bar. The deeper roots of what happened in July 1967 had to do with Detroit's long and sordid history of police brutality and harassment toward African Americans. In 1967, about 95% of Detroit's police department was white in a city that was getting close to 40% African American. The possibilities of tension were enormous. Police in the late 50s and early 1960s began stepping up a stop and frisk tactics, that is stopping African American men for the color of their skin and for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So if you were an African American man in a predominantly white neighborhood by car, by foot, by bicycle, you could almost be guaranteed of being stopped by the police, subject to derogatory slurs, beatings, being pushed up against walls, being arrested frequently for spurious charges.
[SPEAKER_13]: One incident that took place during these days was at the Algiers motel when three African-American teenagers were shot dead and others present were badly beaten after police and others arrived there responding to reports of sniper fire. Thomas, this was a shocking incident for many, wasn't it? But though some of the officers present that night at the motel did face various charges, none was ever convicted of any wrongdoing.
[SPEAKER_08]: That's right. The incident at the Algiers Motel embodied in stark and tragic form the tensions between African-Americans and the police in the city, the profound distrust, the regularity, frequency of harassment.
[SPEAKER_13]: You're listening to The Forum from the BBC World Service, where we're talking about the story of Detroit. So far, we've heard how this American city was shaped by the car industry, became famous for its incredible cultural exports, and was transformed by the turbulent events of 1967. When we come back in a few moments, we'll talk about Detroit's first African-American mayor, who came to power in the 1970s. And we'll also talk about the city's fall into bankruptcy. That's all coming up after the news summary.
[mgC3PACaQmc_SPEAKER_72]: This is the BBC World Service. Now close your eyes and listen.
[SPEAKER_12]: Sound is a powerful medium. It can take you from a busy market to outer space. Create memorable characters. Your dad believes I was here.
[SPEAKER_04]: But that doesn't make it a real memory.
[SPEAKER_12]: To your dad it does. And intriguing plot lines.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can't see! Where are you? Here! I want to go! I told you to stay in the car!
[SPEAKER_12]: If you have a story to tell, why not bring it to life in a radio play? Our international playwriting competition is free to enter and open to anyone living outside the UK. There's a cash prize and a chance to visit London to see your play recorded for broadcast around the world.
[mgC3PACaQmc_SPEAKER_72]: The International Playwriting Competition. For details of how to enter and the full terms and conditions, go to bbcworldservice.com slash radio play.
[SPEAKER_13]: Still to come on the Forum, more on the story of Detroit, how the North American city responded to the turbulent events of 1967, when violent unrest spread across the streets. And after the city recently emerged from bankruptcy, what might the future look like? Still with me are the writer Anna Clarke, the journalist Stephen Henderson, the scholar Thomas Segrew, and Herb Boyd, who's written a history of African-American life in Detroit. We'll all be back after the news summary.
[SPEAKER_11]: BBC News. The US Republican Senator Jeff Flake says he won't run for re-election, adding there may be no place for him in the party. He said US politics had become inured to reckless, outrageous and undignified behaviour from the White House. Another Republican Senator, Bob Corker, earlier described Donald Trump as an utterly untruthful president. Twitter is to introduce new rules for advertisements relating to elections. It says it's responding to criticism of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The United States has threatened to introduce regulation over the lack of transparency in political spending on social media. Russia has vetoed a UN resolution renewing the mandate of a mission investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria. It's the ninth time Russia has used its veto to protect its ally. The investigators have said forensic tests show Syria has used nerve agents. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif has said there's a huge trust deficit between his country and the United States over Afghanistan. He blamed what he called the ineptitude of American and international forces in Afghanistan for not being able to end the conflict. The Venezuelan opposition coalition has been badly split after one of its leading members, a former presidential candidate Enrique Capriles, announced he would leave. Mr. Capriles said he was protesting against the decision by a group of newly elected opposition governors to pledge allegiance to a pro-government constituent assembly regarded as illegitimate by the coalition. Tanzania's government has banned a pro-opposition newspaper for three months. Tanzania Daima is the fourth such closure since June. And a note written by Albert Einstein describing his theory on happy living has sold at auction for 1.56 million dollars. It reads, a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest. BBC News.
