One drawback facing Detroit is that it's completely surrounded by incorporated municipalities. It cannot expand its boundaries - and population - through annexation of unincorporated areas, in contrast to many southern and western cities.
Yeah, on the DetroitYes site I read a thread saying that Michigan has unusually tough annexation laws compared to other states, so that Detroit can't expand even if it wanted to.
Actually, on one of the threads on there someone was talking along the lines of "what if the city resettled people who were living on streets where there's only two houses left and sold off the land to the suburbs?"
Please, please don't buy into this load of old cobblers that Detroit '67 really wasn't *that* violent, or that it was, in the ridiculous words of that guy, "an economic upheaval".
The *official* death toll was 43. My father was an inner city emergency room physician during the riot--and he stopped counting at 80 bodies, and that was at just *one* of the temporary emergency morgues set up. He realized that the city would only count gunshot victims in the toll. So people who, um, 'fell' out of tenth story windows, or people who were run over by cars (which then backed up and ran over them again) were all classified as "accidental deaths", and never made it into the riot statistics. My guess is that every community that has a riot does this sort of smoke and mirrors, which is why I actually give a lot of credence to the original belief that the 1863 Draft Riots in NYC probably did cause 1000+ deaths.
Fair enough. Obviously I wasn't there for either event so I couldn't say!
The city of Detroit's sad plight is what happens when incompetent city officials are re-elected over and over again.
Commenting by HaloScan