[SPEAKER_13]: This is the forum from the BBC World Service where we're talking about the story of the North American city of Detroit. I'm joined by four experts. They are Anna Clarke, a writer who's researched literature from and about Detroit. Stephen Henderson, an award-winning journalist from that city who writes for the Detroit Free Press. Thomas Sugrue, a scholar who's researched race and inequality in post-war Detroit, and Herb Boyd, whose latest book tells the history of that city through the lens of African-American experience. So far, we've heard about the city's early story, its growth with the rise of the car in the early 20th century, the emergence of Berry Gordy's Motown music industry in the 1960s, and the events of July 1967, when unrest raged across the city. Let's turn now to the aftermath of that. And Stephen, what was the aftermath of 1967? Can we describe what happened to Detroit in the years and decades that followed as an extraordinary decline in comparison to the booming automobile city of the first half of the 20th century? Can you paint a picture of the city you must have grown up in?
[SPEAKER_09]: There's been a lot of, I think, mythology that has grown up around 1967. One of those mythologies was that that was the turning point and that the city declined after 67 and as a result of 67. And that's not entirely the case. Detroit, because of slowdowns in the auto industry, because of changes in the international market in terms of manufacturing, Detroit had already started to decline by 1967. It started to lose populations in the late 1950s. And by 1967, its suburbs were growing exponentially. White people, primarily, were leaving the city in large, large numbers to try to find opportunity and space. And we made it very easy for them by building more freeways through the middle of the city than any other major American urban center. The immediate reaction also to the rebellion in the city becomes an enhancement of the brutality by the police department after 67. And that is what ultimately leads to the election of Coleman Young in 1973 as a reaction to those things. This new, vibrant black mayor, first black mayor of the city, who really is energizing the idea among African-Americans that things can get better, that the city can survive and come back.
[SPEAKER_13]: We'll come on to Mayor Young in a moment, but Thomas, can I ask you to elaborate on what Stephen's saying about the long-term causes of this decline?
[SPEAKER_08]: Detroit's decline as an industrial center and as a major city began in the heyday of the auto industry, a moment when America's economic strength globally was unchallenged. Beginning in the early 1950s, the auto industry began to decentralize to other parts of the United States. foreshadowing a later movement of American industry to other parts of the world in search of lax regulation, lower taxes, and cheap labor. Decline in the auto industry had devastating consequences for Detroit. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Detroit lost about 130,000 manufacturing jobs. In addition, in the post-Second World War II period, Detroit emerged as one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. So all of those conspired, you could say, to lead to a population decline and an economic decline in Detroit well before the events of 1967.
[SPEAKER_13]: And as Stephen was saying, one man who was rising through the political ranks in the 1960s was Coleman Young, who in the early 1970s ran to become mayor of Detroit and won. Stephen, by the 1970s, when Coleman Young was running for mayor, what was the platform that he stood on?
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, first and foremost, he was standing for jobs and better housing for African Americans in the city. Still a problem by 1973, even though it had boiled over in 1967. But he was also specifically targeting police activity at that time, which between 1967 and 1973 actually got worse as it regarded the African-American community, the police started a special unit called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets, Stress, that was particularly brutal on African-Americans. Young was a pushback against all of those things, but importantly, he was a pushback in a multiracial sense. I mean, this is somebody who said blacks and whites together could live in the city, they could govern the city, and that things could get better for everyone.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thomas, Coleman Young has had his detractors as well as his supporters. How's his legacy being weighed up briefly?
[SPEAKER_08]: Coleman Young became very controversial among white Detroiters and especially white suburbanites who saw him as the embodiment of a new black power politics. That was a misreading of Young. He believed also in collaborating closely with the white power elite, particularly with the city's corporate leadership. And he was deeply committed to building up the city's economic infrastructure in particular, although, as Stephen pointed out, his efforts to build up the city's economic infrastructure met with some really serious obstacles. But at that point, the ability of these economic efforts to revitalize the city's economy was ultimately quite limited for forces that were well beyond Coleman Young's control.
[SPEAKER_13]: Well, through Young's many terms in office, change wasn't only taking place in City Hall. It was also happening on the dance floor with techno, a kind of music that emerged in Detroit in these years. Anna, there are three men who are often credited with creating the blueprint for techno, aren't there? Who are they and what was their background?
[SPEAKER_01]: The three most credited for the founding of techno in Detroit is Derek May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson, who are collectively known as the Belleville Three, three African-American folks who bonded over their love of music. And they eventually became DJs in the Detroit party scene. They came of age in the Coleman Young era. They were born in the early 60s and were beginning to get out there with their musical experimentations in the late 70s, early 80s.
[SPEAKER_13]: Carlton Goles is the founder and executive director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy, which works to promote and support Detroit's sound and music heritage. Here's his introduction to techno as born in Detroit in the time of Coleman Young.
[SPEAKER_00]: Techno emerged in Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s. It was part of a larger global movement of different genres working in electronic and industrial music and in dance music and in disco that were converging around the world at that time. And Detroit was a place where it stepped off really the funkiest and in some cases the strongest and then was picked up later in the late 80s and became a global phenomenon. I think it's important to know about Detroit Techno put in this context is that many of the people who created Detroit Techno really don't remember a world where black leadership wasn't incredibly prominent in the city. Coleman Young was elected in 73. The people who created Detroit Techno would have been very young at the time. They saw themselves in leadership positions. They saw a successful black middle class in a city. And I think there's sort of an exuberance and joy and attitude that comes from that, that I think you can hear in the music if you listen to it long enough. There was a revolution here in the city of Detroit. Detroit techno was part of that rebellion and revolution in America in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. As director of Detroit Sound Conservancy, one of my jobs is to try to tell this more complicated story of Detroit. One of the ways we're doing that is we're renovating an old sound system that one of the godfathers of Detroit techno, Ken Collier, played on in the 1980s and 1990s to Detroiters. Bringing back that system is part of this process of retelling Detroit's story to the rest of the world.
[SPEAKER_13]: Carlton Goles talking about the rise of techno. The track you heard there was one version of Strings of Life from Rhythm is Rhythm. Well, Detroit continues to be a creative city, but in recent years, it's also faced some vast challenges. By the mid-1990s, its population had fallen to half its peak in the 1950s, and it's also faced severe financial problems. And then in 2013, the city filed for bankruptcy. It's an event that's had quite a back story. Stephen, what did it mean for the city to be officially declared bankrupt? Can you explain in simple terms what that actually meant?
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, in technical terms, what it meant was that we no longer had the means in the short-term or the long-term to shoulder the financial burdens that we had. So one way to look at it was that at the time the bankruptcy was filed, Detroit and Detroiters owed 33 times what the value of everything we owned in the city was. Now, how did the city get there? There were a lot of different players. I wrote a lot in the run-up to the declaration of bankruptcy about the pattern of disinvestment that had unfolded over such a long time, disinvestment at the federal level, disinvestment at the state level. I talked about the borrowing that we did in Detroit as a result of that disinvestment, just to keep the lights on, for instance. We sort of had to just borrow to pay off borrowing.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thomas, was this perhaps an inevitable result of the long story you've sketched out of Detroit's decline? What do you think was really behind the city getting to this point? How should we understand the story?
[SPEAKER_08]: Detroit saw a hemorrhaging of its tax base as the result of the disappearance of manufacturers and jobs. and because of the dramatic decline in the city's population. Today, Detroit has only about 30% of the, 40% of the population that it had in 1950. In addition, the city faced racial hostility that played out in state and federal politics. During the post-1960s period, there was a growing sense that Detroit's problems, at least in the eyes of lawmakers in Lansing, the state capital, and in Washington, D.C., Detroit's problems were the problems of black misrule, of mismanagement. It's their problem. They should solve it themselves was a line that one heard increasingly in the halls of political power.
[SPEAKER_13]: And Stephen, what did all this look like on the ground? How was the city's financial strife affecting everyday life?
[SPEAKER_09]: If you, for instance, had a fire in your house and called the fire department, the fire trucks would roll past two or three other closed fire departments on the way to your house. and get there in 30 to 40 minutes, sufficient enough time for your house to burn to the ground before they got there. Similarly, if you called a police officer to help you if you were in trouble, you could wait just as long for them to respond. 40% of the streetlights in Detroit, we had 88,000 streetlights at that time, 40% of them were dark. And so people who lived in neighborhoods from one end of the city to another, rich, poor, black, white, whatever, were wandering around at night in the dark.
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